Most conversations about Kenya’s economy happen at one end or the other. Either we talk about the big institutions, the banks, the payrolls, the systems that move money at scale, or we talk about the mama mboga and the duka on the corner. Rarely do we talk about both in the same breath. I’ve spent my career building technology for both, and I’ve come to believe that the gap between them is where the real work is.
At one end, I build the simple things. A point-of-sale system for a small shop. A pick-now-pay-later feature so an agrovet can sell feed to a farmer who only gets paid after harvest. A way to track stock so an owner finally knows what’s selling and what’s sitting. None of this is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a business that survives the year and one that quietly closes.
At the other end, I build the systems that serious organisations depend on. Payroll for tens of thousands of employees across several countries. Payment rails that move hundreds of millions of shillings without failing. These have to work every single time, because when they don’t, people don’t get paid.
Here is what building for both ends has taught me: they are not separate economies. They are the same one, seen from different heights. A policy designed to help a bank either reaches the shopkeeper or it doesn’t. A digital payment system either includes the trader in the open-air market or it leaves her behind. The institutions and the hustle are connected, and most of our problems come from treating them as if they aren’t.
Kenya has around seven million small businesses, employing close to fifteen million people. They are not a charity case. They are the backbone of the economy. Their biggest constraint is not effort or ambition; it is access to finance, and access to finance comes down to data, a record of how a business actually trades over time. Give a small business simple tools to build that record, and you make it bankable. Do that at scale, and you change the economy from the bottom up.
This is also why I think in terms of the whole continent. The problems a shopkeeper faces in Nairobi are not so different from the ones in Kampala, Kigali or Lagos. So I start at home, where I understand the ground best, and I expand outward. Our solutions are now used in more than 10 African countries, and the rule never changes: build things people will actually use.
That’s the work I care about. Not technology for its own sake, but technology that makes the thing work for the people who depend on it, whether that’s a shopkeeper in Kibera or an institution three borders away. We don’t have to choose between the two ends. We just have to build for both.