The gig economy in Kenya grew from a niche phenomenon to a significant labour market force during the 2010s, reshaping how hundreds of thousands of Kenyans earned their living while raising urgent questions about worker protections, economic dignity, and the social contract between platforms and the people who powered them.
The gig economy's foundation was M-Pesa. Mobile money made it possible for platforms to pay workers instantly after each completed task - a ride, a delivery, a data annotation job - without the friction of bank transfers or the delays of monthly payroll. This instant-payment capability, combined with widespread smartphone penetration and a large population of educated but underemployed young people, created conditions for gig platform adoption that few other African countries could match.
Ride-hailing was the most visible sector. Uber Kenya, Bolt Kenya, Little Cab, and SafeBoda Kenya collectively engaged tens of thousands of drivers and riders in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, and other Kenyan cities. By 2023, an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 Kenyans worked regularly on ride-hailing platforms - some full-time, treating platform driving as their primary occupation, and others part-time, supplementing income from other sources.
Delivery and logistics platforms added another layer. Sendy, Glovo, Bolt Food, and numerous smaller services engaged motorcycle riders (boda boda operators) and van drivers for last-mile delivery. The price wars between platforms kept delivery fees low for consumers but compressed the earnings of riders who bore all the capital costs - motorcycle purchase or hire, fuel, maintenance, and insurance - while receiving per-delivery payments that often failed to cover these costs on an hourly basis.
The digital work segment - content moderation, data annotation, transcription, and micro-tasks - employed a growing but less visible workforce. Platforms like Sama, Remotasks, and Amazon Mechanical Turk engaged Kenyan workers to perform digital tasks paid per piece. The emergence of generative AI created a boom in data labelling work, with thousands of Kenyans employed to annotate images, label text, and evaluate AI outputs for international technology companies. A 2023 investigation by Time magazine revealed that Kenyan workers performing content moderation for ChatGPT - reviewing traumatic content including violence, abuse, and exploitation - were paid as little as $2 per hour.
The labour rights implications were profound. Gig workers in Kenya were classified as independent contractors, not employees, placing them outside the protections of the Employment Act - no minimum wage, no paid leave, no employer contributions to the National Social Security Fund or the National Health Insurance Fund, no protection against unfair dismissal. Platforms could deactivate a worker's account - effectively terminating their livelihood - without notice, explanation, or appeal. The asymmetry of power between global platforms and individual Kenyan workers was extreme.
Attempts at regulation and collective action were nascent. The Transport Licensing Appeals Board issued guidelines for ride-hailing services, but enforcement was limited. Driver associations formed to negotiate with platforms but lacked the legal standing of formal trade unions. The Startup Bill and various policy proposals discussed gig worker protections, but no comprehensive legislation had been enacted by 2024.
The gig economy represented a paradox at the heart of Silicon Savannah: the technology sector's most celebrated innovations - mobile payments, platform marketplaces, algorithmic matching - had created employment opportunities for hundreds of thousands of Kenyans, but on terms that many workers experienced as precarious, exploitative, and unsustainable. The question of whether the gig economy was a pathway to opportunity or a new form of informal labour remained unresolved.
See Also
Sources
- Anwar, Mohammad Amir, and Mark Graham. "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Freedom, Flexibility, Precarity, and Vulnerability in the Gig Economy in Africa." Competition and Change, 2021.
- Perez, Caroline Criado. "Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men." Vintage, 2019. (Chapter on gig economy gender dynamics)
- Mureithi, Carlos. "Kenya's Gig Workers Are Organizing Against Platforms." Rest of World, 2022.
- Dzieza, Josh. "AI Is a Lot of Work." The Verge, 2023.