This is part of an ongoing series of case studies and blogs coming out of the Kenya HealthFin Diaries project.

“My sister has become like an M-Pesa agent,” H told me. “The healers come, withdraw money, and go.”

H’s sister, S (33), has been suffering from a severe mental illness for the last five years. One day, out of the blue, she fainted, and has never been the same. It started with frequent fainting, then came unusual behavior like disrobing and running through the streets. She began to have seizures.

First, her husband called an herbalist. He poured something into her ear that made her go deaf. One day she woke up confused, not recognizing anyone. Her husband took her to the hospital, and they said she had a problem with a blood vessel in her head that might be causing the confusion and even the deafness. But, the hospital said that perhaps the issue they were seeing was caused by the seizures themselves. They prescribed medicine for KSh 7000, but there was something her husband didn’t trust about the care.

S continued to get worse. She lost the ability to talk and was no longer like herself at all. In January this year, her husband returned her to her mother; he was unable to take care of her anymore while also taking care of the couple’s small children. Things had just gotten too difficult.

S has now stopped eating solid food and has become frail. She must now use diapers, and her family feels they have to restrain her arms and legs to prevent her from running outside and beating the children.

The health issue itself is very heavy. But it also shows something that I’ve been seeing in a few of the households in Isiolo that I visit in the Kenya HealthFin Diaries. Health-seeking decisions are typically made by families, not individuals. And those choices are shaped by who has authority in the family, cultural expectations, and spiritual belief systems. While this collective approach can provide emotional and social support, it also sometimes creates quiet conflicts within families, particularly when members disagree on the most appropriate form of care and feel forced to defer to elders, spouses, and spiritual authorities, even when those authority figures have less education and exposure than other household members.

In S’s case, her husband and her mother, D (60), believe that her condition must be caused by possession by jinns. As such, they have been delaying returning S to the hospital for care and instead hiring very expensive traditional healers and sheiks to try and improve the situation.

It’s not because they don’t care. D has lost her entire livelihood to care for S 24 hours a day. S’s husband has been spending a small fortune on healers. The most recent sheikh, “jinn removal guru,” from Nairobi, cost him KSh 40,000. Half of this was paid upfront and the other half upon completion of the treatment. He applied an ointment to S’s ears and upper arms twice daily and had her family give her evening steam baths prepared from boiled herbs. Initially, the family observed slight improvement. S appeared calmer and no longer attempted to run outside as she had done previously. However, the improvement was short-lived. Her condition later worsened considerably: she stopped speaking, began urinating inside the house, and experienced longer and more severe seizures than before. These developments left her mother in constant fear for her daughter’s life while simultaneously seeking yet another sheikh for prayers and protective talish (holy water).

The emotional burden of the situation extended beyond S and her mother. D’s son, a police officer, quietly struggled with the family’s continued reliance on spiritual healing. Although he did not personally believe in the explanations surrounding jinn possession, he found himself unable to challenge his mother’s deeply held convictions. For five years, he has watched his sister’s condition deteriorate while also witnessing the family’s financial resources being exhausted on spiritual interventions that, in his view, could have been directed toward professional medical care. Equally painful for him was seeing his mother become socially and emotionally imprisoned within the household due to the constant demands of caregiving.

As I’ve gotten to know the families in our study, I’ve seen that the silence from people like D’s son is not simply passive acceptance. Rather, it reflects emotional tension between personal conviction and social obligation. Some relatives continue to financially support spiritual or traditional interventions they doubt, while internally worrying about the worsening condition of their loved ones. Family members who perceive these choices as delays in appropriate medical care experience feelings of helplessness, frustration, and guilt. They may feel responsible for not acting, yet powerless to change the direction of care. Fear of being labeled disrespectful or insensitive discourages open dialogue, reinforcing silence even when urgent medical attention is believed to be necessary. The voices of the most educated family members may not be the ones that prevail if those individuals don’t have real authority in the family and especially when biomedical services don’t deliver quick results that build trust.

When Jane was ready to give birth to her third child at the beginning of our study, she went to a nearby private clinic. She had gone to antenatal clinics at the local public health center and expected to deliver there at no cost. But when she went into labor it was late at night, the health centre closed for the night.

When she arrived at the private clinic, she asked whether they would accept SHA insurance, and they said she had a choice: either pay KSh 6000 in SHA premiums to activate her cover or pay KSh 4500 cash for delivery services. She had only KSh 2500 on hand and asked if they could accept that amount as a deposit, with her clearing the balance when she got back on her feet. The hospital agreed on the condition that they would withhold the baby’s birth notification (used to get a birth certificate) until the debt was paid,

Jane’s story is not an exception. It is the system working exactly as millions of Kenyans experience it, one in which the gap between what healthcare costs and what people can afford is routinely bridged not by policy, but by negotiation, debt, and begging the powerful for help. Gaps in the financing of care mean that many people like Jane are enduring situations in which, while already in pain, their dignity is also lost to the system that was supposed to guarantee it.

Jane’s is one of 330 households the Kenya Health Financial Diaries study has been following across Kenya. Our team has been tracking how low-income Kenyans make decisions when faced with health challenges, their experiences seeking care, and how health and finances shape each other in daily life. Earlier studies have shown that people often delay or forgo care entirely when money runs short, that is, until the situation becomes unmanageable. That is when they turn to friends and family, sell assets, or take out loans. Thirty-six (11%) of the households in our study have outstanding medical debt, several to more than one facility or care provider. This medical debt does not end when the patient heals. For many, it lingers as its own chronic condition.

What do you have?

Being able to clear a medical bill later is not a given. Providers typically want some kind of guarantee. In Jane’s case, the collateral was her unborn child’s birth notification. Joyce, another respondent in the same area, had a huge medical bill of KSh 1.5 million, which accumulated when her mother was admitted to the hospital with a heart problem. Part of the bill, KSh 500,000, was paid by NHIF, while the remaining KSh 1 million was to be raised by the family. Unable to clear the bill and eager to give their mother a proper burial, the family asked to pay later using the title for their family land of three acres as the guarantee. Divorced and with her sister also admitted to the hospital during the mother’s illness, Joyce took on the burden of the medical debt on her own. During our study, she has been paying an average of KSh 7,500 per month, slowly chipping away at the enormous sum outstanding. The fear of losing the land has kept Joyce committed, even when other financial issues – like dealing with some of her own health challenges—arose. In April this year, the area MCA, through lobbying, cleared the remaining amount, and the family got back their title deed after years of painstaking struggle.

When there is no collateral, especially for admissions with large medical bills, hospitals typically refuse to discharge the patient. In one of our rural sites, Sylivia was admitted to a level 4 public facility from January through May. She was admitted to receive treatment for tuberculosis that had affected her spinal cord. She was discharged a few weeks later, still on medication but stable. Since the family could not raise the required KSh 115,000, she was hospitalized an additional three months. A relative who works at the governor’s office eventually asked him for financial help. The governor called the hospital and negotiated the bill on their behalf. They paid KSh 62,000 and were released to go home. They sold part of their land to raise that money, itself an enormous expense. If not for the governor’s intervention, she would probably still be in the hospital.

A relationship as a substitute for collateral

It’s not just big hospital bills that require negotiation, supplication, and debt. Families also struggle to afford the medicines they need when those are not available in public facilities. Local chemists and smaller private facilities—much like the shopkeepers Catherine Molyneux and Jane Chuma wrote about in 2009—play a key role in helping patients finance care. At these private care points, a prior relationship between the vendor and client is the key that unlocks credit. Chemists extend credit to patients who visit regularly.

These facilities are located within local communities, making them accessible and familiar to most of their patients. In Kwale, for example, one respondent took his daughter to a private provider he visits regularly because he felt the staff understood his financial struggles and could be flexible. On one visit, the cost was KSh 1350. Our respondent paid KSh 800 and promised to clear the balance at a later date. Being able to extend some of this small credit to patients is something chemists, especially in rural areas, feel is essential for gaining and retaining clients in a competitive environment. This, however, raises a question: How much debt can a local facility accommodate while continuing to treat the same people they have been serving when those people are chronically poor?

Negotiating dignity

The unaffordability of care turns many families into supplicants, whether that’s turning to politicians, their relatives and church members, or providers themselves begging for credit that helps them get the care they need and spread the burden over time. It’s a sacrifice of dignity for access. Not everyone has direct access to politicians who can help negotiate or clear huge hospital bills. Those who finally get access do so through so costly lobbying that has its own price. While medical debt can make urgent care possible, it means the struggle of overcoming illness lingers long after a medical crisis subsides. Delivering stronger health finance policy in action will go a long way toward closing not just the affordability gaps people face, but the dignity gaps as well. Until then, millions of Kenyans will continue to heal, but will not yet be free.

The Kenya HealthFin Diaries project follows ~300 households, visiting every two weeks to understand their incomes, expenditures alongside healthcare needs and utilization. This case study is the first in an ongoing series of sharing individual stories that showcase themes emerging in the study.

M, 31, is an unemployed and illiterate mother of four children living in Kwale County and struggling with a challenging reproductive health issue. While she calls the issue “nyama ya tumbo,” or fibroids, the official diagnosis in her records is hemorrhagic ovarian cysts. Her health finance experience over the last several months shows some common themes we see in the study: adverse selection into paying SHIF premiums, the hidden burdens of transportation costs and medical needs not covered by insurance, the ways those burdens ripple across families, and the painful opportunity costs low-income families experience when a working age adult can no longer work due to a health issue. M’s story shows how difficult it is for a family to manage a serious health issue, even when public subsidies shoulder the bulk of the cost.

M used to have NHIF when she was an EPZ worker before she got married. In those days, NHIF had been useful in managing her health care finances. But she left the job when she got married, and her husband, who drives matatus on a casual, on-and-off basis could not afford the premiums. However, when the family found out she needed another surgery—her fourth to treat this issue—in January, her husband paid the KSh 4800 SHIF premiums to finance his wife’s care.

During that surgery, the doctors removed a 10-centimeter mass. After the surgery, she developed complications and was admitted for another 13 days. While she was covered by SHA, there were additional out of pocket expenses. The hospital lab was not work, so they had to pay KSh 2800 for a private lab to do the required tests. SHIF did not cover a CT scan that was needed, so M’s family needed to come up with about KSh 12,000 for that. M’s mother, Z, who is also quite low income and often sleeps hungry, sold a goat for KSh 6,000 and took a loan of KSh 9,000 from her SILC group to cover the medical bills and her own transport to go take care of her daughter in the hospital. Since she didn’t have enough money to reach all the way home, she exited the matatu 9 kilometers before home and walked the rest of the way in the blazing coastal January sun.

Meanwhile, M went home, not far from the hospital to recover and returned for her follow up appointment in February. She was told by the hospital that SHIF was not working, so she had to pay 1500 for the consultation and KSh 350 for a urine test out of pocket. M’s husband paid for these costs, though it was a challenge. He often only gets a few days of work at a time.

By March, the situation had become even more challenging. M and her family had exhausted all their financial resources due to repeated hospital visits, medication, and other related expenses. With no money left, she had to depend on family members and relatives to help raise funds. After reaching out to several people, they were only able to collect KSh 6,000, mostly from M’s siblings. They used KSh 1000 of that money for transportation and KSh 4800 for lab tests and medications only available outside the facility. M was prescribed one medication that cost KSh 3,000 alone. With no additional funds available, M went without.

M also got some bad news during her checkup. Another growth had developed, and the doctor recommended yet another surgery, her fifth. She couldn’t believe this was happening so soon after the last surgery. Worried and confused, she questioned whether the growth was really new or whether the doctors performed the previous surgery incorrectly.

The news left her deeply worried and confused. She wondered whether the surgeon actually removed the entire growth or if they did something incorrectly, leaving her with this disruptive issue unresolved. How, she worried, would her family come up with the money for yet another surgery? What’s more, she was told not to work for six months while recovering from the surgery. Already depleted and the mother of four children, she faced not only a serious health crisis but also a deep financial and emotional burden. She worried constantly about her health, the possibility of undergoing another surgery, and how she would provide for her children during this difficult period. She decided to go stay with her mother, Z, since she wouldn’t be able to work and would need help taking care of herself.

Given persistent pain, before her hospital follow up, she went to a local dispensary in search of help. They told her that she really should buy the medication prescribed at the hospital. The dispensary itself didn’t have them in stock. She sat with her pain until her next follow up at the hospital. Meanwhile, her own child became sick with vomiting and diarrhea. They were given paracetamol at the dispensary, but could not afford the KSh 350 for the other medication prescribed that was not available for free.

When M had her next follow up in late March, her husband came up with Ksh 1000 to help with transport costs. It’s Ksh 600 each way, so it didn’t cover all of her needs. This time, the facility said SHIF would cover an ultrasound, which showed that there was not another growth and that her pain was only from the deep wound of the surgery. She was given another prescription, and this time didn’t even bother to check what it would cost. There was no way she could spare even one shilling and still make it home. She did not want to stress herself over where to get additional funds, fearing it might worsen her condition. The doctor scheduled another follow up for a month later, but M said she probably won’t go since it’s such a burden to finance even the transport cost.

Table 1: M’s care costs and financing

Conclusions

M’s story reflects trends we see more widely across our diaries sample:

1. Adverse selection into SHA is the norm outside of the formally employed. Most of those in the informal sector in our study who have paid premiums for SHIF cover have done so because they have a high likelihood of needing inpatient care. They had already planned surgeries, are expecting to have a baby, have serious chronic illnesses, or have already been admitted to a hospital and paying SHA premiums was less than the expected hospital bill. It is unsurprising then, that the recent 2026 Kenya Economic Survey reported that the fund has paid out Ksh 91.5 billion against KSh 57.7 billion in collections.

Even though premiums often are far less than the costs of care people need, they represent a substantial burden for low-income households, especially in the face of the high costs of school fees, food, and rent. (We will cover this in future reports and case studies.)

2. Transportation is a substantial barrier to affordable care. This is true for households in more remote areas, but even in urban ones, as we’ve written about here. Often transport costs change when there is rain and different roads flood. When people are sick or injured, they often cannot walk to the main center and have to hire motorbikes for last mile transport that can add significantly to the costs.

3. Even with SHIF cover, the cost burden of care can be substantial and ripples across the social network. M’s family has come up with KSh 27,470 over three months to help her get the care she needed. This has been a substantial burden for her husband, her mother, and her siblings. Her mother’s loan of KSh 9000 from her SILC and sale of a goat of KSh 6000 represent about seven months of her mother’s typical monthly monetary income. SHIF likely made it possible for M to get care, but it has not prevented the family from experiencing catastrophic health expenditure for the year.

4. Households often face serious distress over healthcare, especially treatment uncertainty, unsustainable costs, and lost income. Coping with this health issue has caused M, M’s husband, and Z all significant stress. M especially worries about whether her treatment will ever be complete, if she’s getting quality care, and if she’ll be able to continue to pay for the medicine and follow up she needs. She feels like she has let her family down, being unable to support her family with domestic chores or any kind of part time casual work. Everything is left to her husband who is trying to take care of the children and keep the family afloat while his wife recovers. Several households in the study have had someone fall into serious, clinical depression following health shocks like these that precipitate a downward spiral in livelihoods.

On the days that Kenya exhausts me, it’s because of how sad and defeated I feel seeing people taken advantage of over and over — system failures that don’t get solved, extortion to access one’s own money or government services, employers abusing their staff, a con seemingly waiting around every corner.

None of this is new. But digitalization seems to be amplifying these risks. Rather than realizing the promise of new transparency, we see unfair discretion embedded into digital systems, risks growing more systemic, and an entire industry arising around fraud and advantage-taking, integrated within government and private sector institutions. How can we make sense of this? How can we understand the operations of perpetrators and the experiences of victims?

Snigdha Poonam’s new book, Scamlands: Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud that Preys on the World (Penguin, 2025) makes an invaluable contribution. The book takes a close look first at networks of scammers within India, then at the organized crime networks that traffic low-income workers into pig butchering “scam factories” in Cambodia and Myanmar. While her lens is on India and Indian workers, the experiences rhymed with what I’ve been seeing here in Kenya, suggesting wider trends, risks, and insights that ought to be on our radar. (I’m going to focus my attention on the first half of the book, the most relevant to readers of this Substack.)

1. The promise of digital prosperity is often part of the pitch that makes victims fall for scams. One famous scam Poonam writes about starts with a caller notifying a victim that they’ve won a lottery. This rides on the back of a real game show run by Jio Telecom and a lucky draw initiative launched by Modi to encourage use of digital wallets, “promoting his vision of a digital economy” (4). The resonance gave legitimacy to scammers and served to justify the digital transactions that followed. The organized international scams run out of Cambodia and Myanmar typically enticed victims to invest in fake crypto platforms — a seemingly feasible pathway to wealth that also enabled their life savings to be stolen without a trace.

2. Significant vulnerabilities created by digital finance are not being adequately addressed. Insufficient data security creates real risk for digital finance users, both through the sale of personal data leaked by staff of financial institutions and e-commerce companies and through hacks of government databases. Digital account opening allowed extortionists to create accounts in other people’s names using their IDs, photos, and signatures on blank paperwork. And holding so much financial value digitally made people irrationally reactive when scammers threatened that they would lose access to all their funds without immediate action. In India, financial fraud appears to be enormous and rising: a 2021 survey found that 42% of people had experienced financial fraud (58), and that fraud surged 65% between 2021 and 2022 alone (66).

3. There is a moral economy of scamming we have yet to fully understand. Without fully unpacking it, Poonam writes about the moral complexities of scamming. Scammers do not usually see their actions as illegitimate or wrong. The webs of enablers — including police, politicians, colluding religious leaders, and doctors — all have their own justifications and ways of seeing themselves as morally superior to other actors in the web. She seems to be showing us that widespread fraud is not the result of individual fraudsters outcompeting enforcement. Fraud in digital finance is one iteration of complex systems of politics, economics, and culture that enable this kind of scale and slow enforcement.

As Poonam writes of communities in Jharkhand and Assam:

I witnessed communities alienated from the narrative of progress or even belonging. For many, scams had become a new way to force a space in an economy that crushed their aspirations or to recover something from a state that at best ignored them and at worst sought to dispossess them. (158)

I thought about the Mulot Boys in Kenya, the famous Kamiti Prison digital scammers, and the local ID office systematically taking out digital loans on new IDs before handing them over to their owners. Little of this is possible without a web of enablers willing to harm others for a piece of the pie.

I was left feeling that we are unlikely to meaningfully address fraud with technical solutions alone and need to pay much more attention to social drivers and enablers.

4. Human intermediaries are both essential to connecting ordinary people to the digital world and an enormous source of vulnerability. I have become obsessed with understanding the role of human intermediaries in digital finance and digital government. Mobile money agents, government service centers, brokers, and cyber cafes are the critical infrastructure bridging — often poorly designed — digital systems with ordinary people. Ordinary people often have low digital or technical literacy, no smartphones or poorly functioning ones, intermittent connectivity, and limited experience with infrequent transactions like requesting a death certificate or applying for a passport. Human intermediaries make digital systems possible in places like India and across Africa. I have long wanted to study their roles and operations more deeply: the costs faced by users, whether primarily for onboarding or ongoing transactions, how agents build their skills, and what this means for access.

Poonam’s book also deepened my thinking on risk. Many of the savvy scammers she met had more legitimate work running customer service centers, helping people open and manage bank accounts — which is how they learned how systems work and gained access to the data they needed to run their scams. She points out that this is not a new role. One scammer, Jitu, had been working as an offline fixer since he was in class 6, a space that was “crowded and competitive” (39). Special government assistance was available for scheduled castes — but they needed a certificate confirming their identity. Helping people obtain those earned Jitu hundreds of rupees per month.

In the digital universe, customer service providers had access to customer IDs, phone numbers, and often PINs and OTPs — anything a scammer might need to steal. And they did. My favorite chapter, “Life Insurance for the Dead,” documents how networks of scammers riddled the Prime Minister’s Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana (PMJJBY) with fraud — some rushing to register widows immediately after a death, others fabricating deaths entirely to make claims. The initiative, which aimed to support widows — often the women least able to navigate the government claims system alone — instead created an army of agents who would show up at bereaved households, bidding to help process the claim in exchange for a cut.

Enforcement was further challenged because, for the government, “every new beneficiary — real or fabricated — counted as a political gain.” This also made me wonder whether acknowledging the fraud in PMJJBY would be too great a humiliation for a government that had so publicly trumpeted its success in curbing welfare fraud through Aadhaar.

My two cents

Overall, I loved this book. The first half I filled with notes and page markers, astounded by the stories and their echoes here in Kenya. The second half is, sadly, increasingly relevant too, as many young Kenyans look for livelihoods overseas — unable to make a life at home — and risk being trafficked into dire situations, whether sucked into Russia’s war with Ukraine or the scam factories documented in this book. Just last week, I learned of a young Kenyan who had just arrived home after escaping one of these scam centers in Myanmar.

I was left with a sense of urgency: we must pay much closer attention to the real world rising up around new digital infrastructure. Things will not go to plan. Not all vulnerabilities live within the digital system; so much is social. And the harms are very real. The very people advocates say have the most to gain from digital “inclusion” also have the most to lose.

The author graciously sent me some copies of this book, as I couldn’t order it in Kenya or the US. If any Kenya-based readers would like a copy, I have two remaining. Send me an email at julie@ekko-insights.com.

Kenya has been making strides in bringing health facilities closer to people. Public health facilities increased from 3,512 in 2003 to 13,576 in 2021. By 2021, 90% of Kenyans lived within one hour of a health facility. However, for many patients, transportation remains a major barrier to care because the nearest facility cannot provide the care they need.

As field researchers in the Kenya Healthcare Financial Diaries, we have seen this firsthand. Being unable to easily access specific kinds of care at nearby facilities, members of the households we study are delaying care, missing appointments, and incurring enormous costs in time and money to try and get the care they need. Sometimes the consequences are severe.

Some with chronic illnesses struggle to keep up with ongoing care far from home

A number of respondents with chronic conditions like hypertension and diabetes are not being served by their local dispensaries. Instead, they need to travel for specialized clinics for their checkups and medication.

In Rural Kwale, “Khalim” is living with hypertension and recovering from a stroke. He was first diagnosed with hypertension in 2018 and initially sought care at a Level 4 sub-county hospital. Due to the need for consistent medical care, he even relocated to near the hospital. While there, he had a stroke and received care. But, unable to work after the stroke, he eventually returned to his rural home where he could stay with his son.

Currently, he travels from the rural home to the sub-county hospital every month. Each journey costs KSh 700 and takes around three hours each way. Since he is unable to travel alone, his son has to accompany him each time. That means spending KSh 2800 per month just on the transportation. With a typical income of around KSh 14,000, this means the family is effectively incurring catastrophic health expenditure (20%) every month.

Sometimes Khalim’s family can’t come up with that much money, and they delay visits to the hospital. Other times, road conditions and weather complicate travel. When it rains, the partially collapsed bridge connecting the community to the main road is impassable. Khalim and his son either skip the trip or have to use an alternative route that takes more than four hours and comes with an extra cost. Khalim can’t transfer his care to the local health centre because they don’t have the personnel and equipment needed.

Another respondent, “Ziya,” in a town in Isiolo County suffers from Type 1 diabetes. Every two weeks, she is supposed to travel to another town, about two hours away, at KSh 2000 round trip, for a checkup and to collect her insulin injection pens. Due to lack of refrigeration, she cannot take more supply on each visit. The local Level 4 hospital does not treat diabetes patients.

Ziya has a newborn at home and is not working. Her husband has a regular job, but only makes KSh 10,000 per month, and even that is often paid late. The couple cannot spend so much of their income every month on these visits, so they don’t. Ziya tries to find someone coming from the other town to bring her insulin. Sometimes she has to go without, and she tries to manage on her own by dosing herself with sugar water.

Transport can be a problem even in dense urban areas

We assumed that transportation barriers primarily affected rural communities, where individuals must travel long distances on poor roads to reach health facilities. While the challenges in these rural locations are severe, we have also seen that the challenge persists in urban settings. In Nairobi’s informal settlements, for example, transport costs also inhibit care.

“Charity” lives in an informal settlement with her husband and four children. Her husband does mjengo (construction) casual jobs, and Charity herself earns an income from small casual jobs like fetching water, washing clothes, and cleaning homes. A few years ago, the family moved from an iron sheet house that cost KSh 2000 per month to their current brick flat that costs KSh 5100 per month in hopes that the cleaner, drier environment would reduce the frequent illnesses Charity and her youngest daughter were facing. But now, covering rent is a stretch. Her husband’s income needs to be retained for rent, while nearly all of what Charity earns—usually less than KSh 200 per day—goes towards food.

When Charity delivered her second born eight years ago, she developed deep vein thrombosis (DVT). Since we met her in August, the veins in her leg have been swelling painfully when she stands and walks. The pain goes up to her abdomen. She had one year of Social Health Insurance Fund (SHIF) premiums paid by a non-governmental organisation, which motivated her to seek medical assistance to sort out the issue. But doctor after doctor at local facilities have told her they can’t determine whether she is suffering from dangerous DVT symptoms or has harmless varicose veins. Some have suggested she may also have a hernia requiring surgery. She needs a specialised scan at either Kenyatta National Hospital (main public national hospital) or Mbagathi Hospital (a level 5 hospital). Scans, they said, are not covered by SHIF, so she needs to look for the money before she plans a visit. She thinks she needs at least KSh 5000, though she doesn’t know the exact price yet.

The lack of a diagnosis has now interrupted her family planning method. Without a clear diagnosis, the local health centre insisted on halting her contraceptive injections. If she does have DVT, the injections could be high risk. They told her she can only be on the non-hormonal coil, which is only available at Mbagathi or Kenyatta National hospitals. Without a few hundred shillings for transport, she hasn’t yet gone. She’s been without birth control for a few months now. She says her husband doesn’t understand and won’t use condoms. When her period was late last month, she was wrecked with anxiety. “If I’m pregnant, I don’t know what I will do. We cannot have another child.”

What can be done?

What does this mean for Kenya’s health system? Kenya has been building a system of primary healthcare with referrals leading up to higher level facilities when needs can’t be met locally. But if patients cannot use those referrals, care needs remain unmet.

Unmet needs can cause further burdens on front line facilities and worsen health outcomes. Charity, for example, has visited her nearest health centre nine times and a private hospital once all in the last five months. She keeps following up on the same issues, out of both fear that something terrible may happen and hope that the medical staff might eventually help.

Some counties are trying new approaches to address this challenge. In Murang’a, for example, some respondents are receiving hypertension follow up care through telemedicine. Patients arrive at the health centre for regularly scheduled visits and talk to a doctor on the computer. While they feel the loss of not receiving physical examinations, it keeps costs down and makes it easier to keep up with regular visits.

Perhaps Murang’a is onto something. To ease the cost burden for ordinary families, we need to figure out ways to get care -not just clinics- closer to communities.

In 2015, my colleague, Laura Cojocaru and I wrote about the digital payments revolution in Kenya that wasn’t. Based on 2012-13 financial diaries data, we showed that M-Pesa had become a very important tool for domestic remittances, but that its penetration into retail payments was negligible. Among diarists, 96% of expenditure payments were still done in cash, 3% on credit, and only 1% with M-Pesa. M-Pesa payments were confined to airtime purchases. We were a long way from any digital payment capturing the high volume of small payments that constituted the ways most Kenyans earned and spent their money.

Fast forward to 2025, and it appears the situation has transformed.

FSD Kenya, Ekko Insights, and Georgetown University have recently embarked on a new financial diaries research project, layering financial diaries with high-frequency data on health experiences. As we’ve started capturing households’ income and expenses, we’ve been surprised by how much both have digitized.

For example, one of our new diaries households in Nairobi is comprised of a boda boda rider, “Brian,” his wife, “Anne,” who does some small-scale tailoring, and their two children in primary school. Most of Brian’s revenue comes from M-Pesa, an average of KSh 1145 on M-Pesa and KSh 284 in cash each day, based on our current data. Brian almost universally pays for fuel using M-Pesa Buy Goods at the petrol station. He sometimes uses the cash he earns to buy lunch while he’s out, to pay the bike owner his daily rental fee (the owner is a neighbor), or to give Anne for shopping at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Whatever cash he has at the end of the day gets deposited on M-Pesa at a local agent.

When it comes to household expenditures, 68% of all expenditure payments this household did during our pilot phase were done using M-PESA. And they were making an average of 27 separate expenditure transactions per day, about a third more transactions by volume than our busiest urban households back in 2012/3. The median transaction size was just KSh 50 on M-Pesa vs KSh 65 for cash. Even when buying tomatoes or Royco for KSh 10, Anne often used M-Pesa. It made sense, because Brian usually sent her shopping money on M-Pesa, and because transactions under KSh 100 on M-Pesa had been zero rated since 2016.

Another pilot household behaved very similarly, albeit with lower income levels. When this respondent was sent KSh 500, she wanted to put aside all of it to save up for an electric kettle. She sent the money—KSh 100 at a time—to a friend who had cash, effectively withdrawing her funds without ever visiting an agent and paying no transaction or withdrawal fees.

We are just a few weeks into diaries in other parts of the country. While in some areas, expenditures are mostly in cash, we are still seeing extensive use of M-Pesa going well beyond remittances, even in remote rural areas.

What happened?

We don’t have a full picture—at least not yet—but some key dynamics are clear.

1. Low-income people are price sensitive.

The removal of transaction fees for small payments has clearly played a major role in the increased use of M-Pesa for small purchases and retail payments. By zero rating low-value payments, Safaricom met users where they were. They made it possible to keep transacting as usual, just changing the channel. They could still buy easily, digitally from one another in the vast informal economy. They could still purchase what they needed in very small values. We found back in 2012/3 that the median transaction size for cash payments was just KSh 40, quite similar to Brian and Anne’s typical expenditures on M-Pesa today.

According to Safaricom’s most recent Annual Report, non-chargeable transactions represent about 42% of all M-Pesa transactions. Revenue growth on M-Pesa has been strong in spite of this large volume of free transactions. Perhaps zero rating of small payments created a more compelling reason for more Kenyans to keep their digital money digital and that this is paying off in terms of customer revenue overall.

2. More extensive payments usage is seeding wallets.

When ordinary people are paying for small transactions using M-Pesa, they are effectively digitizing the incomes of their neighbors running small kibandas, shops, bodas, or doing vibarua (casual jobs) on their behalf. This appears to be creating a cycle of digital payments, some of which are chargeable. If digitization had come on any channel that wasn’t led by person-to-person payments, digitizing incomes in the informal sector would have been an uphill battle if not an impossibility.

3. Retail payments are not just on retail payment M-Pesa channels.

The powerhouse of M-Pesa payments in this market remains “Send Money.” It’s just easy that way. When Anne buys onions and tomatoes, she uses Send Money at her local kibandas. Brian’s clients primarily use Send Money, too, unless he thinks there’s a risk they might try to reverse the payment, in which case he directs them to use Pochi la Biashara. He registered for a Till Number (“Buy Goods”) when Safaricom did an activation in the area. But ever since, he only put KSh 10 as a test and never used it again.

Not needing to jump through extra KYC hoops to get an M-Pesa for business account nor buying any POS devices, means that the digital transition we’re seeing has been truly inclusive, with acceptance quickly ubiquitous. Even the smallest vendors of vegetables and mandazi have not been left behind.

4. Transformation took catalytic policies and time.

FinAccess 2024 reported that daily usage of M-Pesa among users jumped from 23.6% in 2021 to 52.5 % in 2024. That means nearly 40% of all Kenyans are using M-Pesa daily. This widespread high-frequency usage was hit eight years after small transactions were zero rated. This suggests there were other factors at work. I suspect it was a function both of policy catalysts and time.

Part of the acceleration we see is between 2019 and 2021, straddling the Covid era. Having done a lot of fieldwork during that period, it is not my impression that people were overly concerned with virus transmission via cash. However, two covid-driven policy changes likely did have an impact. First, the Central Bank paused bank-to-M-pesa fees, allowing especially higher income users to fuel their wallets and drive transactions. Safaricom also temporarily extended the range of free payments up to KSh 1000.

While these policies were likely important catalysts to the change in digital payments, growth in daily usage seems to have continued even after those policies were rolled back. Here, time may be playing an important role, helping entrench the culture of digital payments.

Figure 1: Daily usage of M-Pesa among all Kenyans over time. Source: Author’s calculations based on FinAccess data over time.

Do ubiquitous digital payments make people better off?

Has increased payments digitization led to increased utility for ordinary people? To fully answer that question, a more carefully designed study would be needed. So far, our respondents’ haven’t reported obvious, outsized benefits. There may be some small convenience gains for those receiving money digitally in their work to be able to turn around and spend that money digitally. The rise of digital payments has coincided with a shortage of coins and small bills to make change, which may be adding some friction to cash payments in some areas. Still, it’s not clear that these more extensive digital trails are doing things like leading to new lines of credit, credit that better meets users’ needs, or that is lower cost. It’s not obvious that money held on M-Pesa is safer or easier to save.

But there is one other change worth noticing. It appears that with small payments over “Send money” normalized, affordable, and ubiquitous, we are seeing more smaller P2P transactions in our households. Rather than sending his sick stepmother a larger sum once a month, Brian sends small values, even KSh 200, when there’s something she needs. It is rare he goes a whole week without sending something. Instead of receiving KSh 2000 for shopping for the month, respondents are reporting getting KSh 150, for “breakfast” or having KSh 100 sent directly to the pharmacy to immediately pay for medicine. In other words, the immediacy of individuals’ ability to make claims on their social network seems to have gone up and the value thresholds for helping out appear to have gone down, leading to what might be even more extensive networks of sharing and coping, which are likely particularly useful in what have been some difficult, volatile economic times.

More to learn

All of this is based on early work in the new HealthFin Diaries. There is so much more we hope to learn on this topic as the work continues through 2026:

• How do these trends compare in various rural and urban sites across the country?

• Who are the biggest adopters of digital payments and which types of people are more likely to still be using primarily cash? Why?

• How much revenue are various types of customers generating for payments service providers?

• Just how much are specific retail payments options like Buy Goods, Pochi la Biashara, and Paybill penetrating lower-income segments, and what can others learn from this?

• What value – and what risks – are various types of individuals experiencing in this new payments landscape?

We think there’s more to unpack here that will matter for Kenya’s payment future and for other markets with similar dynamics where cash remains king.

Seeking order in a disorderly world is a valid endeavour, especially in these times of polycrisis. Europe, by dint of history, understands this deeply, and through its institutions has sought to assert itself as a setter and adherer of norms and rules spanning democracy, human rights and rule of law, to name a few. Today, the EU’s influence in the global ‘balance of power’ is declining, and the principles and norms that Europe has invested in at home, abroad and in the international domain are under severe threat. While there is immense value in striving to protect them, it is also an opportune time to take stock of the universalized interpretation of them: Whose views and perspectives are and were considered? Whose are and were marginalized, ignored or dismissed? How can these insidious tensions finally be addressed and hopefully resolved? This undertaking is even more urgent given the fractured geopolitical landscape in the world today, and the increasingly prominent role that competition around digital and emerging technologies now occupies in global governance discussions.

Europe has been on a quest to (re)define its narrative. The stories Europe tells itself about itself, and its place in the world are significant for the aspirations it sets and the resulting impacts of how its power in the world is exercised. These narratives hinge on the endurance of the ‘European model’, notably its social and economic policies despite facing numerous challenges, especially market competitiveness brought about by globalization. They also project outwards, pointing to the capabilities that Europe possesses to bring forth a ‘New Renaissance’ deriving from the rich history of its distant and recent past and the cosmopolitanism of the current age to present a vision for the future. The role of Europe is seen as ushering this new epoch of sustainable development as a leading and inspirational force, driven by its values, ethics and aesthetics as a baseline for a new global societal model.

At the heart of these narratives on Europe’s projection of power, regulation is a core feature, and ‘regulatory leader’ is an identity that Europe is (in)famously carving out for itself on the international stage. The Brussels Effect is celebrated in Europe as an assertion of its worldwide influence and relevance for pressing global governance concerns. In tech policy, its most widespread impact is through the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In fact, many European technology policy pundits claim the ‘GDPR-ization’ of data protection laws in regions like Africa as a success, emboldening Europe’s claim to being a global referee of sorts in the theatre of techno geopolitics, a regulatory superpower for the digital age, and extending this approach to other emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence as well as governance concerns such as technology sovereignty.

However, as the novelist Ali Smith has observed, ‘every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more — the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible’. While celebrated at home, the GDPR’s Brussels Effect is a source of discontentment abroad. This triumph over data protection regulation globally is as a result of direct and indirect norm externalization that cleverly masks the hard power driving it. The EU leverages access to its single market to drive compliance with GDPR and other of its regulations. This directly affects the rules, standards and regulations that any entity—be it a country, region or corporation— intending to do business with Europe will adopt. In the case of Africa, it has led to countries adopting data protection laws that closely mirror the GDPR, sometimes having short-circuited locally led processes of developing similar laws and regulations rooted in context. And in the case of multinationals, it has proven more cost-effective and efficient to extend these rights to all customers, rather than adapting and maintaining systems on each jurisdictional basis. For developing nations and regions, the dual powers of EU’s stringent regulations and multinationals’ interests,as pointed out, then wield undue pressure to adhere to what has already been set out, and in the case of data protection, it has resulted in GDPR as the ‘gold standard’ for data protection worldwide.

There is, therefore, a tension and contradiction in Europe’s narratives. The endurance of Eurocentrism is the invisibilized narrative around the EU’s standard-setting power. European values are still assumed as shorthand for global or universal values by its actors and institutions. And in the contemporary era, it goes beyond norms and values, into soft and hard laws and regulations. While claiming to pursue cooperation and a ‘partnership of equals’ as the EU frames its relationship with Africa, our values, worldviews, hopes and concerns do not yet reflect in how Europe goes about asserting its regulatory power as the standard for the rest of the world. This emboldens the criticisms and pushback against Europe’s power claims on the global stage. The invisibilized narrative is, first and foremost, a failure to reckon with the lasting harms meted out by Europe’s imperial past, and the underlying Eurocentric beliefs of being a ‘civilizing force’ for regions of the world that its constituent members colonized. To pursue global ambitions resting on an approach that does not present a clean break from the past—at least by reflecting a diversity of views beyond the region’s borders —challenges the legitimacy of Europe’s quest to set the rules of engagement in the international order.

Additionally, in the realm of digital and emerging technologies, Europe stands heavily criticized for ‘regulating before innovating’ and for being rigid in a fast-paced world. Here is where Eurocentrism also presents an Achilles heel for the region, as it has struggled to offer strong counternarratives against this tide of pushback against its rules and regulations. To many, the sheer volume of European regulations hinders innovation, competitiveness of its market and impose a heavy compliance burden, especially for small and medium size enterprises. Bigger corporations, especially in tech, seem to get away with skirting the rules; for them, paying fines is perhaps more convenient than it is to comply. Yet the case for regulation is not only reasonable, but also pressing, especially with the rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence that are driven by various geopolitical, economic, sociocultural and ideological motivations. An urgent question for Europe, then, is how it can make a better case for regulation based on quality and not just quantity, and how it can work in cooperation with other regions to make a joint case, and even pursuit of global governance and regulatory approaches that are resonant and inclusive of others’ perspectives.

Neither is the Brussels Effect the sole thrust in shaping the global technological order! Increasingly, there is talk and visible influence of a Beijing Effect and a Delhi Effect which are worthy competitors to Europe’s ideas and visions for tech governance, regulation and even sovereignty. All these ‘effects’ are playing out vividly on the African continent, presenting a unique lens through which to analyse the (de)merits of each approach. While Europe’s major influence in the technology arena is through regulatory standards, China’s and India’s influence is manifested through infrastructural investments and alternative approaches to digital development that offer contextual implementation options, thus offering much needed flexibility and adaptability to suit local and regional demands and desires, and are especially considerate of regulatory capacity constraints in many developing nations.

In Africa, Europe invests in supporting policy and regulatory capacity of African institutions, typically offering technical assistance. While a useful step, capacity is not meaningfully built on capacity building alone; it is also attained through concrete investments that help translate the theoretical into the practical and modular adaptation, scaling and sustainability of such development solutions in the immediate and long term. The European approach falls short in this regard. While it may count support for African digital policies and strategies a success, they still follow the rigid approach for which Europe stands criticized. Indeed, concerns have been raised by African stakeholders about the outsize influence that Team Europe and development agencies like GIZ have on data governance and AI policy processes at the continental, regional and even country level, sometimes overshadowing local actors. While the ‘European experience’ with these topics may be a useful reference point in the shaping of policies and laws, it is imperative on the EU and individual member states’ overseas development assistance efforts to bear in mind that norms externalization, however well-intended, can also have unintended and undesirable consequences.

Arguably, each geographic, political or economic region is driven by the same inherent motive: to protect its interests and shield itself from external threats. However, these interests and concerns are playing out over resources that are not neatly constricted or limited to national and regional borders more so in the digital age. The infrastructures that power the digital era, such as undersea cables, are interdependent. The natural resources required to power these emerging technologies not only intersect with planetary-scale concerns such as making the green transition but are also derived from various locales across the globe, each with a legitimate claim on how the resulting glocal commons are governed. And even while claims of technology sovereignty are gaining traction, even the loudest voices can concede that it would be a Herculean undertaking to disentangle the status quo, and for each autonomous unit to (re)create them independently.

The growing calls for reform of the international order today are legitimate demands for the inclusion and representation of diverse realities from across the globe; calls for tech sovereignty are heard just as much in Europe as they are in Africa, and the global South. Europe’s push for a one-size-fits-all approach for which its standards are the baseline give the impression of being an imposition rather than an inclusive vision. Eurocentrism squarely belongs on the list of values that much of the world wants to see cast into the dustbin of history. The question for Europe is whether it can learn from norms, laws and regulatory approaches derived from elsewhere, particularly from non-western contexts and philosophies. For instance, in human rights and even data protection regulation, the focus on individual rights misses out on the inherently relational and interdependent nature of relations with others and with the community, and on the balance between rights and duties. Meanwhile, African philosophies like Ubuntu and even legal instruments like the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights are a rich well of insights on balancing these dynamics, which would impact how communities including marginalized groups, as well as nature and the environment are catered for in these governance frameworks.

If Europe wants to lead the world in setting the rules of global tech governance, it should bear in mind the realities of interdependence and relationality, and how they can better inform the rules it sets both for itself and as a benchmark for other regions and the international order. It must acknowledge that ideas, norms, principles and standards for governing technology are not the sole preserve of Europe and the EU; other worldviews and experiences, especially non-western ones, are gaining traction and resonance especially in the Majority World that feels excluded in the international order status quo. These alternatives are evident in tangibles like infrastructure development, not just on paper and dense prose that is considered Europe’s specialty). In this regard, EU infrastructure investments, standards and governance approaches through initiatives like the Global Gateway are going to have to compete with others making their way through places like Africa, notably China’s Digital Silk Road and the Indian approach to Digital Public Infrastructure. To merely point out the shortcomings of these alternatives or decry the muting of a ‘rights-based approach’ plays into the criticism of the West being a lecturing entity than a development cooperation partner.

While the norm externalization of GDPR may be a global success, it is not necessarily replicable across all other spheres of digital regulations— indeed, there is growing resistance and opposition to the EU’s rules and regulations on Artificial Intelligence. Europe has to face the fact that its history of imposing its beliefs and ways, especially in formerly colonized regions of the world casts a long shadow on the role it plays in attempting to shape the rules of the road in a fractured global system. As calls for reform are gaining ground, it will behoove Europe and its member states to contend with the problematics of Eurocentrism that inform whether its efforts abroad are perceived as hegemonic or as a responsive and inclusive provider of order in the present and future.

Your paper is about circular migration, looking at Somali refugees who accepted voluntary repatriation and later returned to Dadaab. How did you become interested in this topic?

Back in 2013 and 2014, there were a lot of attacks from Al Shabaab, and there was a lot of blame on refugees. There was so much hostility towards Somalis. I felt it in so many spaces. I remember there was a time I sat on a matatu and the lady near me just literally got up and sat somewhere else and was muttering something about Somalis under her breath. I knew it was even worse in the camps. The government was calling Dadaab a “hotbed” of terrorism. It led me to question what’s happening and what it meant for people.

When I got the fellowship at Oxford to do a research project, that was my opportunity. I thought maybe this can help to get the conversation started.

By the time I got the fellowship, it was 2020. The government of Kenya was pushing voluntary repatriation of Somalis. Somalis were actually the first ones who had prima facie refugee status. Somalis would just come, and they were granted refugee status without even going through the whole asylum process. So it was a big twist from prima facie to being taken back, though they were calling it voluntary repatriation.

Was it voluntary?

Yes, it was a choice. But, there were a lot of push factors from the government. The push factors were not like the government knocking at your door and telling you, you know, you need to live, go back, go back to Somalia. They had consent forms and there were spaces to go for information, where you are told, this is the situation in Somalia, this is what’s happening. And I think UNHCR had created that space for people.

But the push factors came from funding issues. People were not given rations; there was so little and people were trying to share with each other. Dadaab was also heavily securitized. There was a heavy threat, so many organizations even stepped back their operations in the camp.

And also the police brutality was intense. The police were actually beating people up. One respondent shared that her husband was beaten so badly that he couldn’t work for two weeks and he needed to seek medical assistance. The police harassment never happened like that before in the camp.

It was hard for people to adapt to this hostile environment where you’re getting harassed and there is no food.

Why did you decide to focus on those who came back to the camp, rather than just those who left?

A big issue was access. I was not in a position to go back to Somalia at the time and talk to people who went back and stayed. At the same time, there were a lot of people coming back, which I also thought was interesting. It showed that repatriation wasn’t a durable solution for everyone. And I had better access to those who came back and were in the camps.

What did you learn?

In terms of why people left, the incentive package was a big deal. They were given $200 and supported for six months. That was important to people. Others were really thinking they would find greener pastures, that they might be able to reunite with family and be able to work and save. Some had the idea that Somali had changed, that there were opportunities. For those who came back, that just wasn’t the reality.

You’ve uprooted your life, only to find that Somalia is not home anymore. And it’s not just logistics of making money and getting by. It’s also human identity issues. Someone who’s been in Kenya 30-plus years who is back in Somalia, they’re just not the same. They have a really hard time integrating. They don’t know where they belong. They can’t even speak the same dialect as the people around them.

People came back to Dadaab even though it was harder than before and it meant they might not be eligible for the same services. I think it shows that if people leave before it’s really possible to make a life back home, they will still find a way to come back. Repatriation then just doesn’t solve the problem.

What was it like doing your own research?

I can start with the challenges. Since I didn’t have a lot of experience in research myself, I didn’t know where to start. I had all of those questions! I didn’t know how to do good literature review. That took a lot of time and reading. And also, I didn’t want to replicate someone else’s work. Maybe you even have the same ideas as someone else who’s already written about something. I had to speak from a different angle. Finding my own voice was a bit difficult. Thank God I had a mentor, Pauline Vidal, for all of that. I could go back and forth with her and talk through my ideas to be guided in the process.

Writing was also another challenge, because this was my first paper ever. It took a lot of back and forth and editing and thinking about ideas and how to write about them for the audience you want to reach. Now that I’m doing my third or fourth project, it has become a bit easier.

What I really found amazing was that this is something that I wanted to do and I had the opportunity to write my own paper, have my voice, include my voice into the space.

And it’s something that I hugely cared about. I thought, you know, these are people’s lives at the end of the day. And yeah, I just wanted to write about that. And I didn’t know how. It just took a lot of steps to get there. But I kept going, because I wanted people to talk about this and care about this as much as I did and help stop whatever it is that was going on and the camp.

Local media view the takeover as primarily motivated by the state’s ambition to takeover revenue collection. Upon takeover, KFS immediately replaced the park fee payment system with the centralized government payments platform, eCitizen. While not explicitly digital public infrastructure (DPI) in that eCitizen primarily targets G2C/G2B interactions, Kenyans’ experience with this system for government digitalization draws attention to the serious risks involved in DPI in contexts where government elites lack incentives to deliver strong outcomes for citizens and where accountability environments are insufficient to prevent abuse.

It just so happens that I had already been working on a post about eCitizen, after the recent publication of a special report on the platform from Kenya’s Auditor General, documenting serious problems, vulnerabilities, and leakages. We long suspected serious problems with the system. Nanjira Sambuli, Catherine Wanjala, and I discussed some of our fears in a paper last year. Still, the audit report systematically reviews the nature and magnitude of critical operational issues.

In this post, I highlight what we learned from the audit report, outline what we still don’t know, and finish with a few reflections on implications for Kenya and the broader movement to advance DPI.

What is eCitizen?

eCitizen is a platform to request and pay for government services in Kenya. Buoyed by the example of Estonia (yes, they’re famous even in local conversation) and riding a wave of international enthusiasm, Kenya began embarking on a government digitalization initiative back in 2013 with funding from the World Bank/IFC. The current government pushed it into even more prominence, quickly onboarding more than 20,000 government services now all paid for through a single paybill number. The Bank sees the initiative as an important way to mobilize revenue. It was sold to the public under the guise of increased ‘efficiency.’ The World Bank re-upped its support to the program in 2023 through GESDEK II. The auditor general report was a condition of this funding.

What do we learn from the audit?

The audit report left me with five big takeaways:

1. Lack of governance and accountability.

The report documents extensive problems around the lack of legal frameworks, oversight, clear contracting, and standard operating procedures around critical functions like user access controls, revenue reconciliation, and service onboarding. The audit notes that the government has officially assumed ownership of the system—twice—but is still not functionally in control of the platform.

2. Unauthorized transfers and likely leakage.

The audit found a number of payments that have been made from the system to unauthorized accounts. For example, $4.2 million in payments were made to Electronic Citizen Solutions Ltd, which is not party to any contract with the government. Another $48.7 million was diverted to an undisclosed bank account “not listed among approved collection accounts by The National Treasury.” In January 2024 alone, almost $1 million was irregularly diverted to four private entities that the auditor could not identify.

3. Inefficiencies.

The auditor raises questions about whether the system is actually resulting in operational efficiencies given that revenue reconciliation is being done manually in ways that have dramatically increased time costs. It is not clear that the revenue reports generated by the system are accurate. These dual problems result in enormous discrepancies (and resulting possible revenue misuse). The report found that in a single year for the tourism fund alone, there was about a $3.8 million discrepancy between annual and weekly settlement reports, amounting to about 20% of total expected collections. Further, with revenue centralized but expenditures decentralized, there are significant delays in disbursing funds to operational ministries, potentially impacting service delivery and autonomy.

4. Lack of recourse and loss of citizen funds from failed and duplicate payments.

The audit found more than $20 million sitting in the settlement account that cannot be linked to any invoice. The AG points out that this is often form partial payments, duplicate payments, and failed payments. This is an opportunity for leakage, but also represents taking citizens money without rendering a service. The report flags that the lack of an efficient helpdesk function means citizens cannot get back these funds when things go wrong. I myself—stubborn as I am—fought for six weeks to be credited back $5 when a system error lost track of a payment made to update my business address.

5. Data exposure.

The lack of controls over user access, implementation of an unauthorized payment gateway, and absence of standard operating procedures places sensitive citizen data at risk. The auditors cannot confirm whether the system is in compliance with Kenya’s own Data Protection Act, as auditors were not given sufficient access to assess questions around data privacy and protection.

What the report does not cover

This type of an audit is very helpful in revealing many operational risks of eCitizen. At the same time, we have no evidence on the impact of the system on service delivery, which was outside the remit of the audit.

1. Citizen burdens.

In the remit of the audit, there is some discussion of citizen burdens in the lack of adherence to a pro-rated fee structure and the unfair way that health facilities charge a convenience fee for every service rather than for one overall hospital bill. There is no mention of other citizen burdens, which I suspect are substantial. A Kenyan mother I interviewed last week went to a cyber café to register digitally—as required—for the Social Health Authority (SHA). It cost her KSh 900 to use the cyber café’s help to register. Her actual insurance premium is Ksh 350 per month. It is also unclear whether the system is reducing the burdens on citizens of paying small bribes to facilitate service delivery. After citizens apply for services and pay digitally, the processing of service requests remains manual for many services. Bribes remain very common for things like accessing IDs, birth certificates, and other essential services. Ultimately, there has been no systematic research on the ways that our digital systems shift bureaucratic burdens to citizens and what that means for their access to those services.

2. Downtime.

The AG report only drops one small mention of system downtime (on p. 20), with no measures of that downtime or impact on service delivery. In our previous work, we stumbled upon an instance in which downtime resulted in interrupted medical care that caused a child to be born with brain damage. The more central digital systems become, the more critical it is that they work flawlessly and are available nearly all the time.

3. Service delivery.

It is beyond the remit of this audit, but ought to be central to our assessment of eCitizen whether or not it has actually made government services more efficient and accessible to citizens. Has it reduced wait times? Has it enabled faster processing of service requests? Has it reduced errors? We have no way of knowing for sure, and my own experience has been a mixed bag. While some things are much easier now, some services are definitively worse.

4. Net change in revenue collection.

The primary aim of the World Bank’s investment in eCitizen to support the government with revenue collection. While we regularly hear top line figures of how much money is flowing through the centralized system, there has not been any reporting on the net change in collections. Are we actually seeing new collections or simply centralized ones?

A full assessment of the initiative’s impact must include these parts of the puzzle. For now, we are left with a deeper understanding of costs and only conjecture about benefits.

Implications

What are the lessons for DPI and government digitalization efforts? It is long overdue for practitioners in these spaces to recognize that not all states are Estonia. Digitalization will lead to different outcomes in different environments. My colleagues and I have hypothesized that high-functioning DPI is only possible where there are strong commitments from state actors to high quality implementation AND effective accountability environments. Where this is not the case, we don’t just end up with lackluster outcomes, we can truly entrench state power and the power of a selected few elites over citizens by giving them direct access to both sensitive citizen data and an enormous flow of revenue potentially used to finance political budgets. The recent takeover of Karura Forest and imposition of eCitizen shows this now quite powerful tool taking over a civic space overnight.

If we care about development outcomes, we cannot blindly embrace the potential upsides of digitalization while facing the very real harms with soft, non-binding “principles” and “safeguards.” We need to recognize that DPI is actually a very high-risk intervention and treat it as such. In the wrong environments, it is a weapon used to exercise power over citizens rather than a tool for building agency and facilitating growth. Once such forces have taken hold, even a damning audit report like the one on eCitizen does nothing to force a change in how the system functions. Accountability requires real, countervailing power.

This week, I visited a respondent in a low-income neighborhood in Nairobi. I was interested to see that she and her husband had home wi-fi in their one-room flat. The trouble is, they only pay enough to get online a few days each month. When I asked about how the wife—a tailor—gets her news, she said that mostly her husband fills her in when he’s home from his boda boda riding each evening.

Another respondent of ours this week was unreachable several days in a row. We would call, and the number would ring and ring and ring. It turns out, she has an M-Kopa smartphone. When she hasn’t paid, she has no phone at all. We couldn’t reach her to schedule and interview; employers can’t reach her to offer her casual work.

My housekeeper—like many women I meet lately—has a smart phone…sometimes. Her old smartphone was a hand-me-down and eventually stopped working. She switched to an old kabambe (button) phone. After saving up, she bought another smartphone, but it was stolen from her handbag on a matatu after only a few months. Back to kabambe. Farewell to WhatsApp.

More and more—whether it’s up in the pastoralist North, or the informal settlements of Nairobi—I meet people with two phones: both a smartphone, with its high functionality, limited battery life, expensive data costs, hardware fragility, and high replacement costs as well as a kabambe phone, purchased at Ksh 500 with low-cost airtime, low risk of theft, high durability, long battery life, and often better reception for calls. Smartphones are not simply replacing kabambes, but supplementing them with intermittent access to more complex features. It seems like kabambes are even more popular than five years ago, with kiosks selling them every 300 metres or so in places like Kayole and Kawangware.

We often think about access to connectivity as a binary – a yes or no – when the reality is that most people have intermittent access. Access at all has been enabled by pay-as-you-go models. That means that many people now do have a smartphone or other data connection, but only when they can afford it.

And that affordability has many dimensions – the affordability of daily payments, data bundles or wi-fi, airtime, and handset replacement costs when smartphones are stolen, broken, or just very old. It seems to me based on my recent fieldwork that women in particular move frequently between having and not having a smartphone, unable to replace them quickly.

The supplementary behaviors we see signal to me that even intermittent access is highly valued. In the two households I interviewed this week, the smartphones were 23-25% of the value of the entire stock of the household’s physical assets. (We will look at this more broadly as more data come in over the coming months.)

Still, intermittent access means that many people are missing out on some of the strongest livelihood and other gains of connectivity. If we pay more attention to the ways that access is spotty and incomplete, perhaps we might help digitization deliver more for ordinary people.

• What if much more effort went into bringing down data costs and providing public wi-fi?

• What if smartphones might be rethought to offer 5x more battery life, greater durability, and easier abilities to toggle data usage so that every MB stretched further for the applications low-income people value most?

• What if law enforcement took phone theft more seriously and drove down the rates of loss of these key assets?

What more might we do to make connectivity more continuous and beneficial for ordinary people?

For regular readers, I know it’s been a minute. We have a lot of ideas in the pipeline coming out in the next few months. We’ve just been busy starting up a big new diaries project. We are super excited about it, but it’s pretty all consuming at the moment.

But, as Richard Heeks (2022) has pointed out, it is past time we face up to the impacts of adverse incorporation. What about when inequality persists or is even worsened by “inclusion” into the digital system?

While important issues like surveillance, algorithmic control of information, social media’s psychological impacts, and digital labour exploitation are well-known, a more mundane but insidious problem deserves attention: crappy tech.

Crappy Tech in Everyday Life

Sloppy, unreliable, and poorly designed technology is becoming embedded in critical services, where its shortcomings generate daily friction in accomplishing basic tasks—paying for parking, managing banking, accessing government services, or contributing to savings groups. A few examples illustrate the extent of the problem:

Parking

The airport, offices, and malls around Nairobi have digital payment systems for parking. A user gets a card when they enter the facility, uses that card to pay over M-Pesa or through a parking machine before exiting, and scans the card to leave. There used to be a single provider for parking everywhere, KAPS, and no M-pesa payment. The system was notoriously unreliable. Queues would line up at the machines who would regularly fail, not have change, or reject the user’s coins and bills. Some systems improved when competition entered the market. KAPS, however, is still at the Nairobi airport, JKIA. The machines used to pay for parking here (and in many places around the country) are so bad that there must be a human attendant. There are three full time attendants in the parking garage of JKIA. When I went to pay for parking after a one-day field trip, they needed to guide me. Only one of four machines could issue a receipt. But the machine that could issue a receipt could only read old currency notes. The human attendant had to go around the airport exchanging my fresh ATM notes for used and wrinkled ones so that I could exit. This took about 20 minutes.

The system for recognizing paid tickets is also bad, another 6-10 people man the exit booms, dealing with failures there. When I entered the queue, I spent another 30 minutes trying to exit the airport as we all waited for the problem-prone exit machines to be corrected by their human assistants.

Like at the airport, there are dismal parking solutions all around the city (looking at you, 9 Riverside). These systems require physical infrastructure, so switching costs are high. Offices and security companies are reluctant to abandon their preferred partners. And the properties with marking are the main customers for the parking systems, not users.

Digital government

Colleagues and I have already written a bit about dismal Kenyan experiences with government digitalization, including an unreliable government payments system preventing access to essential emergency medical care. Platforms for accessing government services are routinely down and not functional. This can make it impossible to do thing like pay for emergency healthcare, as we documented here. It can force small businesses to wait weeks to invoice their customers through eTims.

There is little reporting or measurement of citizen outcomes on these platforms. Ownership and control of these platforms is opaque, and growing dependence on single platforms results in vendor lock-in and slow resolution of critical problems. Many systems were set up by allies of political leaders with companies registered just in time to receive critical tenders to build and deliver digitized services. When power changes hands, new systems are often redeveloped from scratch by a different set of preferred vendors linked to key patronage networks.

Banking

About 20% of my transactions fail with one of Kenya’s largest banks. I am on the phone with my bank about missing/failed transactions, problems with online banking, and problems with mobile banking about five times a week, on average. The bank converted some of my accounts to a new online banking system that lacked even basic functions, like transfer payments. When I called to get help, I was asked to join a full day training and told the system was in piloting, a pilot I never opted into. It seems my bank spends more money sponsoring golf tournaments that ensuring their basic functionality. (I’ve already spent an hour dealing with a failed internal bank transfer by 10am today. My very kind branch manager has suggested I conduct all my future transactions by email within the online banking platform.)

For months, I asked around for recommendations for better banking services. I could find no enthusiastic response among dozens of friends. I delayed switching banks because switching is costly. It’s not the KYC or credit worthiness that is so difficult to port. It’s the dozens of beneficiaries whose banking details I would need to re-enter in a new system and clients I would need to update payment records on file. Switching would mean days of administrative work, costly for a very small business.

I met with a relationship manager at another bank who herself advised me to stay put. The next weekend, that bank’s core banking system went offline for an entire weekend, with none of their customers able to access their funds on mobile and online banking.

Savings group apps

A number of applications have emerged to help savings group digitize and use records from savings group transactions to extend the groups additional capital for intermediation. Philanthropic donors and investors have supported these initiatives with the noble aim of getting more resources to low-income communities and women. But, despite significant philanthropic investments in the space, I have yet to see evaluation of what this has meant for users.

My glimpses into how this are going have revealed some troubling patterns. Instead of streamlining operations, many apps replicate paper records and double meeting times. Their interfaces are often usable by only one member, leading to information asymmetries and intra-group distrust—especially when credit terms change and only the app operator is informed.

But subsidy heavy models mean that issues affecting end users can be slow to surface and providers slow to respond. Their client, after all, is first and foremost the donor, not the very low average revenue per user (ARPU) user in a remote village.

Why is there so much crappy tech?

Our current Black Mirror-like reality is one in which we must use digital systems for nearly everything, and those systems rarely work the way they are supposed to. Rather than new efficiencies, we encounter new delays, burdens, and costly time spent coping with and correcting the mistakes and errors from this digital slop.

The billion dollar question is why. Why do so many of our digital systems stink? I have two hypotheses:

1. Mismatch between the “client” and the “user”

Many systems are designed not for the user but for someone else: governments focused on control or revenue, donors chasing innovation, or platforms unwilling to invest in low-ARPU markets. When providers are not accountable to users, reliability, usability, and trust suffer.

2. Lack of genuine competition and competition around quality

Many digital services are quasi-monopolies. They benefit from platform efficiencies but entrench lock-in. Switching is expensive, and competition is weak. Even in sectors like banking, where users have alternatives, no provider stands out for quality. We’ve grown accustomed to mediocrity. When I told friends how much time I lose navigating these failures, they suggested hiring a full-time accountant—just to manage the dysfunction. That’s not transformation; it’s institutional failure.

Raising the Bar for Digital Inclusion

For years, the ICT4D space has prioritised inclusion, assuming that digital equals better. It’s time to abandon that assumption.

While the previous era of digitalization placed a heavy emphasis on design, we now need much more attention to how markets and incentives work to deliver beautiful, reliable tech, that solves many more problems than it creates. We need to understand better how digital systems distribute power and what that means for actually delivering on the promise of efficiency, safety, and voice for users. In a low ARPU context, we need to grapple with alternative, non-market feedback loops that value users’ experiences even when they are not the ultimate customer of the tech provider. A starting point for all of us is moving towards (or back to?) a fundamental preoccupation with outcomes for ordinary people and raising the bar for what counts as good and transformational technology.

Artwork by Liyou Zewide

If there is one word that features prominently in matters Africa—from socio-economic transformation plans to democratic governance ideals, it is “potential.” Africa’s potential animates policy recommendations, institutional formations, development assistance programs and even discourses challenging the prevailing narratives and assumptions about the continent. Since the turn of the century, talk of the continent’s potential has coalesced around its demographics. Youth in Africa have even been described as the continent’s most precious asset, and ‘Africa’s youth potential’ has taken centre stage in policy and strategy planning. The continent comprises the world’s most youthful population and is bound to have the largest workforce globally in a decade’s time.

One outcome of this focus on Africa’s youth potential is a general alignment of diverse actors’ assessments of what needs to happen to harness it. Broad consensus now exists on the urgency of investing in skills and education towards ensuring there are jobs—both through employment and entrepreneurship— as well as meaningful youth engagement in governance and policymaking. These focus areas are meant to build upon the efforts addressing extreme poverty, improving access to health, advancing peace and security, and other continental development priorities. We also see women and youth discussed in tandem, foregrounding and mainstreaming the importance of gender equality. Aspiration 6 of the African Union’s continental blueprint —Agenda 2063 — encapsulates these intertwined goals neatly: ‘An Africa, whose development is people-driven, relying on the potential of African people, especially its women and youth, and caring for children.

African youth— it goes without saying— are not a homogenous entity. Nor is it particularly straightforward to generalize on trends and development progress across Africa. However, the plans, strategies, frameworks and charters agreed upon, signed and ratified at the African Union (AU) level are a useful analytical yardstick. In this regard, there have been notable AU-level developments indicative of the policy thrusts pertaining to African youth. The African Union Commission (AUC) claims a mandate to act on youth issues, bestowed upon it through the decisions of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government, which is the AU’s highest policy and decision-making organ. The AUC additionally states that it has the convening power to mobilize and synergise multistakeholder efforts – that is, national and international stakeholders spanning governments, civil society, development actors, the private sector and ‘youth voices’—and legitimize all their efforts at the continental level. The AU level efforts are also a crucial frame of reference as they bypass the contentious demarcations of Africa — into ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ and North Africa— typically employed in the international development domain. Instead, the AU frames the continent as comprising 55 member states, and eight Regional Economic Communities (RECs) that group individual countries into sub-regions and associations, to primarily enhance regional economic integration.

From potential to policy proposals

Following from the mapping of youth potential in Africa over the past two decades, several policy positions, priorities and investments are taking shape. In education and skills development, a key strategic direction is on reforming and reconstituting Technical and Vocational Training (TVET) across all levels of education. Rather than resorting to TVET when other educational options have failed, the paradigm shift pursued in centering this approach is to accommodate wide-ranging forms for technical and professional skills-building across formal, non-formal and informal environments. This approach is considered responsive to the contextual realities of training avenues readily available across the continent and considers TVET a unifying umbrella. From the Continental TVET strategy to national level policy reforms, the TVET approach encourages training supply to be flexible, adaptive and supportive of continuous apprenticeship in order to accommodate labour market demands— from agriculture and traditional manufacturing to emergent green and blue economies and digital societies. Overall, the TVET reorientation rests on the notion that it prepares young people to go beyond job seeking to become job creators. The TVET paradigm shift also serves to reinforce the narrative on entrepreneurship as key to ‘unlocking the economic potential of Africa’s youth’.

The typical narrative arc on youth entrepreneurship in Africa today is one that articulates endless opportunities to be seized. Young people, it is also said, want to ‘be their own boss’, so their ‘innovative energy’ being channelled into entrepreneurship is widely championed as the solution to unemployment and underemployment, as well as a formula for economic growth. Young people are increasingly encouraged— pressured, even— to create their own jobs, as traditional pathways to employment become less certain. This has gained even more traction with the rapid diffusion of digital technologies, from mobile phones and the internet to Artificial Intelligence.

Then there’s the potential of youth empowerment and engagement in leadership and democratic governance, especially in public service. Exhortations about youth as future leaders abound and have spurred a flurry of initiatives around youth volunteerism, youth advisory panels, youth mentorship programs, youth secretariats, youth quotas and— in the case of the African Union—the appointment of a Youth Envoy to advocate for and represent the interests and voices of African youth.

But potential and policy proposals are not enough

Talk of ‘youth potential’ litters numerous plans and policies as outlined above, and in many more spheres. When is this potential to be met? Is potential just a mirage, a distraction from the action needed today, as the promise of tomorrow is held up as a priority? How and when do we take stock of all the missed or wasted potential, even as more potential is pursued? Importantly, while potential predominantly refers to optimistic future outcomes, it also describes the perilous cost of not realizing them. In between potential risk and potential reward is the intricate theatre of development policies, politics and investments. Arguably, this is the area in which more effort should be applied, as it is where we can learn and iterate on what works and what can be built upon, reformed or discarded. We can better understand which combinations of factors and actors help register meaningful progress. It is what makes the difference in shifting and correcting prevailing perceptions of Africa as a poor continent, to the more accurate reality that its resources —human and natural — are gravely mismanaged.

It is one thing to wax lyrical about potential, and it is another thing entirely to act upon and realize it in the present and near term, just as much as in the long term which is typically the implied horizon. For instance, refrains like youth being leaders of tomorrow never specify when tomorrow is. In the eyes of many of the continent’s young and not-so-young, tomorrow never comes, not in time at least. This is evident in the enduring absence of meaningful youth representation in political and public sector leadership across the continent. In most executive arms of government in Africa today, youth affairs are bundled alongside gender, arts, culture and sports, or ICT.[1] In practice, these categorizations translate into the dockets where policy issues considered secondary are parked, and usually those for which government budgets allocate fewer resources. In fact, only recently has ICT and Digital Economy as a policy theme been elevated from the ‘Youth and—’ dockets to standalone or more prominent portfolios as the economic significance of digitalization has become more evident.

The long-term implications of such an intergenerational gap are dire, and they also raise difficult questions on the future of leadership on the continent overall, as younger people — including those who’ve recently graduated from the youth bracket — are not yet registering in the most influential rungs of governance. Instead, African youth are subjected to endless tokenistic engagement efforts. As a seminal report from the AU Office of the Youth Envoy and the African Leadership Institute rightfully notes, reform on this front is not just about getting youth into governance; it is about refreshing and reshaping the public sector and governance culture on the continent by introducing youthful change agents who can help governments achieve these lofty ambitions.

In education and skills development, African governments are still underinvesting, even as younger generations are entering the workforce having attained higher levels of education. The quality of education received, and even the purpose of education altogether warrant more critical discussion and recalibration. Given the urgency of addressing underemployment and unemployment, there is a fixation on imparting ‘practical’, ‘marketable’ or ‘employable’ skills. A false dichotomy then emerges, where ‘critical’ and ‘soft’ skills are sacrificed for the former. Unfortunately, even the favoured set of skills supplied do not align with labour demand. There remains, for instance, the gnawing challenge of fewer and fewer industries being capable to absorb the talent generated. Manufacturing is on an overall decline on the continent, and while employment in the service sector is on the rise, there remain significant challenges — such as minimum job experience requirements that lock out young people even from entry-level jobs and increased automation— that complicate the prospects the steady and sustained sectoral growth needed to absorb the ever-increasing volumes of talent.

Similarly, while entrepreneurship may be a viable avenue for tackling unemployment and underemployment, the reality is that the potential therein falls woefully short of being realized. A major overall barrier is the harshness of the operational environment across political, cultural, economic and social dynamics that play out both locally and regionally, as well as those of globalization and its unique effects on a continent for which investments have predominantly focused on resource extraction. Additionally, the odd fixation on concentrating (youth) entrepreneurship in Africa at micro, small and medium size enterprises stifles ambition at both policy and innovation levels. Economic growth— as established in numerous development assessments— requires a steady rate of growth of firms, not just many small ones. Unfortunately, the typical profile of African entrepreneurship is based more on survival and a dependence on supplying government and big businesses, than on innovation and growth. This is not to dismiss the successes registered across various sectors, notably the ascendancy of fintech and other tech enterprises on the continent; rather it is to emphasize that those remain the exception rather than the norm.

One of the most frustrating obstacles to earnestly addressing the challenges youth entrepreneurs face is a failure of imagination, both in the policymaking and development circles. They seem stuck at rationalizing the scope of challenges as a skills shortage issue, and a defeatism that they ‘there are no jobs’ for young people (in the existing formal sector). Solutions and investments that follow revolve around recommending more skills, mentoring and capacity building investments, which reinforces a romanticized but vicious circle of perpetual skills development and entrepreneuring — with microfinance, small and medium-size grants proliferating, all of which require significant time and effort to discover, apply for and comply with. Efforts by public, private, philanthropic and development actors alike adhere to this trend, which in turn obfuscates the other structural issues at play, such as market access, inadequate and inappropriate funding structures and regulatory hurdles that all conspire to hinder the growth, survival and scalability of these businesses. This is a challenge plaguing all prospective sectors for youth entrepreneurship— from agriculture and manufacturing to digital economies. The last two decades of Africa potential discourse have already taught us that entrepreneurship cannot per se overcome entrenched and poor public policy. It is especially fallacious to expect young people to magically leapfrog these entrenched complexities.

The problem with potential, it is said, is that it’s easy to recognize, but not so easy to realize. This is certainly true for individuals, and even more acute for a demographic as vast and diverse as African youth. We need sustained efforts and investments in analysing the in-between of potential mapping and realization, and we need them urgently. This is a task for all actors — including development cooperation partners like Germany who invest heavily in continental and country-level efforts. Reforms must incorporate – and in fact, be led by— the wisdom, ideas and solutions that African youth already have. The potential of Africa’s youth is undisputed. But we need intellectually and morally honest stock-taking of attendant policies, strategies and investments to realize it for present and future generations.

A German version of this essay first appeared in Internationale Politik’s May 2025 Special Issue on Africa: https://internationalepolitik.de/de/junges-potenzial-alte-versprechen

You can read more about Nanjira here.

[1] See e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Youth-ministries-in-different-African-Countries_tbl2_326431611

This reduction was actually in spite of 54% of program jobs being held by women. How was this possible? Women were typically viewed as “insurance workers,” entering the labor force only when households were truly desperate. Guaranteed employment reduced that kind of desperation by allowing men to work more. The women who did join the scheme were often shifting from worse types of employment into relatively better work.

García found that household poverty declined and consumption increased. At the same time, women’s financial independence and even body mass index(!) fell. Women’s labor force participation is important for enabling financial independence, women’s physical and mental well-being, and gaining exposure that allows for other types of growth and social change.

We would love to believe that development interventions are positive sum in every dimension. Reality is more complex. Changes in equity do not automatically follow from reductions in poverty, and, like this research shows, sometimes growing household incomes can correspond with actual reductions in women’s welfare.

This is a hard truth to accept. I’ve seen it’s often difficult for my clients just starting to think about gender to grapple with that kind of complexity. Recently, I was advising a new investment fund on integrating gender intentionality into their work. One of their investees was getting generally high praise from customers for their impact. When we disaggregated those responses by gender, there was more divergence. In open ended comments, we heard that some male customers reported their incomes had improved so much due to the new product that they married a second wife.

I was reminded of a visit to an oil palm growing region of Côte d’Ivoire years before. In this area—for better and worse—low-income men were claiming forest plots, cutting the trees, planting oil palm, and waiting. When their palms began to produce, their economic status completely transformed. Suddenly they stopped worrying about being able to buy food; they could build houses and buy pickup trucks. Several I met also married additional wives, many of them still girls not yet finished with school. Especially without economic prospects of their own, the girls were happy to drop out and become the favored wives of the newly rich. Older wives and their children were being cast aside, still struggling to make ends meet, with no economic opportunities on the horizon.

A separate investee of the new fund was introducing irrigation to farmers in a semi-arid region, and my client was sure this would benefit women. I was less sure. While affordable irrigation would likely increase household income and consumption, but it might have little impact (even potentially adverse impact) on women’s incomes and agency, given they are much less likely to own the land or be able to finance irrigation on the plots they manage. In some cases, dramatically improved productivity on “men’s” plots can even push women off the land they formerly controlled or convert “women’s crops” to ones managed by men better positioned to capture the new profits that increased productivity and commercialization unleash.

My clients were understandably frustrated wondering what on earth they should be doing. I don’t believe Indian policymakers should kill the employment guarantee scheme or that my clients’ investees shouldn’t invest in expanding irrigation access. Rachel Glennerster and Siddhartha Haria also warn against trying to address externalities like this by throwing in loads of complementary interventions, introducing complexity that makes programs much less efficient.

It does mean, however, that we need to pay attention, learn, and improve. Equity is not an automatic outcome of rising incomes. We need to understand its specific drivers in a range of contexts and recognize we need to do things differently to get both increased incomes and equity. I also think it calls for a little humility. Even the smartest, most well-intentioned development practitioners and policymakers cannot do all things for all people nor predict all outcomes of their work. Some social forces are outside the control we imagine we have in the fictions of our theories of change and project logframes. Doing better demands keeping an open mind and an ear to the ground.

We are so delighted to introduce you to our 2025 Ekko Fellows. After receiving more than 50 applications from masters students around Kenya, we narrowed the pool to a shortlist of seven applicants. Among those, a set of three generous external judges selected our final awardees. Our fellows receive cash support grants of KES 200,000 to help them complete their fieldwork as well as advisory support from our team, in collaboration with their academic advisors.

Our 2025 Fellows are Stella Wandera and Anthony Wanjala. Stella is a passionate officer at Kenya Fisheries and is currently working towards a masters in environmental science at Kenyatta University. She will be studying the fishing practices of artisanal fishers in Kwale County, trying to understand how well current sustainability policies are working and how they might be better designed and implemented. On the opposite side of the country, Anthony Wanjala, a biotechnologist and student of public health at Masinde Muliro University, will be studying the drivers of malaria vaccine uptake and attrition in Kakamega.

We had our first meeting with Stella and Anthony yesterday, making us even more excited about their work. Both of them chose topics about which they are passionate and where their work has real world applications.

Anthony was thrilled when the malaria vaccine Mosquirix was introduced in malaria endemic parts of Kenya providing hope to reduce malaria related mortality in the country. But then he learned that uptake was relatively low, even in towns, where one might expect parents have more access to information and relatively close proximity to health centres. Further, those who were getting vaccines for their children were often not completing the four-dose series. Through his research, he wants to understand why and help ensure more children benefit from the protection conferred by these new vaccines.

After several years as a fisheries office in Kenya, Stella has seen progress made in ensuring regulatory compliance of commercial fishing operators, but worries that gaps in enforcement of artisanal fishing practices may be causing significant degradation of fish stocks, inhibiting efforts to ensure sustainability in the sector. Her work will understand what practices artisanal fishers are using and why, how they think about sustainability, and how current regulations are or are not affecting their practices. She hopes to offer insights that may lead to more effective policies supporting sustainable fishing on the Kenyan coast.

We are thrilled to be working with Stella and Anthony and look forward to sharing more from their work here later this year. Stay tuned!

The role of AI in creating or eliminating jobs for African youth is a matter of hot debate. Various prognostications are often lacking an empirical perspective on what is happening now and what it portends for the future. In some sectors, dramatic disruption is already underway.

Online writing is one such space. In 2019, while studying the ways digitization was changing livelihoods in Kenya, we interviewed young people engaged in online writing, including content creation for websites and blogs as well as “academic writing,” essentially writing essays and other homework for students in the United States and UK. The latter had become a substantial industry, likely generating income for tens of thousands of Kenyans.

The academic writers we met were mostly young people, one to five years out of university. Many had done a little bit of academic writing as a side hustle while studying, only to turn it into a serious gig after graduation when confronting a job market devoid of opportunities for people like them. Skills honed at university—excellent writing in English, research skills, and time management—helped Kenyan graduates thrive as academic writers. They bought, curated, and sold expensive, high-performing accounts (often with a mzungu, white person, avatar) and hired teams of writers to help them take on more and deliver faster on assignments. Full-time writers were bringing in upwards of KSh 40,000 (about $400 at the time) per month.

It wasn’t a great job. It required working long hours and being available at a moment’s notice to revise an assignment. When colleges were in session, most had to work overnight shifts, responding to requests for jobs and completing work on schedule for US time zones. Groups of young men often shared apartments to better share costs and coordinate the servicing of accounts. Some told us they had little time to see their friends and family. However, the reliable, relatively high incomes helped them justify the sacrifices and the moral compromise involved in helping foreign students cheat.

In 2019, digitization was an enabler. It connected these skilled young people with a market that valued their particular skills. It helped overcome unemployment challenges at home. Six years later, the number of jobs is far fewer and only the best writers can maintain their livelihoods. Last week we caught up with four academic writers we had interviewed in 2019 to understand what’s shifted and what it meant for them. We heard about big changes:

Demand

The number of jobs going through academic writing platforms has dropped dramatically. Presumably many students are using AI directly for more assignments, meaning there is less work for Kenyan writers. Collins^[1] (28) went from flying high between 2018 to 2022 to a crash in 2023 with the introduction of ChatGPT. He went from doing two jobs a day to two a week. “ChatGPT can do in two minutes what it used to take me a whole day. And it has better grammar and such,” Collins told us.

James (35), who used to subcontract a number of other writers, has had to greatly reduce the number of writers he works with. There aren’t enough jobs, and, he said, “You have to work with the person who can agree to the new terms.”

Falling rates

Those new terms involve greatly reduced pay. Prices dropped from around $6 per page to $2-3. Some students use AI to generate their essays and then hire academic writers just for “paraphrasing” or humanizing work to get around AI detection at their universities. This work pays less than original writing.

Alternative job creation in Kenya (and elsewhere) hasn’t accelerated in the midst of this transition, meaning many people are still looking for academic writing jobs even as the number of assignments and pay have reduced. Some writers are reportedly trying to make extra money by selling training services to aspiring writers. Some of our respondents felt this was exploitative given the dearth of real opportunities to earn a living in academic writing today.

Competition over even low-paying jobs remains fierce. Collins told us there used to be about 10 bids per job. That exploded to more than 100 within two minutes of a new assignment posting.

AI detection and the “authenticity” premium

Academic writing platforms have introduced AI detection tools and zero-tolerance policies for AI usage, positioning themselves as a premium alternative for students who might otherwise use Chat GPT directly. If submitted work is suspected to be AI-generated, writers are fined and their accounts blocked. Judith (29) explained, “You can write a project even from scratch, and yet it is flagged as AI-generated. You have to check everything with those detection tools and keep changing it until it’s okay…For my account, there is a fine of $500 for any work flagged as AI-generated.”

“You prefer to even make sure there are some errors in the work so that it is regarded as human,” Collins told us.

AI tools that humanize AI text have also emerged, and are being used by academic writers to help with work that is sent to them to humanize and also to ensure their original work passes AI screening. Account managers now often run completed work through Turnitin, an AI detector that is also used by universities, to check that work submitted is not AI-generated.

Judith does not use AI to generate content. She finds that actually doing the work makes it easier to avoid AI detection. She uses Grammarly to check her work, which often flags her work as AI-generated. But when she writes herself, Turnitin usually flags only about 10% of her work as AI-generated, which for her is easier to fix than when the percentage is much higher. It also saves her money on Turnitin, since she doesn’t have to run the same piece of work through the detection software as many times. Junior writers often find the constant revision to get to 0% AI detection to be exhausting, especially given low payment rates. Reportedly, this is leading to significant churn for junior writers.

This strategy means Judith is still getting work and in high-paying accounts. These days, this kind of human authenticity pays. Judith told us, “Usually the students come to us after they’ve been caught using AI. They don’t realize it can do things like hallucinate sources.”

Some writers we spoke with diversified their writing types and clients into areas that are less stringent around the use of AI. Tasks for content creation for blogs, direct/offline clients, and clients looking for technical tasks (like audits, online research, and R programming) are more flexible on the use of AI. “Brian” (25) now focuses on those technical tasks, and AI makes him much faster at task completion. He bids on every possible technical project and can do three or four tasks per day with AI help compared to just one per day before.

One other area that still needs human support is “chat moderation.” While often sold to digital workers as merely moderating chats, it often involves supplying content on adult chat websites. Out of desperation, Collins gave this a shot, before walking away. “That thing, it is not good for your mental health.”

Appreciation of asset values for good accounts

Many had invested hundreds of dollars in buying highly-rated academic writing accounts only to lose them overnight to suspected use of AI. Few could afford to buy a new account and start over with remaining accounts that have appreciated in value. Group accounts that used to go for KES 50,000-70,000 (about $387-542) on platforms like Essay Pro are now selling for around KES 500,000 ($3,870). One writer told us it’s worth it, but only if you have good writers who can deliver original work.

Of the four academic writers we spoke with, only Judith is still doing academic writing full-time. She has also maintained a staff of four who support her work. But she would advise other young people to look for other opportunities. Academic writing has never been easy, and it’s much harder now. Beating AI detection even with authentic work is exhausting, often for low pay. When thinking about whether even her work will be replaced she told us, “We have never known the future…we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.” She’s also a little sad about what AI means for the future. Before AI some students were paying people like her to cheat on their homework, but now “No one is studying. All you need to do is show up in class. That’s it.”

The constant of change

What is being demanded of all four of the young people we spoke with is constant adaptation to survive. While Judith is still writing, she must keep up with constant changes in the academic platforms and AI tools, just to stay in place. Collins is creatively searching out new ways to make money through poultry farming, and he’s trying to use AI to shorten the learning curve, helping him establish more quickly. While AI has decimated opportunities in academic writing, it has made it easier to take on more technical tasks. It leaves behind (for now) some opportunities in humanizing AI texts and for the dismal work of chat moderation. Even with college degrees in fields like engineering, people like James and Collins have little hope of landing a steady job or reliable livelihood to plan a life around.

The ways that AI disrupts livelihoods in Africa are bound to be different than the West. The workforce is atomized into many diverse domains dominated by the self-employed, making wider trends will be difficult to disentangle. Already reeling from eroding purchasing power, African young people are likely in for a bumpy, uncertain ride. Staying on the pulse of change in terms of actual worker experiences is going to be critical to shaping a more hopeful future.

^[1] All names changed.

In late 2004, I showed up in a small mountain community in what was then Swaziland. The country had been bulldozed by HIV, with about 40% of pregnant women testing positive and life expectancy dashed to just 32 years. The country was just starting to receive ARVs, in large part due to US government funding.

Once I settled in, I tried to meet every family in the community by conducting a little survey on community issues. Towards the end of the survey, I met a woman, Nancy[1], who told me she tested positive for HIV. Her husband was already dead, and she was thin, frail, sick. Her youngest baby, about a year old, wasn’t growing. Her sister had also recently died, leaving her five-year-old daughter behind. Nancy’s mom, “Esther,” was really worried. If she lost Nancy, she, a disabled and diabetic grandmother, would need to fend for the four grandchildren (two of them sick) under her roof.

At that moment, ARVs were extremely expensive. There was much debate happening about whether providing them for free would ever be ‘sustainable.’ The US government’s PEPFAR program started providing them anyway. From my village, I started to see sustainability differently. It was definitely not sustainable for women like Nancy to die en masse and for women like Esther to try to raise a generation of grandchildren on their own. The social upheaval caused by the wiping out of a generation of working age adults is still hard for me to articulate.

After Nancy confided in me, we went together to the regional hospital that was supplied with ARVs. Her T-cell count was low enough for her to qualify, and she started treatment right away. Within weeks, she had a horrendous allergic reaction to the first line medications and had to be hospitalized with all of the skin on her face and hands peeling off. Luckily, they offered her a second line option, and she began to really heal. Once Nancy was stable, we tested the kids who were sick as well. Two were positive and started treatment. They started to gain weight, to grow, to play with the other kids. Nancy got a job as a shop attendant. That let her help Esther with the money they needed to take care of the kids and pay for school fees.

I helped bury way too many friends and way too many children in two years. ARVs were new, rollout was slow, it took time for doctors to learn proper doses for kids and how to follow up and support patients. It took time to set up the systems and institutions needed to ensure lots of people tested, were followed up, and got treated when the time was right.

But Nancy lived. And because she lived, her kids have a mom. Because she lived, other people started getting tested and getting treatment. Because she lived, Esther’s grandkids went to school. Life expectancy in eSwatini has risen to (a still-too-low) 56.

Being in Swaziland as part of Peace Corps was often frustrating. The organization often seemed more focused on policing volunteers’ travel than supporting our work in communities. We were isolated. We had no jobs, no job descriptions, so were fighting these independent battles rather than helping build more institutionalized responses. I was annoyed by some of our American leadership preaching the purpose of our mission from their big ambassadorial houses in the capital, unwilling to pick up even very basic phrases of siSwati. I was annoyed that PEPFAR foolishly and for political reasons pushed ‘abstinence’ so hard in a country where being married was women’s biggest risk factor for getting HIV.

At the same time, I was honored that our government and the American people found this kind of service, this kind of engagement with another country to be worthy of investment. I was proud that in a Kingdom so neglected by its own leaders, the US was providing critical assistance and life saving medication. In the 20 years since, I’ve been proud to see curious, proud, empathetic, and hardworking former Peace Corps Volunteers play important roles in our State Department and in USAID. Our government funded an intentional training ground for informed, multi-lingual bureaucrats that is unique in the world.

PEPFAR was rolling out, and I was doing my service at the same time that the US was occupying Iraq and deploying USAID very differently there in the aftermath of a senseless war. The enormous international bureaucracy of the richest country in the world isn’t just one thing.

Like many, I’ve been shocked to watch America’s foreign assistance programs and now research funding come under such swift and cruel attack by the Trump Administration. Among the many thoughts, feelings, and fears swirling around me, I’m most of all sad. I’m sad that it feels Americans are losing the last of their shared values and the boldness to take on big, global challenges and mobilize a response. Regardless of the institutional realities that emerge in the coming months and years, this is the new reality.

In the US and beyond, there seems to be a movement by the relatively better off to retreat into what we think we can control, to shut the doors and try to take care of ourselves. Putting aside whether it is even possible to thrive in such an order, I’m being reminded of how much I don’t want that. I want to live in a world where we belong to one another. I want to owe something of myself to others and have some expectation of some basic rights I’m owed in return. Raised under a different set of American, global, and religious values, I’ve learned that obligations are beautiful. Increasingly in my personal life, I feel I’ve learned that beautiful obligations are what give life meaning.

There will be time to think about what this new order means for international development—and what possibilities it might even open. But I think it helps to sit with why this feels so painful and remember the values we want to hold onto as institutions are broken and remade. In a quest to make America ‘great,’ how can Americans as a society and polity hold onto a few things that make America somewhat and sometimes good?

[1] I changed her name, even though I REALLY want you all to know it. I know ‘Nancy’ is public and proud of her status, but I don’t know that about her kids. I also REALLY want to show you a picture of her beaming with life, but for the same reason, I haven’t

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(by Julie)

I love a good podcast, and my listening hours took a sudden upturn about 18 months ago when I adopted an indefatigable Kenyan Shepherd, Pickle. On weekends, we visit a nearby off-leash forest area. Pickle explores all the scents and splashes in the stream. I follow her more slowly, listening to podcasts. And there is such great stuff to listen to these days! As we close out 2024, I thought I’d share a few episodes that left me thinking long after.

1. “Leadership, legacies, and the politics of change” with Ken Opalo on Our Long Walk

Our Long Walk

Can you say SDGs?

Listen to the Our Long Walk podcast here first, with new episodes available on other platforms a day later. Paid members get early access, plus exclusive in-depth posts that explore each episode furt…

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2 years ago · 19 likes · 3 comments · Johan Fourie and Ken Opalo

Ken Opalo’s writing this year has been so, so good: thoughtful, relevant, sharp. If you’re not already following An Africanist Perspective, you should. This podcast episode was, I believe, the second in this new and excellent series Johan Fourie and Jonathan Schoots, Economic Historians at Stellenbosch University.

This conversation with Opalo is packed with ideas I wanted to take in more slowly, significantly lengthening my development reading list. Opalo talks about what it means when local policymakers adopt global development movements like the SDGs (or one might substitute “Universal Primary Education”, “Financial Inclusion”, or “Digital Public Infrastructure”). What it signals is that policymakers are willing to outsource their attention on that issue in favor of ones that are more central to the government’s true priorities. This idea really hit hard, and I’m still mulling on it months later.

2. The White Saviors

https://www.canadaland.com/shows/the-white-saviors/

This series from Canadaland is from 2021, but was new to me this year. It’s a five-episode series about how what seemed to start as good intentions morphed into an NGO empire that attracted enormous celebrity attention and mobilized contributions from millions of young people in the West, while the founders got rich and failed to document what all those donations actually produced. Operations slid into threats and violence. This podcast is for a popular audience and the themes will be familiar to seasoned development practitioners. Still, I enjoyed the reflections on the systems that allow these kinds of things to happen.

A quote from Kenyan-born scholar, Firoze Manji in episode 5 has stuck with me: “What these NGOs do is they hide the fact that there is a process going on that makes people poor, that impoverishes people. And, so you have these people claiming outrageous achievements. If one looks at the last 40 years in Kenya—indeed in most African countries—you will see that there are more people unemployed, more landless people, more people in the ghettos, large scale dispossession of land, large scale exploitation of natural resources, and massive impoverishment. To claim that by providing little services, on a private basis [is helping address poverty], to put it politely, it’s bullshit.”

3. “Karthik Muralidharan Examines the State of the Indian State” on Ideas of India

https://www.mercatus.org/ideasofindia/karthik-muralidharan-examines-state-indian-state

I love Shruti Rajagopalan’s Ideas of India podcast. Rajagopalan’s ideological orientation is not the same as mine, but she is deeply curious and probing around the research of her guests. She cares about pragmatic solutions to difficult problems and the real stories that evidence is telling us about how development happens.

This episode is a discussion of Muralidharan’s book, Accelerating India’s Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance. If you—like me—have not had time to read that book, yet, you may appreciate this condensed discussion of some of the big ideas about what it takes to build a bureaucracy capable of a high level of service delivery. I was particularly interested in some of the ideas towards the end about novel approaches to staffing the public sector.

4. Vox Dev “How connecting firms to markets can promote economic development” and “Vocational and apprenticeship training programmes in developing countries”

https://voxdev.org/topic/firms/how-connecting-firms-markets-can-promote-economic-development

https://voxdev.org/topic/labour-markets/vocational-and-apprenticeship-training-programmes-developing-countries

Vox Dev’s podcast is very different from Ideas of India. Each episode is essentially a paper summary, and the intention is simply to share, not deeply interrogate and discuss it. The research shared leans heavily towards quantitative development economics and RCTs. At the same time, having these short summaries is a great service in helping me keep up with new research. It’s just that listening, for me, usually feels like eating my vegetables.

The two episodes that were most helpful for me this year were on connecting firms to markets and on returns to training programs. These topics were directly tied to work I was doing this year and thus had some immediate application. Those of you who spend a lot of time thinking about livelihoods and jobs will probably also appreciate the nuggets of insight they offer.

Globally, poverty reduction has stagnated since 2015. Recently, The Economist drew attention to this troubling trend and the lack of a robust global response. In Kenya, poverty is actually increasing. In a previous piece, I looked at changes in nominal consumption spending in Kenya between 2015/16 and 2021. Between 2015/6, median monthly consumption per adult equivalent had fallen 8% in nominal terms and 33% in real terms, with some of the largest declines happening in the top quintiles of the income distribution. Most of this decline was in the lead up to covid, not as a result of the pandemic, meaning people have been really struggling for several years now.

Now we have data from 2022. So far, KNBS has not reported on the overall median consumption levels, but instead provides an urban/rural disaggregation. Here we see slight increases from 2021 in median consumption levels at about 11% in nominal terms (3% real terms) for rural households and 6% nominal (-1% real) for urban households. Poverty and hardcore poverty both rose.

The provision of consumption data broken down by rural and urban areas prompted me to look at longer term trends through that lens. That analysis shows that real consumption has fallen even more steeply (down 34%) in urban areas than rural areas (down 23%) between 2015/6 and 2022. Only the top 20% of Kenyans were consuming more than KES 16,903 ($130) per month in urban areas or KES 7,360 ($57) in rural ones in 2022.

This stark reality ought to be front page news. It ought to foreground all of our conversations about development, whether we’re talking about technology, energy, jobs, finance, or women’s economic empowerment. The reality is that many Kenyans are stagnating at very low levels of economic well-being. We’re witnessing the dream of a growing middle class fading away as well being particularly among the slightly better off and among urban workers erodes. In that context, where does real, poverty reducing growth come from?

There is so much more I could say about this, but why don’t you chime in. Let us know what this means to you in the comments.

References

• 2015/6 Kenya Integrated Household Expenditure and Budget Survey – Basic well-being report: https://statistics.knbs.or.ke/nada/index.php/catalog/13/download/60

• 2019 Kenya Continuous Household Survey https://www.knbs.or.ke/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/The-Kenya-Poverty-Report-2019.pdf

• 2020 Kenya Continuous Household Survey file:///C:/Users/julie/Downloads/Poverty%20in%20Kenya%20-%202020%20Report%2007062023%20(1).pdf

• 2021 Kenya Continuous Household Survey https://statistics.knbs.or.ke/nada/index.php/catalog/123/related-materials

• 2022 Kenya Continuous Household Survey https://knbs.or.ke/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/The-Kenya-Poverty-Report-2022.pdf

The contrasting cases of Brazil’s focused, intentional, and successful DPI, and Kenya’s high-risk DPI journey raise important questions about the conditions under which governments can be successful facilitators of these kinds of systems in ways that generate citizen and user value. Certainly, proponents of DPI have long acknowledged the risks such systems entail (for example, here, here, and here). However, the approach to mitigation has thus far been focused on identifying soft sets of vague principles or technical safeguards recommended for countries to self-impose to limit expected harms and data misuse. While helpful conversations, such approaches seem to take for granted that all government facilitators are both committed to delivering high quality systems that maximize public value and that accountability environments are sufficient to manage risk by ensuring these types of principles and safeguards are implemented seriously. It was enlightening to consider Brazil’s selective pursuit of DPI to fit its needs—focusing on payments and open banking—alongside Kenya’s apparent interest in adopting the “package” of DPI pillars (digital ID, payments, and data exchange) regardless of where there is a strong need and opportunity to deliver value. That raises questions about the scope of DPI and the merits of pitching it as a package with essential elements relevant regardless of context.

As I reflect on the presentations and conversations at the 2024 RFF, I recognize four themes for deeper research and conversation needed to move us towards responsible DPI. Many of these themes rhyme with longstanding conversations and debates from financial inclusion, inviting us to remember all that we’ve already learned, even as we move into this new era.

Theme 1: Centering outcomes over methods and tools.

Over many decades, financial inclusion practitioners have been taught the hard lesson that there is no technical silver bullet for financial inclusion, and more importantly, financial health. The sector moved from a focus on microloans to bank accounts and savings, to mobile and digital payments, to digital credit and e-commerce in waves only to learn in each successive wave that user financial needs must take precedent over any kind of product. We learned over and over again that leading with the favored tool of the era was a recipe for short sightedness, wasted resources, and costly mistakes that sometimes harmed users.

One of the most important success factors of Brazil’s Pix project is the Central Bank’s insistence on user centricity. They pursued this project to deliver low cost, ubiquitous payments to all Brazilians and organized themselves to deliver value from day one. Before the technical design of the product, they conducted detailed user research including payment diaries to understand user behaviors and pain points. They analyzed other payment channels to understand their value proposition better. This all fed into Pix’s technical design, but it didn’t stop there. The team relentlessly engages with its members who offer Pix through their channels, with users of the system, and with data on usage and challenges to constantly iterate to address emergent challenges, shortcomings, and risks. For the Central Bank, DPI is not the goal; the goals are consumer value and financial health.

Pushing for speed in DPI adoption and advancing DPI as a package of pillars of interventions that appear to be context-blind can jeopardize this kind of attention to outcomes. I worry that initiatives explicitly encouraging speed and scale—like “50 in 5” create incentives to prioritize the adoption of the “DPI package” over user value. I fear they create accountabilities to the tool and to the international community rather than to citizens and their outcomes. Where risks are substantial, might slow, thoughtful policy be more responsible than “moving fast and breaking things”?

Theme 2: The urgent need to deepen understanding.

A second theme – again with echoes from financial inclusion experience – is the urgent need to deepen our understanding of DPI as a sector. In financial inclusion, to understand the value of digital payments, we needed to understand the landscape of informal finance and remittances that preceded it. It was this expansive view that led to value adding innovations. An important step in deepening our understanding of DPI is broadening our scope for what kinds of initiatives fall within the landscape of interventions we care about. Definitional debates about what constitutes DPI are important, but narrowing the frame of what “counts” as worthy of our attention is risky. It may lead us to look at only those cases that fit our normative ideals, and leave out those that fall short. It can exclude non-DPI government-led digitalization experiences that offer rich lessons about conditions required for states to build citizen/user centric digital infrastructure and the fuller nature of emergent risk. I would argue that we need to broaden our analytical view to include state-led digitalization of all sorts to deepen our understanding of what delivers success and value. Within that wider landscape, we can identify DPI is a subset to recognize what truly sets it apart in theory, practice, and utility.

It also means expanding the set of case studies for our consideration and reflection beyond the few big wins. Our understanding of all of these cases could be enriched by rigorous research that seriously interrogate processes, value, and citizen outcomes quantitatively and qualitatively. Systemically considering cases based on the same criteria could be enormously useful in guiding where resources should be focused in ways that will really matter for the outcomes we care about.

And, we need to take an expansive, long-term view on these impacts, including not just uptake, usage, and costs of proximate usage, but also general equilibrium effects. What do DPIs lead to in terms of competition? Are they making it easier or more difficult for smaller businesses to thrive? Where they are the foundation for new systems of taxation and credit, what are the distributional effects of these new systems?

Theme 3: Making wise choices about where and how to support governments.

Nanjira Sambuli and I presented our hypothesis that high-value DPI is a function of two local political conditions: states themselves being fully committed to high value implementation and a strong accountability environment holding them accountable to delivering value and managing user risks. If true beyond our admittedly small set of current cases, this means that the international community of promotors and funders should think quite carefully about which contexts are truly ready to implement responsible DPI.

In my view, this may be one of the most important ways to advance responsibility in DPI. DPI – even under the best of circumstances – entrusts new power to states. How will that power be used in the short and long term? I do not think we fully know. We know in some places, digitalization has enabled increased surveillance and interference with the lives of those out of favor with government. But that is not the only risk. There is also the risk of interruption to critical service delivery, intentionally and unintentionally. There are risks of data breaches where governments are not able or willing to properly safeguard data. DPI can make citizens beholden to and dependent on infrastructure that can be disabled during periods of unrest or protest against the state. And I imagine there are a range of other risks from this power transference that we cannot yet fully know.

Theme 4: Mechanisms for strengthening genuine accountability.

Linked to Theme 3, we need to be strengthening meaningful mechanisms for accountability for both states and for the community of DPI promotors. Where donors are funding, supporting, or even legitimating this new endowment of power to states, existing political processes for negotiating state power can be circumvented. States don’t need to make the same case to their citizens about the value and safeguards for these initiatives when they are not subject to ordinary legislative and budgeting processes. The choice of international actors to thus empower states over their citizens in this way is an incredibly risky endeavor that calls for heightened levels of responsibility. In my view, that should entail very careful consideration of where to intervene, high levels of transparency locally and internationally to the nature and levels of donor support given to government initiatives, and an insistence on supporting initiatives only when they adhere to local laws and are subject to appropriate legislative and political processes. What incentives and accountability measures should be in place to ensure responsibility among DPI promotors?

Some international donors—like the World Bank—put in place transparency and safeguarding measures in the past, including conducting and publishing social and environmental risk assessments. Many of these processes grew out of harms generated from World Bank-funded physical infrastructure interventions. But, as Nanjira and I point out, such risk assessments applied in the context of digital infrastructure are mismatched to the nature of real harms emerging in practice. Our old tools are in desperate need of revamping to account for new landscapes of risks that we do not yet fully understand.

State actors also respond to incentives and accountability structures. In Brazil, it was the Central Bank’s incentive to make digital payments ubiquitous and low cost that led to the rise of Pix. The Pix team is accountable to the Central Bank for delivering on this mandate, and public data on usage –and also internal data on fraud and other problems—keeps them accountable for what they are achieving and where they fall short. But this kind of accountability—something that goes beyond having the right technical safeguards in place—is not present everywhere. What should it look like? At a minimum, I would suggest it entails the capture and publishing of regular public data on DPI performance and user value to be used for learning, but also as a tool civil society can use to hold implementing agencies to account, where political conditions allow. Conversations around metrics –what they should capture and how—have already begun (for example Vora and Dolan, 2022), but more work is needed here to practically implement feedback loops and start establishing exemplary cases.

A final thought

Emergent DPI successes, like Pix, are indeed very exciting for what they can accomplish for inclusion in a very short time. At the same time, the DPI space is new territory, where the risks – particularly because of the necessity of state involvement—are enormous and uncharted. After articulating these views at the RFF, a number of attendees thanked me for raising these concerns and commented that such work was “brave.” It should not require courage to beg for caution around this new space. Truly pursuing responsibility in this new domain demands an openness to evidence, debate, and independent inquiry. While we are in new territory, we can also be guided by the wisdom of decades of pursuing responsibility in financial inclusion. That wisdom calls for us to be guided by outcomes, broaden our view of the landscape, and to be guided by deep, rich, and rigorous evidence.

Recommended reading:

· Gelb, Alan H., and Anna Diofasi Metz. Identification Revolution: Can Digital ID Be Harnessed for Development? Washington D.C: Center for Global Development, 2018. https://www.cgdev.org/publication/identification-revolution-can-digital-id-be-harnessed-development

· Solon, Olivia. “How Surveillance Gets Weaponized Against Critics in Uganda.” Bloomberg.Com, June 4, 2024. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-06-04/uganda-yoweri-museveni-s-critics-targeted-via-biometric-id-system.

· Vekatesan, Jayshree, Edoardo Totolo, and Loretta Michaels. “Responsible DPI for Improving Outcomes Beyond Inclusion.” Washington, D.C.: Center for Financial Inclusion, July 2024. https://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Responsible-DPI-for-Improving-Outcomes-Beyond-Inclusion_jul1.pdf

· Zollmann, Julie, Nanjira Sambuli, Catherine Wanjala. “Citizen Experiences with DPI: Kenya’s Digital ID Transition.” Washington, D.C.: Center for Financial Inclusion, August 2024. https://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/citizen-experiences-with-dpi-kenyas-digital-id-transition/

Ekko Insights is a development research consultancy. We specialize in leading in depth research with ordinary people to unpack their experiences around important and shifting development topics. We listen deeply and do our best to echo key ideas and insights out into the development conversation. This substack, The Development Ekko, is one way we’re working to do that. We will use this as a space to share what we’re thinking about and what we’re hearing in the course of our work. Join us in the conversation by reading our pieces and sharing your ideas in the comments.

From our seat here in Nairobi, Kenya, the development outlook is gloomy. As a future post will outline, poverty is rising. People are struggling. And often it feels the international development agenda is out of step with the realities we’re seeing kwa ground. Our ambition as Ekko Insights is to know better with deep engagement and rigorous research. We’re hopeful that knowing better, together, means doing better for improving lives and livelihoods in this messy, complex, ever changing world.