Inside Kenya’s Silicon Savannah: gender, work, and digital future

By Agnieszka Fal-Dutra Santos*

Kenya has been recognized as Africa’s frontrunner in digitalization. As of 2024, an estimated 40% of Kenyans were connected to the internet – and the coverage continues to grow, with 4G and 5G infrastructure quickly expanding. The government has committed to the digital transformation, contributing to it with large-scale investments and legal and policy changes, as well as digitalization of many government services.

Consequently, Kenya has become the “Silicon Savannah” – an ideal location for digital giants who have set up parts of their operations in the country, as well as start-ups and small and medium enterprises working on technology.

A digital revolution in everyday life

The digital leap occurring in Kenya is palpable. When our research team first visited the Kibera informal settlement, located in Nairobi’s suburbs, we were struck by its ubiquity: internet wires hanging from makeshift poles; street vendors selling mobile data; phone repair services and charging stations scattered around the neighbourhood.

In Kibera, it becomes clear that digitalization has penetrated even the most remote corners of neighbourhoods otherwise characterized by extreme poverty, high levels of unemployment, and challenges with access to healthcare, food, and water.

This stark contrast raises the question: Can digitalization truly help improve people’s livelihoods? Or does it risk deepening existing challenges like access to decent work?

Transforming the nature of work

For many Kenyans, the internet, platform work and the gig economy have become key ways of finding employment. The Kibera settlement is no exception. But how does finding or doing work via digital platforms change the nature of work?

The UPDATE project (see info box) seeks to answer this question. The project team has organized meetings, workshops, and discussions with various stakeholders who represent different types of work that have become mediated through digital platforms: domestic workers, agricultural workers, and tech workers.

While there are differences in how these different types of workers engage with the platforms, certain trends seem to hold across the groups.

A crisis of trust

The digital mediation of work appears to create a crisis of reliability and trust within the labour market. Nearly all the workers we spoke to have faced issues with scams and fake jobs. And even when the jobs are real, the relative lack of accountability on digital platforms sometimes enables employers to abuse workers – for example by assigning them more work than was initially agreed or by refusing to pay. This makes workers wary of the jobs they find online – although they often continue to use the digital platforms, since they have become the main means of finding work.

Trust is also an issue on the other side. Some employers feel uneasy hiring someone they only met online – especially for work in private homes. This can lead to increased surveillance – including digital surveillance – of domestic workers, in turn further fuelling the dynamics of mistrust.

Mistrust between employers and employees is not unique to digital platforms, but it appears to be amplified in the “platformized” economy. What does this mean for the nature of work and the well-being of workers? This is one of the questions the UPDATE team is still grappling with.

A gendered reality?

While digital work affects everyone, it does not affect everyone equally. Women often face added challenges. They usually have less time to look for work on platforms, as they are disproportionately burdened with care and domestic duties within the household.

Women also face certain unique challenges: They are more exposed to hate speech and threats and are sometimes targeted with sexualized messages on digital platforms. Their vulnerability is also apparent in technology-facilitated gender-based violence – such as the case of a domestic worker who showed up for a cleaning job arranged via a digital platform only to find that the client expected sexual favours from her.  

Platforms are trying to respond to some of these gendered challenges – in particular technology-facilitated gender-based violence – but their responses barely scratch the surface.

Finding solutions

The question arises: How can these new challenges created by digital platforms be effectively addressed in Kenya and beyond?

In Kenya, workers’ associations – such as the Domestic Professionals Associations of Kenya– have been working towards generating greater recognition of domestic workers and the challenges they face, including in digital contexts. Workers themselves have resorted to the use of social media – in particular WhatsApp groups – to warn each other of fake ads, provide emotional support, and share learning resources.

At the international level, the International Labour Organization has been working on developing new standards for decent labour that better reflect the new digitalalized reality.

These responses show that while digitalization brings risks, it also creates space for new forms of solidarity and collective action, bringing together new technologies with better regulatory frameworks and changes in society and people’s awareness.

Our aim is to contribute to solutions by revealing some of the challenges and highlighting ways of addressing them in Kenya. Stay tuned!

* This article was informed by the collective work and conversations within the UPDATE team, as well as interviews with UPDATE team members.

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