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Walk along Outering Road on any given afternoon and you will behold a spectacle now fully absorbed into Nairobi’s street culture: a matatu barrelling down the road, swaying side to side, a rapper’s face airbrushed across its flank, eyes closed, a crown of thorns rendered in gold, and beneath it, in Sheng, a proverb about hunger and patience. A riot of boys hangs off the open door, one hand on the frame, bodies dangling above the tarmac, yodelling, blowing whistles to herald their advance, chanting the crude lyrics of the songs blasting from within, audible distances away.
These are nganyas, distinguishable from other matatus by their vibrant aesthetics: neon underglow, flat-screen monitors, and high-decibel systems playing Gengetone and urban hip-hop.
Just across the road, in one of the cybercafés that line the commercial streets of Pipeline, a young man is staring at a different kind of light: a green candle, then a red one, a number ticking upwards and then downwards. He has not left his seat for hours.
Here is a microcosm of the Nairobian informal hustle. One loud, muscular, visible, tangible, that employs – in its manufacture and maintenance alone – airbrush artists, audio technicians, panel beaters, photographers, mechanics, and car-wash boys, the other quieter, conducted in cyberspace and denominated in virtual currency. It promises the same hustle with none of the mess: a smartphone open to a trading app, a Telegram channel called something like Binance Killers delivering leverage calls at three in the morning, a P2P order waiting on an M-Pesa confirmation.
Both are answers to the same question. What am I supposed to do in an economy that has made little space for young people?
Every year, somewhere between half a million and a million young people leave school and enter the labour market. The formal economy, across all sectors, produces about 50,000 to 80,000 jobs in that same period. That range is itself an admission of how little anyone knows about where Kenyan youth will end up. More than 75 per cent of the population is under 35. This dismal state of the country has persisted since the 1980s and ’90s, when structural adjustment hollowed out the public sector and the state formally exempted the earliest matatus from licensing rules rather than build the transit system it could no longer afford. Thirty-five years on, that small bureaucratic shrug has become an entire informal industry absorbing the youth that the formal economy cannot.
Crypto infrastructure has a similarly unglamorous origin story: M-Pesa, which was never designed to be a gateway into digital asset speculation, became one simply because it was already ubiquitous. Ninety per cent mobile penetration meets a currency that keeps losing value against the dollar meets a banking sector charging fees that eat into whatever little there is to save, and you get, almost inevitably, a population that ranks among the world’s most active in peer-to-peer crypto trading. While Nairobi is not uniquely credulous about Bitcoin, Nairobi’s young have correctly identified that the ordinary channels of wealth-building available to their parents’ generation – the salaried job, the pension, the bank account that quietly accrues interest – were never going to be available to them, and have gone looking for a workaround.
Stupidity or mere greed are rarely the incentives that draw a person into a skwadi, or onto a trading app, whatever the tone of the news coverage might imply. The answer is much closer to a kind of applied realism: nganya culture offers immediate cash, a peer network that functions as both employer and social world, and – this part is easy to underestimate – a form of dignity. When you work a route, you belong to something with a name and a reputation, you inherit route knowledge from older crews, you are seen, literally, in a city that otherwise renders its unemployed young invisible. Some journalists have called it “therapy on wheels“, and I don’t think that’s sentimental; a city with almost no accessible mental health infrastructure for its poor will produce its therapy wherever it can, and as it turns out, a bassline and a shared ritual of collective risk will do the job that a clinic was supposed to.
Crypto trading offers something structurally similar: agency in a place where agency is scarce. A trade is a decision you get to make about your own life, with your own money, on your own terms, at two in the morning if you like – no CV required, no gatekeeper to please. For the university student who has taught himself to read candlestick charts, or the IT graduate spending his days in a cybercafé in Pipeline chasing signals, real skill is being built, real curiosity is being exercised – there’s a kind of dignity in self-reliance and autodidacticism that the formal economy, with its credentialism and its dead ends, has failed to offer him. It would be a mistake to see only foolishness here. It would be equally a mistake to see only foolishness in the boy hanging off the open door of a bus doing sixty down Outering Road.
But the risks are not symmetrical with the rewards, and this is where both vehicles reveal that they are extensions of precarity, merely dressed in more exciting clothes. On the nganya, the danger is bodily and immediate – the reckless overtaking, the stunts performed for no particular audience, the sound systems that drown out a driver’s judgment, the extortion that route cartels have historically levied on crews too vulnerable to resist, the misogyny that renders those buses genuinely unsafe spaces for the women who ride and work in them. Daily quotas of ten to fifteen thousand shillings, owed to a vehicle owner before a single shilling is earned by the crew, turn an eighteen-hour day into something closer to indentured labour than entrepreneurship.
On the trading app, the damage is financial and, increasingly, psychiatric, and it does not stop with the trader. When a platform collapses – and Kenya has now watched several do exactly that, users logging on to find accounts that held the equivalent of months of income emptied overnight – the loss travels through a household, not just an individual: Tuition fees vanish into an AI scam; a cybercafé owner loses hundreds of thousands of his own savings before he understands what he’s been drawn into. Fraud losses linked to crypto in Kenya have climbed by the double-digit year over year, and behind each of those figures is usually a specific, ordinary person – often young, often male, often otherwise unremarkable – who is now also carrying debt from the high-interest lending app he turned to in an effort to win back the loss, a second gamble stacked on the first. Psychiatric wards report rising admissions among young men whose gambling and trading losses have tipped them into depression, and the reporting on speculative ruin in Kenya has, with grim regularity, had to include the word suicide.
It is tempting, faced with all this, to reach for a villain like the predatory Telegram channel, or the offshore clone brokerage, or the reckless matatu owner. And these villains are real. But the deeper culprit is structural, and naming it honestly means naming a kind of financial order that development economists have started calling subordinate financialization – the process by which poor countries are folded into global capital markets not through the asset-based security that wealthier economies have built for their own citizens (the mortgage, the employer-backed insurance) but through unregulated, high-risk instruments that extract far more than they protect. In economies such as Kenya’s, financial inclusion for the informally employed arrives without that cushion – raw micro-loans with interest rates that would be illegal in most of the world they were copied from. The hustler is asked to become his own investor, his own social safety net, with none of the institutions that make investing survivable elsewhere.
It follows that neither the nganya nor the trading app is, properly speaking, the problem. Each is a rational adaptation to an irrational allocation of opportunity. To ban either is to remove the adaptation while leaving the underlying deprivation untouched.
What, then, would constitute an actual alternative, rather than a further round of prohibition dressed as reform?
First, a labour market intervention: Revitalizing technical and vocational training that has been gutted over the past decade as colleges were converted into universities, producing credentials with no corresponding demand. Reversing this – funding trades, software courses, and installing renewable energy at the scale the demographic requires – addresses the root deficit rather than its downstream symptoms.
Second, regulation that is calibrated to protect. A licensing framework for digital-asset exchanges, enforceable anti-money-laundering controls, a cap on retail leverage – proposals that are already before Kenya’s regulators, modelled in part on IMF technical guidance, separating the platform’s genuine utility as an inflation hedge and a low-cost payment channel for freelance labour, from the predatory leverage products currently marketed indiscriminately to people with no cushion to absorb a loss.
Third, non-extractive capital through youth enterprise funds, micro-equity grants, cooperative lending – mechanisms that supply the same appetite for a stake in one’s own future currently being served by leverage and debt without the compounding interest that turns a bad trade into a permanent one.
And for the mganya specifically, formalize the genuine creative economy already thriving inside it. Certify the airbrush artists and audio technicians who are already running informal apprenticeships out of workshops in downtown Ngara; enforce labour protections so that a skwadi boy has some recourse against a route manager; regulate for safety without regulating away the culture, which the recent High Court ruling upholding the graffiti ban did not manage to do, prioritizing order over the livelihoods and art it was ostensibly balanced against; extend some basic version of that floor the SAPs removed – better health cover, injury compensation, minimum unemployment benefits – to the drivers, traders and other informal workers, who despite existing in a precarious state, are currently inadequately covered by dysfunctional social nets.
None of this can be quickly enacted, which is presumably why it hasn’t been done yet. There is no single dramatic gesture available, no policy conference that can fix a demographic mismatch thirty-five years in the making. But it is worth holding on to the fact that the monetized street culture and the alt coins they’re chasing spring from real skill, real appetite for risk, real hunger for a life that has been made deliberately hard to attain by decisions made in rooms these young people were never invited into.
