Labor is Very Cheap in Kenya

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One of the most significant mental adjustments I’ve had to make in living in Nairobi is internalizing how incredibly cheap labor is (1). There aren’t lots of high-paying job opportunities here, so tons of people are willing to do low-skilled labor for very low costs (2). Here are some of the ways that the cheapness of labor manifests itself:

  • A 15-minute Uber costs ~$2-3

  • Food delivery is cheap (~50 cents for an UberEats order)

  • Most apartments have maids / house managers who come in frequently to clean and do laundry. In my apartment we pay $100 per month for someone who came three times a week (this was excessive so we recently asked her to switch to twice a week, but are paying the same amount. We also had to explicitly ask her to stop cleaning the guest bathroom every week because we never have guests)

  • My friend who works at a e-commerce company said that when they need new deliverymen (3) they don’t put out formal applications because “guys just materialize”. If you need an extra guy you just let your current deliverymen know, and one (or all) of them will have friends who are happy to take that spot (4)

  • Many many buildings have multiple security guards who apparently do very little. Security is more of an issue here than in the US, but I feel like at very least a lot of these offices/apartments/houses would have only one security guard if guards were more expensive

  • When staying in a hotel in Amboseli National Park, people cut the grass lawn by hand with a machete instead of with a lawn mower. It must take them at least 5 times as long to cut by hand as it would with a machine, but because the grass cutters are probably being paid less than $10 per day, management is fine if it takes them 3 days to cut all the grass by hand to avoid disturbing guests with a loud lawnmower

  • People work long hours to make enough money. General working hours are 45-52 hours w week according to Kenyan labor law. Today a worker at a food mentioned how “we have to work so hard here - we can’t work just 8 hour days like people do in the US”

In the US I was always averse to paying for things like food delivery, Ubers, or cleaning. I felt that I was being lazy and wasteful by paying to avoid getting my food myself, biking to wherever I was going, or cleaning my own stuff. When I moved here I told my flatmate that I would probably do all the dishes, because I like doing them and I often did them for my family, housemates in college, and roommates in Chicago. But I’ve found that my enjoyment in doing the dishes has decreased dramatically now that I know that I always know our maid is coming sometime in the next few days.

1. The median income in Kenya is only ~$1,000 per year (compared to $30,000 in the US)

2. People can also survive on low incomes, because things are cheap (and the main reason things are cheap is because labor is cheap)

3. I have yet to see a deliverywoman, and have had only 1 woman Uber driver in 2 months

4. Another factor allowing this to happen is the low degree of formal employment (5 times as many people in informal employment as in formal). Since most of these delivery people didn’t have formal jobs, switching costs are very low. It’s easy for them to just start doing deliveries tomorrow, instead of having to decide if they’re burning bridges by leaving, giving 2 weeks notice, etc.