The Job Before the Job

On Sunday, The Star described a familiar reality for many Kenyan graduates: completing education does not necessarily mark entry into a career. It can mark the beginning of months or years of applications, short contracts, informal work and repeated attempts to gain the experience employers demand.

The article matters less because every young Kenyan follows that route — they do not — than because it exposes a weakness in the usual language of employment. Someone can drive a boda boda, sell goods, take occasional construction work or help in a family enterprise and still be searching for a more stable job. Statistically, that person may be working. Economically, the transition into a dependable livelihood may still be unfinished.

This is why the question “How many Kenyans are unemployed?” is too narrow on its own. A second question is at least as important: what kind of work are people able to find, and does it provide enough income, predictability, protection and progression to build a life?

Recent Kenyan labour data show the scale of the challenge. KNBS reported in the 2026 Economic Survey that 18.1 million people were engaged in the informal sector in 2025, an increase of 4.1% from the previous year. Wage employment grew by 2.8%.

AFIDEP, writing after a June policy dialogue on youth employment, estimates that roughly 800,000 to one million young Kenyans enter the labour market each year. It says the formal economy created 78,600 jobs in 2024 and that more than 80% of employed youth earn their living in the informal economy, often without written contracts, social protection or income security.

Those figures should be read carefully. Informal work is not synonymous with failure. It includes businesses, trades and forms of self-employment that sustain households and create value across the economy. The problem is not informality by definition. It is the absence, for many workers, of reliable earnings, protection and a route to greater productivity.

Kenya therefore does not simply face a shortage of work. It faces a shortage of sufficiently secure pathways through work.

In Korogocho, the problem becomes visible much earlier. A December 2025 article on korogocho.com describes how education competes with the immediate economics of household survival. A child who sells goods, collects rubbish or takes odd jobs can make a small but meaningful contribution to family income. School offers a possible return years later; the household needs money today.

The same article describes the practical barriers around education: costs beyond tuition, overcrowding, limited public-school capacity, distance to secondary schools, transport and safety. Legally, education may be available. Economically and physically, the path can still narrow.

Korogocho should not be treated as a miniature version of all Kenya. It is a particular place with unusually concentrated disadvantages. But it makes one national mechanism easier to see: the employment story begins before labour-market statistics start counting jobseekers.

A young person who leaves school early to earn money has entered the world of work, but not necessarily through a route that expands future choices. A young person who completes secondary school or university may have more options, but can then encounter another barrier: experience.

Kenya’s policy response increasingly recognises this missing bridge. In July, the Government, UNDP and the Kenya Private Sector Alliance launched NextGen.Ke, a KSh2 billion youth employment programme designed to connect graduates with practical work experience and private-sector placements.

UNDP says the programme is expected to benefit more than 15,000 university and college graduates over three years through structured 12-month placements. The logic is straightforward: a certificate or degree does not automatically provide the workplace experience employers seek.

But the scale is also revealing. A programme reaching more than 15,000 graduates can be significant for those participants while remaining small relative to the hundreds of thousands of young people entering the labour market each year. That is not an argument against such programmes. It is an argument for judging them by what they solve — and what they cannot solve alone.

Training cannot create demand by itself. Internships cannot substitute indefinitely for permanent employment. Entrepreneurship programmes cannot turn every jobseeker into a successful business owner. The bridge between education and work ultimately depends on an economy able to generate productive opportunities at scale.

Kenya is also changing how it measures the problem. In June, KNBS launched the 2026 Integrated Labour Force Survey, a nationwide household survey intended to update labour-market evidence after major economic changes.

The survey is notable for what it intends to measure: not only employment and unemployment, but labour under-utilisation, informal employment, decent work and digital-platform employment. KNBS says it will produce national and county indicators as well as thematic publications on youth, gender and informality.

That broader lens matters. Conventional unemployment measures answer a specific statistical question. They do not automatically measure whether work is regular, whether earnings are adequate, whether hours are sufficient, whether a worker has social protection or whether a temporary activity can become a career.

The distinction is not semantic. It changes how a country understands its labour problem. If policy concentrates only on reducing unemployment, it can miss people who are already classified as working but remain economically insecure.

Job creation is one of the most durable promises in Kenyan politics because it speaks directly to households and to a very young population. But “jobs” can become a politically convenient word precisely because it is so elastic.

A temporary placement is work. A day of casual labour is work. A small informal enterprise is work. A formal salaried position is work. Yet these activities offer very different levels of income, protection, predictability and opportunity.

The better policy question is therefore not simply how many jobs a programme says it has created. It is what happens to the people who enter those jobs six months, two years and five years later.

Do wages rise? Do skills deepen? Does the worker gain bargaining power? Does a small enterprise survive? Does temporary experience become permanent employment? Does work create a route forward rather than merely another day of income?

Those are harder questions. They are also closer to what young people actually need.

Kenya’s labour market contains enormous economic energy. The informal economy is evidence of that energy, not its absence. People create work because waiting for a formal vacancy is rarely an option.

But improvisation should not become the standard by which success is measured.

The policy challenge is to make the transitions stronger: from school to skills, from skills to experience, from experience to productive work, and from work to a livelihood capable of supporting a household and a future.

That means improving education and training, but also expanding productive firms, reducing barriers to business growth, supporting workers as enterprises formalise, improving labour-market information and building forms of social protection that reflect how Kenyans actually work.

Kenya does not need every worker to follow the same path. It needs more paths that lead somewhere.

Europe often discusses African youth employment through the lenses of migration, development aid or skills programmes. Kenya shows why that framing can be too narrow.

A young population entering a labour market dominated by informal work is not simply a development challenge. It is a question of economic transformation: whether productivity, firms and institutions can grow quickly enough to turn demographic scale into expanding opportunity.

For European governments and companies, that makes the quality of partnerships important. Training programmes are useful when they connect to real demand. Investment matters when it builds local capability and durable employment. Development policy becomes less convincing when it counts participants without asking what happens after the programme ends.

The relevant question is not whether young Kenyans are willing to work. The evidence of the informal economy makes that question almost absurd. The question is whether economies and institutions can convert that willingness into productive, secure opportunity.

The most important new evidence will come from KNBS. The 2026 Integrated Labour Force Survey should provide a much richer picture of employment, under-utilisation, informality, youth and decent work at national and county level.

NextGen.Ke will also be worth following beyond launch announcements: how many placements are completed, how many participants move into sustained employment and which sectors actually absorb them.

And politically, employment will remain central as Kenya moves toward 2027. The useful test will not be the number of programmes announced or jobs claimed. It will be whether young people can see credible routes from education and effort to economic independence.