When politicians and platform executives talk about the gig economy in Africa, the language is almost always aspirational: flexibility, entrepreneurship, digital inclusion. But new data from Ipsos Strategy3’s multi-country Gig Economy Study, released in January 2026, tells a more complicated story, particularly in Kenya.
The headline number is impressive enough. Kenya’s gig economy is now valued at approximately $1.03 billion, supporting an estimated 1.55 million workers across e-commerce, ride-hailing, freelancing, remote work, and micro-tasks. At roughly 0.85% of GDP, it’s still a sliver of the national economy, but for the people inside it, the stakes are enormous.
The dependency gap
The study’s most striking finding is a simple comparison. Among ride-hailing drivers surveyed in Kenya, 53% said platform earnings are their primary source of income — not a supplement, not a side hustle, but the main thing keeping their households running. In Nigeria, that figure is just 25%. In South Africa, 30%.
That gap matters. When three-quarters of Nigerian drivers treat ride-hailing as a top-up to other work, a bad week on the app is an inconvenience. When more than half of Kenyan drivers have no fallback, a platform policy change, a fuel price spike, or an algorithmic shift in ride allocation can destabilize a family’s finances overnight.
The income distribution data reinforces this. Among Kenyan respondents, 20% reported that ride-hailing accounts for more than 75% of their total household income. Another 24% said it contributes between 51% and 75%. Nearly half of Kenya’s ride-hailing drivers, in other words, are drawing the majority of their income from a single app.
A market shaped by limited alternatives
The dependency isn’t irrational. It reflects a labour market where formal options are thin. Kenya’s workforce reached 23 million people in 2023, but job creation remains overwhelmingly informal. Of the estimated 782,300 new jobs created in 2024, around 90% were in the informal sector, according to provisional data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.
Youth unemployment runs at roughly 12%, more than double the national average of about 5.4%. The Ipsos study captured this sentiment directly. “There are no jobs, that is why I decided to join it,” one freelancer told researchers. A Nairobi-based driver put it more bluntly: “Driving is what keeps food on the table, but nowadays the fuel prices make it hard to depend on it alone.”
The gig economy didn’t create this problem. But it absorbed people the formal economy failed to employ. And in doing so, it became load-bearing infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of households.
The paradox: improved lives, fragile foundations
Here’s where the data gets genuinely interesting. Despite the dependency, gig workers in Kenya overwhelmingly report that their lives have improved. A striking 54% said their standard of living had “improved significantly” since joining the gig economy. Another 44% said it had “improved slightly.” Barely 2% reported any decline.
Drivers described being able to pay rent, clear debts, cover school fees, and move into their own housing, outcomes that are difficult to dismiss. The gig economy is delivering real material gains for people who previously had less.
But the gains rest on a narrow base. Most ride-hailing earnings flow through mobile money (primarily M-Pesa), which creates transaction histories and opens doors to micro-credit; a genuine step toward financial inclusion. Yet the underlying income remains volatile, subject to fuel costs, platform commission structures, and demand fluctuations that individual drivers cannot control.
Kenya has taken regulatory steps. The Digital Taxi (Owners, Drivers & Passengers) Regulations of 2022 capped platform commissions at 18% and mandated transparent terms around activation, deactivation, and data control. Bolt has partnered with M-Kopa to make vehicle ownership more accessible and launched the “Bundle Ya Deree” programme offering weekly fuel discounts at Shell. Electric vehicle adoption is beginning, with platforms like Bolt and Spiro leading a push toward two-wheelers and EVs that could lower operating costs.
These are meaningful interventions. But they’re incremental improvements to a system where the fundamental dynamic, workers with no alternative depending entirely on platforms they don’t control, remains unchanged.
What happens next
The Ipsos report frames the gig economy’s future around four themes: e-mobility and green transitions, financial inclusion products (micro-lending, savings, insurance), safety and regulation, and diversification into delivery and logistics. All are important. None address the core vulnerability.
The question Kenya’s gig economy now faces isn’t whether it can grow. It’s whether it can mature into something that offers its most dependent participants a degree of stability, or whether a billion-dollar market will continue to be built on the backs of workers who have nowhere else to go.
For the 53% of Kenyan drivers with no Plan B, the answer can’t come soon enough.
Data sourced from the Ipsos Strategy3 Multi-Country Gig Economy Study (2025), covering Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, with 250 survey respondents per country, supplemented by focus groups and stakeholder interviews. Additional data from the World Bank, KNBS, and GSMA.
