Microsoft's Africa Development Centre promised USD 100m (about KES 13bn) and 500 engineers. Here's what it built in Nairobi and Lagos, and why it's closing.

Microsoft is offering about 60,000 of its employees the chance to leave the company with a severance package, if they want to. It announced the Voluntary Exit Offer on Monday 26th October 2026 in a memo from Amy Coleman, its chief people officer, and eligible staff were to get the details of their own offer by email within hours.

The offer is open to employees in Canada, India, the United Kingdom and the United States, and only in teams whose leaders have chosen to take part. Kenya isn’t on that list, so if you work for Microsoft here, this offer isn’t for you.

What the offer is

It works like a buyout, although Microsoft has said it isn’t positioning the offer as one. Microsoft puts a package on the table, and each eligible employee decides whether to take it. In a layoff, it’s the company that picks who goes. Coleman’s memo says the offer gives people “who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support”, and gives the teams taking part “another way to adapt their workforce to changing needs”.

The memo itself only promises “financial support and career planning resources”. Microsoft has said more about the terms: the package is equal to its standard severance. That means base pay worked out from your level and how long you’ve been at Microsoft, shares you’ve already been granted continuing to vest (that is, become yours), health cover for a fixed period, and help finding your next job. There’s no minimum age or length of service, and Microsoft says performance isn’t a factor. Staff have until the first week of December to decide, and those who accept leave at the end of the year.

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Eligibility runs up to level 70 on Microsoft’s internal grading scale. That takes in general managers and some people with vice president titles, but not corporate vice presidents, who sit higher up. About 60,000 people is more than a quarter of Microsoft’s workforce, which stood at 223,000 full-time employees on 30th June 2026, before the July job cuts. Microsoft says some groups working on data centres, sales and marketing are excluded, along with some engineering groups and corporate functions. It hasn’t published a full list.

Microsoft’s second exit offer this year

In April, Microsoft announced a Voluntary Retirement Program, the first in its history. It was open only to US employees at senior director level and below whose age plus years at Microsoft added up to 70 or more, and Microsoft said about 7% of its US staff qualified. It also built roughly USD 900 million (about KES 117 billion) in one-time costs for the programme into its forecast for the April to June quarter. Its next quarterly results come on Wednesday 28th October.

When Microsoft cut around 4,800 roles in July, Coleman wrote that “more than 30% of eligible employees” had taken the retirement offer, and that Microsoft would “continue exploring similar approaches in the future”. This is that approach, widened to three more countries and without the age and service rules.

Microsoft expects a much smaller share of people to take this one, since the retirement offer went to long-serving staff who were more likely to accept. It also says the offer isn’t a sign it needs fewer employees, and that it isn’t replacing layoffs, which remain part of how it manages its workforce depending on business conditions. So if you’re eligible, you’re choosing between a known severance package now and staying on with no promise that any future cuts will skip you.

What it means for Microsoft in Kenya

Two weeks ago, on 12th October, Microsoft told everyone at its Africa Development Centre (ADC) in Nairobi that their jobs are going. The ADC is where Kenyan engineers build parts of Microsoft’s global products. The day after that notice, we traced how it went from a USD 100 million (about KES 13 billion) promise in 2019 to closing its doors.

People may have started leaving the ADC before that. In September, a former ADC employee wrote on LinkedIn that people they’d spoken to were told to either accept a performance improvement plan, a short deadline to show better results, or take a “voluntary” exit. That came a month before this programme, which Coleman calls “new for us”.

India, on the other hand, is on the list. Microsoft has run an engineering centre there, the India Development Center, since 1998, so staff in the teams taking part in India get to decide whether to leave, on known terms. ADC staff got a notice instead. For them, the floor is what Kenya’s Employment Act sets for redundancy: a month’s notice or a month’s wages, any leave still due paid in cash, and severance of at least 15 days’ pay for every full year worked. Anything above that is up to Microsoft.