Asili Africa

Sometime in the second week of April, 2020, the people of Nairobi looked up and saw something they had not seen in years. Kenya was locked down. Public transport had stopped. The…

This is the story of how a kerosene burn in a village became a bond market in Nairobi.

To understand M-Pesa, you have to begin in a place that has almost nothing to do with Kenya. You have to begin in Newbury, England, in the corporate social responsibility departmen…

On the sixth of March, 2007, in a small office in Nairobi, a Kenyan telecoms company launched a product that nobody else in the world thought would work. It was called M-Pesa. It l…

In 1993, a supervisor at the Central Bank of Kenya carried a thin folder into a meeting room in Nairobi. Inside the folder were the books of a small building society in Murang'a. T…