Jasiri
Things Kenyan Daughters Were Never Properly Taught About Money
The most expensive thing you carry is not your debt. It is the financial silence that was handed to you by women who were also never taught. This ends with you.
If you are a Kenyan woman who feels behind with money, confused by investing, or ashamed about what you do not know, this edition is a direct word to you. The financial knowledge you are missing was never withheld deliberately. It was simply never passed down. This is where the silence ends, and where you begin teaching yourself the things your family could not teach you.
Think back to when you were a girl, and money came up in your home.
What happened?
In most Kenyan homes, one of two things. Either the conversation went quiet, adults exchanging a look that said “not in front of the children,” and the subject closed before it opened. Or money appeared as a crisis, as a shortage, as the reason something could not happen, a school trip, a pair of shoes, the thing you wanted for Christmas that arrived smaller or not at all. Money was a problem to be managed in private. Not a subject to be understood. Not a skill to be taught.
And if you were a daughter, specifically a daughter, there was often a third thing sitting underneath the silence. The unspoken understanding that your relationship with money was always going to be mediated by someone else. A father. A husband. A brother who was somehow given more of the financial conversations than you were, more of the responsibility, more of the assumption that he would one day need to know how to handle it.
I am not writing this to blame anyone. Your mother did the best she could with what she was given, and her mother before her did the same. The silence was not cruelty. It was inheritance. They passed down what was passed to them, which was, in matters of money, very little.
Your mother was not taught either. She did the best she could with a silence that was handed to her.
But here is what I need you to understand, my sister, and I need you to really let it settle. The fact that you were not taught is not your fault. The shame you feel when you do not know how to invest, when you realise your salary has been the same for three years and you never once asked for more, when you look at your savings and feel the quiet panic of knowing it is not enough and not knowing how to make it more, that shame does not belong to you. It belongs to a system that decided daughters did not need to know.
You are reading this now. Which means the silence ends here. With you. In this generation. Let us start with what was left out.
Four Lessons Your Home Could Not Give You
These are not complicated financial concepts. They are basic truths that most Kenyan daughters were never told. Each one, once you understand it, changes how you handle money for the rest of your life.
One. You Were Taught to Be Grateful. You Were Not Taught to Ask for More.
Do you remember the first time you were offered a salary? What did you do? Most women nod, say thank you, and sign. Because from childhood we were taught that having a job is a blessing, that wanting more is greed, that asking for more is ingratitude, and that a woman who negotiates is somehow difficult or proud.
And so we sit in offices, doing the same work as men who earn thirty percent more, not because the men are better, not because the employers are necessarily unfair, but because the men were taught to ask and we were taught to accept. The men had fathers or uncles or older brothers who sat them down at some point and said “when they offer you a number, you say you were expecting more.” Nobody sat most of us down for that conversation.
Here is what that silence has cost you. Take whatever you earn right now. If you had negotiated even a ten percent increase when you took your current job, and that increase had compounded over every year you have been there, the number you have left on the table is not small. For a woman earning KSh 50,000 a month, ten percent is KSh 5,000. Over three years, that is KSh 180,000. Money that was always available. Money that nobody told you to ask for.
Negotiating your salary is not aggression. It is not ingratitude. It is literacy. It is the skill of knowing your value and stating it clearly. Every employer expects some negotiation. Many are quietly relieved when a woman does it, because it tells them she knows what she is worth. And the ones who are not relieved, the ones who think a woman who negotiates is difficult, those employers have told you something important about how they will treat you for the rest of your time there.
You are allowed to ask for more. You were just never told that. Now you have been told.
Two. You Were Taught to Save. You Were Not Taught to Invest.
The chama. Every Kenyan woman knows the chama. A group of women who gather, contribute money, and take turns receiving the full amount. It is beautiful, it builds community, it creates a forced savings discipline that banks have never managed to replicate. If the chama is part of your life, please do not stop. It is real, and it works.
But here is what the chama is not. It is not investing. It is organised saving. And there is a difference that nobody explained, a difference that will determine how much money you have at sixty years old in a way that almost nothing else will.
Saving is keeping money. Investing is growing money. When you keep your KSh 5,000 in a regular bank savings account, the bank pays you approximately three percent interest per year. But inflation in Kenya, the rate at which prices rise, has averaged six to nine percent in recent years. This means that your “safe” money in the bank is actually losing its value every single year. The KSh 5,000 you saved today will buy less in three years than it buys today, even though the number in your account looks the same or slightly bigger.
Investing means putting your money somewhere it can grow faster than inflation. A money market fund, accessible through M-Pesa or through institutions like CIC, Britam, or NCBA, currently returns between nine and twelve percent per year on small amounts. That same KSh 5,000 monthly contribution, placed in a money market fund instead of a savings account, over ten years at ten percent returns approximately KSh 413,000. In a bank savings account at three percent, it grows to approximately KSh 279,000. The difference, KSh 134,000, comes from the same money, the same discipline, the same monthly KSh 5,000. Only the location changed.
Saving is surviving. Investing is building. Your mother saved because nobody taught her the second option. You have been taught.
You do not need a lot of money to invest. CIC Money Market Fund accepts from KSh 100. NCBA accepts from KSh 1,000. The barrier is not the money. The barrier was always the knowledge. Now you have the knowledge. What you do with it is your choice.
Three. You Watched Your Mother Build. You Watched Her Own Nothing.
Think about the women who raised you. Your mother, your aunties, the women at church, the women in the neighbourhood. Think about how much they built. The homes kept clean, the children raised, the businesses run from the kitchen, the chamas maintained, the families held together in ways that would have fallen apart without them. Think about the decades of work, the uncountable hours, the energy spent on everyone and everything around them.
Now think about what was in their names.
In so many Kenyan homes, the answer is very little. The land is in the husband’s name. The house is in the husband’s name. The car is in the husband’s name. The savings account that was built by two salaries is accessible to one. A woman can spend thirty years building a life that belongs, legally and practically, to someone else. And when that someone else dies, or leaves, or decides the arrangement should change, she discovers that the life she built is not fully hers.
This is not ancient history. This is happening right now in homes you know.
My sister, put your name on things. Whatever you can. A bank account in your name only. A piece of land, even a small plot, in your name. A pension in your name, funded by you, growing for you. It does not mean you do not trust your partner. It means you understand that trust is not a financial strategy, and that a woman who owns something is a woman who is never fully without options.
Check your NSSF statement this week. Many Kenyan women have had contributions deducted from their salary for years and have never once looked at the account. Log in to the NSSF portal, find your member number on your payslip, and see what is there. Some women discover KSh 80,000, KSh 100,000, sitting in an account with their name on it that they did not know existed in any real sense. It is yours. Know it is there. Know how to access it one day. It is a beginning.
Four. You Were Taught That Money Is for the Family. You Were Not Taught to Pay Yourself First.
The salary arrives. In the first few hours or days, it leaves again. The rent. The school fees. The food. The KPLC bill that arrived at exactly the wrong time. The money you send home because your mother’s water pump broke, or your younger sibling needs something, or your cousin is in hospital and the family is looking at you because you are the one with a job. By the time you have been responsible for everyone who needed you, there is very little left, sometimes nothing, for the person who earned it.
And you have been taught, in ways both direct and invisible, that this is correct. That a good woman, a responsible daughter, a reliable member of the family provides before she keeps. That wanting to keep something for yourself is selfishness. That your needs are the last item on the list, the ones addressed if and when everything else has been addressed first.
I want to say something clearly, and I want you to hear it all the way through. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and you cannot build from an empty account. Paying yourself first is not selfishness. It is the financial version of putting your own oxygen mask on before helping others. A version of you that has nothing saved, nothing invested, nothing building, is a version of you that will one day need the family to carry her. The most loving, generous thing you can do for the people who depend on you is to build yourself into someone who will not need to depend on them.
Paying yourself first means this: the moment your salary arrives, before rent, before school fees, before the request that will come later that day, move an amount to your savings or investment account. Even KSh 1,000. Even KSh 500. It comes out first, before you know it is there to spend, before someone needs it. The rest you manage with the same discipline you have always managed everything. You are better at making do than you give yourself credit for. Trust that skill. And give the part that is building your future the one thing it has never had from you: first priority.
The silence ends with you. Which means the knowledge you build now is the inheritance your daughters and nieces and the young women watching you will receive. Here are three things to start this week, not because they are complicated, but because they are the beginning of a different financial story for every woman who comes after you.
- Check your NSSF statement. Go to the NSSF online portal or visit a branch. Find your member number on any recent payslip. See exactly how much has been contributed in your name. Many women discover significant amounts they were not actively tracking. This money is yours. Know it.
- Open one investment account. CIC Money Market Fund, NCBA, Britam, or Sanlam all allow you to start with small amounts. Research one this week. The goal is not to invest a large sum immediately. The goal is to open the account, make one small deposit, and watch what it does. Understanding comes from doing, not from planning to do.
- Set your pay-yourself-first amount. Decide today, not when you next get paid, what amount leaves your account the moment your salary arrives. Write it down. Make it a standing order if possible. KSh 500, KSh 1,000, whatever the number is, the habit is worth more than the amount at the beginning.
You were not given these lessons. You are giving them to yourself now. That is not a small thing. That is everything.
This week, check your NSSF statement and find out exactly how much is sitting in your pension account right now. Then, if you have a bank savings account, find out what interest rate it is paying you. Compare that number to the current rate offered by one money market fund of your choice. Write down the difference. That difference, multiplied by your savings over ten years, is the cost of the lesson you were never taught. You have just taught yourself.
This is the most expensive myth in Kenya’s financial landscape, and it is the one that keeps ordinary women out of the only systems that actually grow money over time.
The truth is the exact opposite of what the myth says. Investing is most powerful precisely when you start small and early. A woman who invests KSh 1,000 per month from age twenty-five will have more at sixty than a woman who invests KSh 5,000 per month from age forty. Not because of the amounts. Because of the time. Compound interest rewards the woman who starts, not the woman who waits until she can afford to start properly.
There is no version of “properly.” There is only now and later. And every month of later is a month of growth you will not get back. Start with what you have. Start with the KSh 500 you were not planning to invest. The habit you build with that KSh 500 is the same habit you will use when you have KSh 5,000. The habit is the thing. The amount grows with time. Begin.
Same time next Saturday. Same honesty. More building.
The silence ends with you. Everything you learn from this point becomes the inheritance you leave. That is not a small thing, my sister. That is everything.
Know a woman who was also never taught?
Forward this edition to her. The financial education we were all denied does not have to stay that way. Share it with the women in your life and let the knowledge travel the way the silence did, from woman to woman, generation to generation. Only this time, it builds.
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