10 Proven Ways to Make Money Fast in Kenya

Making money is not a walk in the park. It requires time, tact, and effort, and the three combined can lead to fruition. We will discuss 10 proven ways to make money fast in Kenya. We hope that you will find something that you can experiment with and see if it is suitable in your quest to make more money for your needs. 

Making money is a need and a desire for everyone. It's so easy to blow your money on wants that typically will bring short-lived gratification. Still, if you're looking for a way to bolster your current income or prepare for the lean times ahead, this article will give you some valuable pointers on getting started quickly.

The options below can be pursued as full-time commitments or side hustles if you already are in full-time employment or add to your hustles if you are so motivated. 

1. Copywriting

Copywriting: You don't have to be an expert writer to earn money from writing. Many companies will pay people to write articles on various topics for their websites. As long as what you write is interesting and well-researched, you can earn a decent amount of money per article, even if it isn't grammatically perfect. 

There are hundreds of local and international websites always hiring new writers - you could pitch to them directly or create an account at freelance websites such as Upwork and get linked to companies looking for writers. The upside of working through freelance websites is that your income is guaranteed - a client cannot shortchange you as opposed to dealing directly with them. However, you will have to part with a percentage of your earnings to enjoy the service.

2. Flipping Clothes

Flipping Clothes - Kenya's economy has been growing over the past couple of years, and with that growth has come more potential customers. If you have clothes lying around that will fit Kenyans, why not sell them on Facebook or at a flea market? Depending on how appealing it is to the target customer, you can make a significant amount. 

A more sustainable way of flipping clothes away from selling your own used clothes is buying used, cheap clothes and selling them to customers at the highest possible price. This is just like the Mutumba business model - which has produced tens of millionaires. 

3. Delivery Services

Kenyans, especially since the pandemic, have become very receptive to the idea of allowing others, that they have never met, to run errands for them. The business of deliveries has thus become very popular over the last two years. 

Using various means including door-to-door marketing or on social media, or setting up a brick-and-mortar company, you offer to deliver items at a fee. You are responsible for the logistics of getting the thing to its destination, but it can be almost anything. 

The possibilities are endless. You can help people move things around town or even across the country without paying for shipping or gas. You're helping others out and making money at the same time.

4. Cleaning Services

Office space in Nairobi has expanded significantly over the last decade which birthed the need for professional cleaning services when the idea of hiring a permanent cleaner became less viable. 

Domestic cleaning services have always been in demand with mama fuas running the show on a much, much smaller scale in low-income neighbourhoods. Given the option of a more professional, structured cleaning service provider, many will buy in - especially in middle-income homes that have more specialised needs. 

Being a service that thrives in high trust, you have to spend some time brand building, possibly choosing a niche area or niche service, and start onboarding customers who will be your ambassadors. Setting up a formal cleaning company is the best way as opposed to advertising an individual. 

Read Also: Feliz Cleaners: The Success Story of Maureen King’ori

5. Taxi Services

Offering taxi services in Kenya is a great way to make money fast. Many taxi companies need drivers, and they're willing to pay well for drivers who can accept credit cards. You can also drive if you own a vehicle and sign up for taxi-hailing apps such as Uber and Bolt. 

Note that the taxi business is complex with the rising fuel prices, the need to service car loans with fidelity, and some taxi apps may have low margins that may not meet your needs.
Nevertheless, when well run, a taxi business can guarantee a daily income with a very low barrier to entry which makes it one of the easiest ways to make money fast in Kenya. 

6. Car Renting Services

If you own a car, you have the option of offering taxi services as above or just renting it out to a company or car hire services company and earning an income without needing to be directly involved in the day-to-day. 

If you have just one car, it might not be a great idea to do the hiring yourself since the car hire business has its risks that you do not want to shoulder alone. Giving your car out to an established company to hire it out for you is the more preferable option. 

If you are lucky, you could hire out your car to a company that is in need of extra vehicles such as for ferrying executives, clients, or day-to-day field visits and does not want to buy a vehicle of its own.

This option may become more popular as the cost of operating vehicles increases making the option of simply commuting more attractive and less of an inconvenience. 

7. Selling Printables

Printables are documents that can be printed for use by consumers. As people increasingly need help planning, organising, scheduling, etc, they are increasingly turning online to find bespoke printables that can help them do these tasks with ease. 

Printables include downloadable day planners, stickers, journals, art prints, and so on. With the relative ease of making them, selling printables can be a very lucrative business. It is fast becoming a popular digital product. 

Printables are especially a good way to make passive income from your creativity. With a very low marketing budget, you can easily make high profits. 

Some opt to sell both printables online and actual hard copies at a store or delivery to further increase the income potential. 

8. Blogging

More and more people in Kenya are turning to blogs to make money. Because of this, several companies are willing to pay bloggers and social media influencers a fee to publicise their products or services. Here is how you can get started:

Step 1: Find a company that is looking for bloggers

Step 2: Contact the company

Step 3: Post about the company's product or service on your blog and social media accounts

Step 4: Wait for the money to start coming in.

9. Social Media Management

It is a no-brainer today that any company worth its salt has to have a strong social media presence. This is true for a small business dealing with second-hand clothes to a big architectural firm. 

But the major challenge is the scarcity of high-quality social media management talent. Companies are continually looking for social media managers who can create content that resonates with their target audiences and can influence them to take action favourable to the company. 

If you have had some good experience managing social media accounts, you could fashion yourself as a consultant, offer packages for different business types, hire a team to work under you and take multiple projects across multiple clients or simply hire yourself out as a freelance if you do not think it is time to structure this into a business. 

10. Selling e-Books

The online marketplace is probably the biggest gift to 21st-century youthful job seekers. As employment prospects shrink and traditional incomes increasingly fail to support expenses, seeking alternative revenue streams online is now a default. 

It is well documented how Amazon brought traditional bookstores to bankruptcy when the model of selling books online took off. Well, this graduated to people not needing to buy physical books necessarily - birthing the eBooks market. 

If you are a gifted fiction writer, you can create a manual, ‘How-to’ series, a handbook for a certain craft, and literally anything in the realm of eBooks, you can get a ready market on Amazon and tens of other websites where readers go to purchase books.

There are tips and tricks to ensuring your book is discovered that you need to learn before your efforts can pay off. If writing comes easy to you, then this is something worth considering. You could work as a team, hire writers and handle the marketing if you see this opportunity as a worthy investment.

There is a lot of passive income to be made from digital book publishing.  

WRAPPING UP

Making money fast is never guaranteed - the only guarantee you can get is that there are some ventures that can pay off early with little investment, not-so-much technical know-how, and without much formalisation. 

Incidentally, if it is going to make you money fast, you may find the initial income can be quite lower compared to other formalised endeavours.

If you experiment first, you can gauge your own individual ability to actually make money in that specific way and figure out the possibility of scaling and how much additional income you could make if you invested more time and money.