This Kenyan small business platform is built for the hustle

When business at Kivaya Josiah’s three cybercafes in Kenya dried up during the pandemic, he needed to hustle for new ways to make a living.

Scrambling for ideas, he logged onto MESH, a social media network built to empower young Kenyans in the informal economy with business, financial and digital skills and valuable connection. He quickly connected with other “MESHers” and became hooked on its TikTok-style videos packed with business tips and finance advice.

Thanks to the part-time gigs and contacts he found through MESH, Josiah now has three new ventures. When he’s not distributing comic books or working as a MESH community host, he’s developing an agribusiness at his farm at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro.

“The situation in Kenya is really very, very difficult,” he says. “You have to diversify.”

Josiah, 34 and father to a 2-year-old daughter, is one of millions of tech-savvy young Kenyans juggling multiple gigs. According to the Shujaaz Inc. social venture network, MESH’s first investor, around 95% of the one million young Kenyans who enter the job market each year end up working in the informal economy. This growing frustration with the lack of job prospects contributed to the Gen Z demonstrations that rocked the country earlier this year.

Acting as a LinkedIn for the informal sector, MESH aims to connect young people to one another, to capital, to gig opportunities and to easily digestible business content. MESH bridges the gap between an education system that prepares students solely for formal jobs and the real world of informal micro businesses.

“Often young people are told a very unhelpful story — you should get a degree and there’s a wonderful job waiting for you — but that’s not the case,” says Anuj Tanna, CEO and co-founder of MESH. “They’ve not been prepared at all for how to build a business in the informal economy. They’ve been prepared for jobs that don’t exist.”

Some 400,000 MESHers, who range from hairdressers to online marketers to shop owners to DJs, now sign in to the platform each month to share business advice, advertise their products and watch videos on topics ranging from digital literacy to AI content creation.

Besides opening the doors for MESHers to employ one another, the platform allows major companies to tap into Kenya’s vast informal sector. By offering gigs through the platform, one major fast-moving consumer goods company has expanded its local distribution network and added thousands of new retail outlets.

Since 2022, MESH has teamed up with Mastercard Strive, a global initiative to support small businesses where they are — online and in real time, with innovative digital and data-first solutions tailored to their needs. With Strive, launched by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth and Caribou Digital, MESH is now looking for new ways to scale its platform and help its entrepreneurs grow their ventures.

“Digital transformation is enabling these entrepreneurs to overcome structural barriers and accrue social capital in ways not possible before,” says Payal Dalal, executive vice president for global programs at the Center for Inclusive Growth.

“When we combine that with access to opportunities through private-sector partnerships, including mobile network operators, fintechs, banks and consumer goods companies,” she says, “we empower entrepreneurs to reach their potential, build stronger networks and breathe new life into economies.”

Giving business owners such as Josiah better access to the affordable financing needed to expand is the next step for MESH, which is devising creative ways to de-risk extending credit to its users and open doors to new lenders as part of a second phase of its partnership with Mastercard Strive.

Because young entrepreneurs often have no traditionally verifiable credit history, this next phase will develop, pilot and launch a credit product on the MESH platform in collaboration with innovative credit providers, with an emphasis on financial education and responsible borrowing. By measuring how many videos MESHers digest on topics likes loan repayment plans and monitoring how they network online, lenders could better understand who is most dedicated to growing their business and would most likely repay debt, Tanna explains.

“A lack of affordable access to capital and credit is a massive barrier,” he says, “but we also know that credit alone is not enough. The way to make credit productive is to have the knowledge of how to build and grow your business.”

The second phase is expected to reach up to 5,000 entrepreneurs.

So far, some 60% of MESHers have seen their incomes increase since they started using the platform, and that’s already translating into significant changes for entrepreneurs in Kenya, where many earn just a few dollars a day.

When young people earn more, they’re more likely to use digital financial services, employ their peers and build up a financial cushion, Tanna says.

For Josiah, MESH has helped him build his social media presence and link up with fellow farmers who have given him the advice he needed to improve his crops of melons, bananas and butternut squash. He’s even found time to complete an online course at Brigham Young University. But most importantly, his flexible schedule allows him to spend more time with his daughter as she grows.

“MESH has become a new family to me,” he says. “We help each other with personal challenges and share knowledge.”