Why accurate, well-sourced information matters in Kenya's digital economy

On 1 September 2025, a notice moved through Kenyan WhatsApp groups and Facebook feeds carrying the National Treasury's name. Invest between Ksh10,000 and Ksh50,000, it said, and collect returns within three hours through Treasury bills, bonds and "regulated crypto ETFs." The Treasury spent part of that week telling the public it was fake — that genuine government securities run through the Central Bank on published timelines and are announced in the gazette and the My Gov paper, not in a group chat.

I've spent more than fifteen years as a software and cloud engineer building web and mobile systems in this market, and notices like that one are why Index Digital Systems exists. Too much of the information Kenyans rely on every day — rates, news, mobile money, scores — is scattered, hard to verify, and hard to trust. IDS builds and operates information platforms, so I have a commercial stake in that problem being taken seriously. I'd rather say so in the second paragraph than have you wonder.

The rails work. That was the easy part.

By the Communications Authority's latest report, covering October to December 2025, Kenya had 78.4 million active SIM subscriptions — a penetration rate of 149.5 per cent — and 51.4 million mobile money subscriptions, or 98 per cent of the population. Those are supply-side counts, and the 149.5 per cent means many people carry two or three SIMs, not that Kenya is one-and-a-half times connected. Even so, the achievement is real. Money moves here at the speed of a text message, into market towns banks never reached.

But rails carry whatever you put on them. The network that delivers a supplier payment in two seconds delivered that fake Treasury notice at the same speed, and in April 2025 it delivered CBEX — a scheme marketed as AI-powered crypto trading that froze withdrawals on 9 April and collapsed within the week. Reported losses across Nigeria and Kenya ran above US$800 million; the Kenyan share was never firmly quantified, which is itself part of the problem.

Even the flattering numbers don't get checked. For years, the most repeated fact about Kenya's digital economy was that 31, then 43 per cent of GDP "passed through" M-Pesa — printed by the Economist and the Financial Times. Susan Johnson, a researcher at the University of Bath, showed the comparison was invalid: mobile-money figures are gross flows in and out of wallets, while GDP measures goods and services produced. The GSMA corrected its infographic. The figure still circulates.

Someone already showed the way

Organised fact-checking in East Africa did not start with elections or deepfakes. It started with money. PesaCheck — the name riffs on pesa, Kiswahili for money — was co-founded in 2016 by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein under Code for Africa, as part of their ICFJ Knight Fellowships. The brief was unglamorous: check the public-finance figures officials quote in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, because newsrooms mostly reprinted whatever number a minister announced. "There are some things that are gray area issues, where you can say it's partly true, but it's partly false too," Gicheru told the International Journalists' Network in the early days. Leo Mutuku, PesaCheck's first Kenya Fellow, put the method even more plainly: just acquaint yourself with the budget cycle, and you can tell immediately when something is off.

That proposition — a quoted figure is a claim, not a fact, until someone traces it — is the founding idea of IDS too. PesaCheck proved it works as journalism and grew into the continent's largest indigenous fact-checking operation. We are betting it can also work as a product.

What we hold ourselves to

On our finance and data platforms — markets, currency, mobile money — every figure is dated. Every claim links to its authoritative source. A named editor stands behind the analysis. A company's claim that it is "number one" gets attributed as a claim, not repeated as a fact. Where we summarise others' reporting, we say so and link to it; we don't republish it as our own. We use AI-assisted writing and disclose it. When we get something wrong, we correct it in the open, because we will get things wrong.

None of that is original. Most of it is table stakes in any serious newsroom, and PesaCheck was doing a version of it here a decade ago. What's unproven is the business: sourced, dated, named, corrected information costs more to produce than the forwarded kind, and nothing in the market guarantees it wins.

That's the bet. Kenya solved the hard engineering problem — the rails, the coverage, the two-second payment. The information layer on top of those rails is still, mostly, take-it-on-trust. We're building the version you can check, one platform at a time, and we intend to still be here when checking becomes the habit.