Working from Nairobi for a few weeks

Nairobi is an easy city to work from, and a slightly harder one to work from well. The infrastructure is better than most visitors expect and the failure modes are different from the ones they prepare for.

The time zone is the quiet advantage

East Africa Time is UTC+3. That puts a Nairobi working day comfortably alongside Europe — London is two hours behind for most of the year, the Gulf is an hour ahead, and India is manageable in the afternoon. The United States is the awkward one: an East Coast morning is your early evening, and the West Coast is a genuine sacrifice.

For anyone working with Europe or the Middle East, a month here costs almost nothing in overlap, which is a large part of why it works.

Connectivity

Fixed-line fibre in Nairobi is fast and widely available — well beyond what video calls need. The two things worth checking before you commit to a place are whether the connection is fibre rather than shared wireless, and what happens when the power goes.

• Mobile data is genuinely good and cheap. A Safaricom bundle is a perfectly reasonable backup for a call.
• Tether before you need to. Set your phone up as a hotspot on the first day, not during the outage.
• Ask about the generator. Fibre routers do not run on goodwill. A building with backup power keeps the internet up; one without does not, whatever the advertised speed.

Where to sit

Nairobi has a real café culture and a growing number of co-working spaces, most of them in Westlands and Kilimani. They are good, and they are a twenty-minute drive from Upper Hill that becomes fifty at the wrong hour.

In practice, most people working a full month settle into a rhythm of working where they sleep and going out for the parts of the day that benefit from other humans. Which makes the desk in your room the single most important piece of furniture in the trip — a point we make at more length in the comparison with hotels.

Money and admin

• M-Pesa runs the city. Set it up on day one. It pays for taxis, groceries, the barber and the man selling avocados.
• Cards work in supermarkets, malls, hospitals and hotels — less reliably everywhere else.
• Keep receipts if any of this is going on an expense claim. Direct bookings usually come with a cleaner paper trail than a third-party platform, which is one small advantage nobody mentions.

Staying longer than you planned

A surprising number of month-long trips become six-week trips. It is worth knowing before you book how extending works, because “we are fully booked from Friday” is an unwelcome discovery in week four.

With us, you ask from your account and we confirm if the nights are free. Extended nights appear as their own line rather than being folded into the original booking, so what you have paid and what you owe stays legible.