Is Networking in Kenya Becoming More Important Than Qualifications?

Ask any young Kenyan how they got their last job, and watch how often the honest answer starts with a name rather than a job board. "My uncle knew someone." "A friend forwarded my CV directly to the HR manager." "Someone from church mentioned there was an opening before it was even advertised." It is such a familiar script that Kenyans have a phrase for it — mtu wetu, "our person" — and everyone understands instantly what it means: the job did not go to the best-qualified applicant. It went to the best-connected one.

That raises an uncomfortable question nobody likes to ask out loud in a country that constitutionally guarantees merit-based hiring: is networking quietly becoming more important than qualifications in Kenya's job market? The evidence, once you go looking for it, is harder to dismiss than the comforting story that skills and certificates are what really decide who gets ahead.

The Uncomfortable Data

Start with the public sector, where hiring is supposed to be the most tightly regulated. A joint audit by the Office of the Auditor-General and the National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) found that in several public universities, a single ethnic community held between 45% and 73% of all staff positions — Koitalel Samoei University at 73% Kalenjin, Rongo University at 72% Luo, University of Kabianga at 70% Kalenjin, Maseno University at 66% Luo, Moi University at 64% Kalenjin. Every one of those figures breaches the National Cohesion and Integration Act, which caps any single community's share of staff in a public institution at one-third. The pattern is consistent: institutions disproportionately hire from the dominant local community, and roughly ten minority communities were found to be entirely absent from staffing at the universities examined.

The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission's National Ethics and Corruption Survey 2024 backs this up from a different angle: favouritism was cited by 22.5% of respondents as a form of corruption they had personally encountered in public offices, the third most common after bribery, while tribalism and nepotism specifically were flagged by 11.8% of respondents. These are not fringe complaints. They are patterns large enough to show up clearly in national survey data.

What the Law Says vs What Actually Happens

The gap is not for lack of legal clarity. Article 232(g) of Kenya's Constitution explicitly requires "fair competition and merit as the basis of appointments and promotions" in public service, and the Public Service Commission's own framework defines merit precisely: possession of the minimum qualifications, and the requisite skills and competencies for the job, nothing more, nothing less. On paper, Kenya has one of the clearest constitutional merit mandates in the region.

In practice, the audits above suggest the mandate is honoured mostly in the breach at the institutional level, and the corruption survey suggests ordinary Kenyans experience that gap directly and often. When the law says merit and the audit says "one community, 73% of the jobs," something other than qualifications is clearly doing the deciding.

It Is Not Just the Public Sector

It would be convenient to treat this as a public-service problem alone, but the private sector is not meaningfully cleaner. A World Bank skills-measurement study of the Kenyan labour market found that over 50% of employers rely on informal channels to recruit — word-of-mouth through personal contacts, or hiring people recommended by someone they already know — rather than open, formal advertisement and selection. For more than half of Kenya's employers, the front door of the hiring process is not a job board at all. It is a phone call.

That has a quiet but significant consequence: if a majority of jobs are filled through networks before they are ever formally advertised, then a candidate's CV, certificates and interview performance were never actually competing on a level field to begin with. The competition many jobseekers think they are entering has often already been decided.

Why "Who You Know" Still Wins

None of this is unique to Kenya — referral hiring exists everywhere, because it genuinely reduces risk and cost for employers. A trusted employee's recommendation is a cheap, fast substitute for expensive vetting, and it lowers the odds of an obviously bad hire. The problem is not that referrals exist. It is how much weight they carry relative to everything else, and who gets systematically shut out as a result: young people without well-placed relatives, migrants from other counties working in an unfamiliar region, first-generation professionals with no one in their family who has ever worked in an office. Their qualifications may be identical, or better, than the "mtu wetu" candidate's. It rarely matters, because they were never in the room where the decision was actually being made.

The Cost of a Connections Economy

A labour market that quietly runs on networks rather than qualifications is not just unfair to individuals. It is expensive for the country. Positions filled by "who you know" rather than "who can do the job" produce weaker institutions, lower productivity, and talented people either underemployed or driven to leave the country entirely in search of a fairer shot. Every ethnic-diversity audit that finds a public institution 70% dominated by one community is also, implicitly, a finding about the qualified candidates from every other community who did not get in. The cost of nepotism is never just borne by the people excluded from it.

Where Janta Connect Fits In

This is exactly the problem a skills-and-portfolio-based hiring platform is built to counteract. When a jobseeker's verified skills, completed projects and demonstrated work are visible and searchable to any employer, the advantage of already knowing someone on the inside shrinks. A candidate with no connections at all can still show an employer exactly what they can do, in a format that is just as visible as anyone else's, on the same platform, at the same time. Janta Connect will not single-handedly dismantle Kenya's networking culture, but it gives capable people who lack the right contacts a real, visible way to compete on what they can actually do rather than who they happen to know.

For employers, it is also a practical way to widen the pool honestly: instead of defaulting to word-of-mouth because it is convenient, a platform surfacing verified, comparable candidate profiles makes it just as easy to hire the best person as the best-connected one.

The Future of Work in Kenya

Networking is not going away, and it should not have to. Relationships have always mattered, and always will, in any economy anywhere in the world. But there is a difference between networking as one useful ingredient in a career and networking as the whole recipe — the difference between a referral opening a door and a referral being the only door there is. Kenya's constitution already says merit should decide who gets opportunities. Closing the gap between that promise and audits showing 73% ethnic dominance in individual institutions will take more than good intentions. It will take hiring systems, public and private, that make demonstrated ability impossible to ignore, however unconnected the person showing it happens to be.