All About Nairobi is a free, independent guide to living in Nairobi. It explains the things that are obvious to everyone who already knows them and hard to find out if you do not: how the eTA works, what comes off a Kenyan payslip, how to buy electricity tokens, which matatu stage to stand at, and where in the city you can afford to live.
It is modelled on All About Berlin, which has spent years proving that a city deserves one honest, well-maintained manual rather than a hundred blog posts written once and abandoned.
Who this is for
- People moving to Nairobi from anywhere, including Kenyans coming home after years away.
- People who already live here and have hit a specific wall: a payslip that does not add up, a deposit that never came back, an eCitizen form that will not submit.
- People helping someone else move here, who would rather send a link than write the same message again.
It is not a tourism site or a relocation agency. Nothing here is sponsored.
How this site stays accurate
The hard part of a site like this is not writing it. It is stopping it from going stale.
Kenyan figures move. Finance Acts change the tax bands, the NSSF limits rise every February, and minimum wages are revised by legal notice. A guide written in good faith in March can be wrong by August, and a reader has no way to tell.
So the figures are not typed into the guides. They live in one file,
content/constants.yaml, and each one carries:
- where it came from — the Act, the regulation or the agency that publishes it
- when a person last checked it against that source
- when it should be checked again
The guides pull their numbers from that file, so the PAYE bands in the tax guide and the ones on the home page cannot disagree: there is only one copy.
The map works the same way. Its boundaries, census figures and landmark positions come from named public sources, listed under the map with the date they were fetched.
What this site cannot do for you
- Fees at the counter are the real fees. Published schedules and what you are asked to pay are not always the same. Confirm before you pay.
- This is not legal, tax or immigration advice. Knowing what the law says is useful leverage; it is not the same as having a lawyer or an accountant.
- Offices change their minds. Requirements vary between branches and sometimes between officers. Bring more paperwork than you think you need.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, out of date, or missing the one detail that would have saved you a wasted trip, say so. Corrections from people who have just been through the process are the most valuable thing this site gets.