Kenya’s economy relies on informal workers: the mama fua washing clothes in people’s homes, the boda boda rider looking for fares, and the artisan who is paid in cash for yesterday’s work. Yet they are invisible to banks, insurers and lenders, who demand payslips, logbooks and predictable incomes.
Now, however, four young Kenyan women are addressing this issue with their fintech app, Jasho.
‘Jasho is a fintech tool built specifically for gig economy workers, including people with disabilities, who have been largely ignored by existing financial applications,’ says team lead Veronicah Anzimbu.
The idea for Jasho was conceived at the 2025 Absa GirlCodeHack, a pan-African hackathon with the theme of ‘Future-Proofing Africa: Innovation at the Intersection of FinTech, Cybersecurity, and AI’.
Over the course of 30 sleepless hours at Absa Towers in Nairobi, Veronicah, Faith Chemitai, Dorcas Kalaka and Mawia Katiwa developed a working prototype.
Faith trained AI models for income forecasting, credit scoring and expenditure analysis. Mawia handled the back end. Veronicah, an AI/ML associate engineer, oversaw integration. Dorcas sketched the user interface from scratch.
‘Faith spent around 10 hours training models and running different algorithms – including random forest – to see which performed best for the use case,’ recalls Veronicah.
Despite server crashes and integration errors, they presented a functioning minimum viable product (MVP) and won the Kenyan leg of the hackathon. At the Pan-African finals, however, they lost to Tanzania’s Tokiva Sisters, prompting them to resolve to turn their prototype into a product.
Currently, the team is onboarding a test cohort of between 50 and 100 users, all of whom are based in Nairobi.
‘No money is moving through the app yet – the current features don’t involve cash because we are still building user trust before enabling that functionality. Revenue is a post-launch concern. Once the app is live, we plan to generate revenue through transaction fees, insurance commissions, gig referrals, Sacco partnerships and other integrations,’ says Faith.
One behavioural pattern has already emerged during testing. ‘Users overwhelmingly prefer standing orders to voluntary contributions. Left to their own devices, they forget, but once automated, they persist,’ observes Mawia.
Beyond the wallet lies the innovation: AI models that learn from user behaviour. The app can forecast income dips, encourage savings and analyse expenditure.
For a mama fua, for example, it might issue a warning: ‘Your clients tend to travel in December. Your income may slow down. Consider setting aside more this month.’
A recent addition to the app builds on this, as Dorcas explains: “We have developed an expenditure analysis feature that provides users with a detailed breakdown of their spending habits – showing them where their money is going, how their spending patterns change over time, and what this means for their financial health. For workers who have never had visibility into their own spending, this is a big deal.’
The app also includes a community forum where gig workers can post and pick up work from each other.
‘A boda boda rider overwhelmed with deliveries can flag an available job for another rider in the network. It’s a small feature, but it demonstrates that the team understands financial inclusion is not just about saving and borrowing, but also about establishing the kinds of economic connections that informal workers are often excluded from,’ notes Veronicah.
Building a financial identity
‘But perhaps the most consequential thing Jasho is trying to do is build a financial identity for people who have never had one. In Kenya, access to formal credit is largely dependent on payslips, logbooks and consistent bank statements – documents that gig workers simply do not have. Banks do not have a model for a mama fua who earns Sh600 one day and nothing the next,’ she continues.
Jasho aims to develop this model from scratch. By tracking every transaction – money in, money out, savings patterns and chama contributions – through the app, it builds a verifiable financial record for each user. The team hopes to use this record to unlock credit through Sacco partnerships, rather than through predatory mobile lenders.
A mama fua who has consistently saved Sh10 a day for a year through an app that can vouch for her behaviour is a different kind of borrower to those that banks have traditionally been able to access.
‘We are also in early conversations with insurance companies regarding three product lines: health cover, life cover and income protection. This makes sense: an app that knows a worker’s income stability, spending patterns and savings history is exactly the kind of data an insurer needs to offer an affordable, relevant product to a population they have historically found too risky or expensive to reach,’ says Faith.
When the team mapped the existing fintech landscape in Kenya, they noticed something.
‘We looked at multiple fintech applications here in Kenya. And none of them has really incorporated people with disabilities,” Faith explains.
The team meets virtually often and in person once a week, coordinating via a WhatsApp group and meeting in Nairobi’s city centre when schedules allow.
The intellectual property has been submitted to the Kenya Industrial Property Institute and is currently under review.
‘We are also marketing within our local community, testing messaging and building early awareness.’ The response has been encouraging. People who work in the informal economy recognise the problem we are trying to solve because they experience it first-hand,’ says Dorcas.
Kenya’s Data Protection Act 2019 sets a clear standard in this area, and the team has been deliberate about its data policy: users consent to the terms and conditions when they sign up; data is neither sold nor shared; and if a user leaves the platform, their data is deleted.
Any data shared with the government or NGOs for policy purposes is anonymised before leaving the app.