For every 216 freelancers who signed up on Kenyan freelance marketplace WorkKE during its first year, just one completed a job, according to internal company data shared with Condia.
Between September 1, 2025, and August 11, 2026, 7,140 freelancers across Kenya signed up on the platform. Only 757 submitted a proposal. Of those, 39 won bids, and just 33 ultimately completed a job.
That means fewer than 5 in every 1,000 freelancers who signed up on WorkKE completed a job during the year.
That figure exposes a challenge that receives less attention in conversations about Africa’s marketplace startups, since signing people up has proven far easier than getting them to actually transact.
Kennedy Asiago, the founder of WorkKE, built the platform to test an assumption that underpins much of the optimism around Africa’s digital work economy, namely that connecting freelancers to paying businesses online would translate into meaningful income.
A year of WorkKE’s verified data offers a partial answer, and it complicates the founder narrative that usually accompanies marketplace launches.
Supply arrives faster than demand
The pattern that emerges from WorkKE’s numbers runs against how digital work is usually discussed across Africa.
Policymakers and training programmes tend to treat skills acquisition as the binding constraint on Africa’s digital economy, assuming that more people learning to code, design, or write will translate directly into more people earning online.
WorkKE’s Academy clearly illustrates the gap, with 90 learners enrolling in courses during the year and 38 of them going on to become active in the marketplace. Of these, 28 placed a bid and only 12 ever won paid work.
Training pushed people toward the marketplace, yet it did little to guarantee that paying clients would be waiting for them once they arrived.
WorkKE registered 294 employers during the year, though based on the platform’s job count, only about 105 of them appear to have ever posted a job, leaving about 189 registered employers who never posted a job.
Among that group of 105 who posted, 46 posted more than one job, which puts the repeat rate at 44%. Those 46 repeat employers went on to generate 222 of the platform’s 281 jobs, while the remaining 59 employers each posted a single job.
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Businesses that used WorkKE kept coming back to use it, an encouraging retention signal for a young marketplace, though it also means 1 in 6 registered employers produced about 80% of all the work posted that year.
The most telling number is the 281 total jobs posted compared to the 7,140 registered freelancers, a ratio that leaves little room for most people who signed up to ever encounter work in the first place.
Job values reinforce the picture of a marketplace still finding its feet. The median completed job across the year was worth KSh 2,000 Kenyan shillings ($15.45), while the average sat higher at KSh 4,664 shillings ($36.03), pulled upward by a smaller number of larger contracts.
WorkKE recorded a 48% job fill rate, meaning fewer than half of all jobs posted were matched with a freelancer, while three-quarters of filled jobs were ultimately completed.
Payment succeeded in 3 out of every 4 transactions, though WorkKE did not disclose the reason for the failed payments. Verified freelancers earned more on average than unverified ones—KSh 6,146 ($47.48) against KSh 4,575 ($35.34), suggesting that trust signals carry real economic weight.
What the WorkKE data still cannot say
Asiago was careful about the limits of his own numbers when asked whether digital freelancing functions as a primary income source for the people using WorkKE.
He argued that the evidence points toward freelancing functioning as supplemental or occasional income for many participants but stopped short of quantifying that position, as WorkKE has not surveyed its freelancers about how much of their household income comes from the platform.
WorkKE’s dataset is also geographically narrow. Nairobi accounted for 78% of the 7,435 registered users captured during the research period, leaving the rest of Kenya representing 22% of the remaining sample size.
Asiago acknowledged this limitation, describing WorkKE as a window into one emerging Kenyan marketplace rather than a national sample of the country’s wider digital workforce.
WorkKE’s funnel leaves two questions unanswered. Only 281 jobs were posted against 7,140 registered freelancers, which points to a shortage of paying work relative to interest.
But 6,383 registered freelancers—a significant majority—never submitted a single proposal. That gap raises several possibilities. Some may have joined the platform without finding jobs suited to their skills; others may have been browsing rather than actively looking for work.
Whatever the explanation, understanding why so many freelancers never moved from registration to participation could be key to unlocking the marketplace’s value.
Last updated: September 3, 2026
