EarnNomad HQ

  I worked in Nairobi for years. Not visiting. Not passing through. Working. Processing over a million dollars in international transfers every month at Hodan Global Money Remittance. Managing daily foreign exchange transactions of up to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars at Continental Forex Bureau. Watching money move between currencies and countries and people from behind counters in Westlands and the CBD and across the financial district of a city that takes its payments infrastructure more seriously than almost anywhere else on the continent. When I talk about getting paid online in Kenya I am not talking about something I researched for this post. I am talking about a system I have worked inside professionally for years and now rely on personally to receive income from clients in the UK, the UAE and beyond. That context matters because the standard guides about getting paid online in Kenya cover the obvious options without explaining the decisions behind choosing between ...

I passed ten out of thirteen ACCA papers. I want to start there because I think the number matters more than people acknowledge when they talk about professional qualifications and income. Ten papers is not a footnote on a CV. It represents years of studying complex financial reporting standards, management accounting, taxation, audit and assurance, financial management and strategic business leadership while working full time across three different countries in East Africa. The conventional return on that investment is a job. An accounting role at a firm or a company that pays a salary, provides a career path and validates the qualification through employment. I am not in that job right now. Not because I could not find one. Because I made a deliberate decision to explore what the qualification could generate outside traditional employment. Partly from necessity while between positions. Partly from genuine curiosity about whether the skills and knowledge that ACCA represents can be pa...

  I did not plan to become a digital nomad. It happened gradually. One country became two. Two became four. Now I move between East, Central and Southern Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, Congo with a laptop, a phone and a collection of tools that make working across borders actually possible. This is not a list of tools some blogger tested once and wrote about. These are the tools I open every single day. The ones I would genuinely miss if they disappeared tomorrow. I want to be specific about something before this list. The word tools gets used loosely in digital nomad content. Most lists are assembled by people who signed up for affiliate programmes and are recommending products they have never actually opened on a slow Tanzanian mobile connection at eleven at night trying to meet a deadline. I am going to tell you what I actually use. Not what I have been paid to recommend. Not what sounds impressive on a list. What is genuinely open on my laptop right now as I build EarnNomad...

I am writing this from Dar es Salaam. Not from a co-working space with reliable air conditioning and fibre internet. Not from a beachside café with a coconut on the table and a ring light positioned for the perfect Instagram shot. From wherever I happen to be sitting today with whatever internet connection is available and a VPN running in the background because Twitter is blocked and I need it for work. This is what working remotely from Africa actually looks like in 2026. Not the version that gets shared on LinkedIn by people who moved to Bali. The version that exists when you are building something real in East Africa with the infrastructure and constraints that East Africa actually has. I have worked across three countries in this region. At Hodan Global in Nairobi managing over a million dollars in international transfers monthly. At Continental Forex Bureau managing daily foreign exchange transactions of up to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. At Hyperloop Haulier in Zambia...

When I started my blog I made every mistake possible. I spent three days choosing a name. I changed my brand twice. I worried about design when I should have been writing. I waited until everything felt perfect before publishing my first post. Nothing was ever perfect. I published anyway. That first post got zero views. The second got two. The third got five and one of those five was probably me checking if it worked. I started my blog with nothing. Not almost nothing. Genuinely nothing. No domain purchase. No hosting payment. No design budget. No technical skills beyond knowing how to use a browser and type into a form. The blog you are reading right now — buildafricanow.blogspot.com — was started on a free Blogger account that took approximately twenty minutes to set up. Everything that exists on it today was built on top of that free foundation without any upfront financial investment. I am telling you this at the start because I want to remove the most common excuse people use ...