I make Sh1,500 a-day from broken phones and computers

Paul Kariuki Wang’ombe Kibunja, 26 I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in psychology in 2015 and started a community empowerment programme to rehabilitate drug addicts, as well as offer basic computer training to the youth.

 I wasn’t able to carry on with the programme after it suffered political sabotage, so I abandoned it and got work as a cyber café attendant. It was while working there that I saw a gap in computer repairs and decided to step in. Having mastered the ropes, I quit the attendant job and began doing
computer and phone repairs in 2017. However, hard business times forced me to go beyond repairing gadgets and into restoring old and neglected motorcycles and bicycles to give them a customised look, a process called ‘restomoding’. The challenges I face with these two hustles include the flooding of the market with counterfeit products. Some of these counterfeits, like phones and computers, can’t be repaired, either due to a lack of spares or their being poorly made, and this has affected my work. Some customers would also rather sell their devices as scrap than have them repaired. Further, many Kenyans don’t appreciate the amount of work done by technicians, which makes pricing difficult. With the ‘restomoding’, business is picking up, but it’s still a relatively new concept so the orders aren’t that many. I make between Sh1,000 and Sh1,500 daily.