Is boda boda business profitable in Kenya?

Well, there are profits to be made in the boda boda business within Kenya, but they are not super-profits. So for someone who is looking for normal profits, yes, those can be made in the Kenyan boda boda industry. But for someone who is looking for super-profits, those may not be available in the Kenyan boda boda industry. That is the reality.

How profitable your boda boda will be obviously depends on whether you will be operating it yourself, or you will be employing people to operate the motorcycles on your behalf.

If you operating the motorbike yourself, you can earn decent sums of money. But you will have to be spending huge amounts of time on the bike... and you can only ride one bike at a time.

On the other hand, if you will be employing people to operate the boda boda for you, the margins will be smaller. I think that in most places, the arrangement is for the hired operator to give the owner 300 shillings per day, and keep the rest (of course after fueling the motorbike). So now you see, if you are getting 300 bob per day, that works out to 9,000 shillings per month, and 108,000 per year. Still, within a year, you get recoup the money you spend on the boda boda. In the subsequent three or four years before the machine becomes totally battered, you get to earn some good money for yourself. And at the end of that period, you find that you can still sell the boda boda for a decent sum of money as a second hand machine. Or you operate it for seven years and then sell it as scrap...

All said and done, you stand to earn more through the boda boda business in Kenya than if you had kept the money in the account! But the super-profits that used to be enjoyed by the pioneers of the boda boda business in Kenya are not there nowadays.