“I wasn't operating. Let's just say I wasn't operating.”
Diana Kimwaki is describing the years before she had a plan. She'd been singing seriously since joining a choir, and writing for as long, and none of it was attached to anything.
“I'm just singing for singing. I write just for the sake of writing, but there are no systems, there's nothing to hold on to. So there were no operations, basically.”
She has told the story twice for Sanara: once from the stage at a programme event in April 2025, to a room of creatives, and once face-to-face with us, at greater length. The two versions agree on the facts. The second goes further on the money.
Living off my parents
She introduces herself as “a singer and a songwriter and a multi-creative.”
From the stage, she'd put it as a principle: “There's no one creative that does one thing.” She draws. She has worked as a psychologist, out of an interest in “how people's minds work.” She's worked as an assistant project lead for a community organisation that uses music, graffiti and podcasts, a job she took without having done it before.
“I said to them, 'I would like to join you,' and they were like, ‘Great! You're our assistant project lead.' And then I had to reckon with the fact that I've never done this before, but this is what I need to do.” She traces all of it to one habit. “I like to tell stories, so how do I tell stories? I write. And then, because music is also storytelling, it's one thing in a lot of things.”
When the project work ended, she lived with her family. “Now I was living off of my parents. Yes. I still eat and I still sleep. I'm okay.” The pressure came from everyone else.
“Everyone is just like, ‘So now, you're unemployed. How are you going to make money? How are you going to live?’ It was a lot. And at some point, I thought, ‘You know what? My parents are not stressing me, so I'm not going to allow you to stress me as well.'”
The harder question was her own. She wanted to keep the music without letting it starve her, and she found an answer that she repeats whenever the subject comes up.
“Creativity is a lifestyle that needs to be funded before it can fund itself. You need to be able to fund it. So I decided I'd rather just put it on pause just to be able to find a way that I can be able to fund it.”
What do you have?
The way out began with a line from another creative at a workshop, which she calls “very eye-opening”.
“You need to be able to work with what you have. So what do you have? You have your talent, yes, you have the skills. But then how do you... like, I can't produce music. So I need a producer. So how does that work?”
You can almost hear her relive the moment in real time as she talks about it.
She looked around and found she was surrounded by the skills she lacked. “I have friends who are graphic designers, I have friends who are photographers, I have friends who are producers, I have friends who are in different niches across the creative industry. At which point I realised, ‘Oh, I can do this.'”
So she began trading. “What can I give you, and what can you be able to provide for me? Like a skill I can provide for you that you do not have, so that we can be able to do something together. And that is now my operation.” It replaced money she didn't have. “I don't have the funding or the source of funding, but I do know people that can help me out when I need it and I do know people that I can also help out when they need me.” She recognises that the arrangement isn't quite as free as it sounds. It “doesn't really have any kind of strings attached, but it does sort of.”
The poster
She went looking for the missing piece, and she's frank about what she expected to find. Most training offered to young musicians, she says, repeats what's already circulating. “There are things sometimes that you can Google, honestly.” What matters in Kenyan music isn't written down anywhere.
“Because as everyone says, we don't have a music industry. We just have things that work, but we don't really understand the in-between, and you will not find this information because it is very, very well gate-kept."
“Very, very well gate-kept.” She repeated that reflexively, but with an unnamed weight in her voice.
Then she saw a Sanara poster on Instagram, and applied for the business training run by SNDBX-Ubuntu, one of the programme's partners. Five full days, one subject each: strategy, marketing, people and processes, legal, finance.
It “surpassed my expectations.”
The first day asked a question she says carried her through the rest.
“Asking what kind of business you are trying to create. And when you say you're a musician, you want a music business, right? So, as a musician, are you trying to be a songwriter, a producer? Are you trying to be an instrumentalist, a soloist? Are you trying to start a band? Are you a performing artist? Are you a recording artist?”
“That's something I'd never thought about.” Legal asked her to look at her own trading arrangement. “Have you thought about how your collaborations are working? Because that's what I'm doing. I'm collaborating with other creatives, but how do those collaborations work? Do you have things written down?”
And the fifth day brought the bank balance to the fore. On stage, she put it like this.
“These four are, like, expounding on your dream. You're like, yes, now I'm building on that dream. And then now the finance day just brings you back to reality because now you have zero.”
“You have to track your expenses. What are you tracking? You don't have expenses because you don't have money to do all these things.”
In one exercise, participants were asked to choose between money and equipment from an imaginary fund. Most chose money. She didn't. “For me, I'd rather get skills and equipment because then I can be able to do my own thing at home.” Cash, she suspected, “might not go into the project.”
What she valued most came after the classroom: one-on-one sessions on her plan, and people who kept checking. “They follow through with us every single time: you said you had this project, this is what you wanted to do, what kind of support can we give you, and who can we connect you with?” She doesn't claim it gave her money. It gave her a plan, “something I can go back to and say this is what I have now and this is what I want to get,” and one lesson from coaching that pointed back at her.
“You realise that you're the one who's standing in your own way when it comes to just moving forward.”
A million shillings
Then we asked the question underneath all of it: is there a tension between the creative side and the money side? She answered by running the experiment on herself.
“If someone came to me and said, ‘Here, this is one million for you,' I am pretty sure I wouldn't put more into the music.”
“I probably would because it's on my mind right now. But then I would think about it more, and there are so many things. I want a new phone.” She chuckles, then immediately continues. "I'm tired. I need a vacation even though I'm not even doing anything. Imagine emergencies start from nowhere, everywhere. Somebody is sick, there's no food, Wi-Fi has gone down, things like that.”
It points to a very real dilemma that most - if not all - creatives face nearly every day: For an artist without a salary, any money is household money first. Which is why, unusually, she sees a use for the paperwork that comes with grants. “At the end of the day, you have to show this is what I did and this is where the money went and you have to be accountable for that.”
“Right now I have it in my mind, so when something is on your mind clearly, you go there first.”
Asked what she'd change with a day's absolute power, she started with royalties nobody collects (“There's a lot of money there that is going to waste because people don't know that money is there”) and ended with the question every new performer faces.
“If I were to go and perform, I have no idea how much I should charge, but because I want money, I will take whatever it is that has been given to me.”
The rest of the industry, she says, runs on the same uncertainty, but it's the newcomer that pays most for it.
Knowledge doesn't stop the loss, in her account. It does, however, shrink it. “That's how you go from somebody taking your 100,000 to somebody taking your 10,000.”
The creative centre
There's a bigger picture behind the plan, and she offered it almost in passing. A friend once asked her where she wanted to be.
“I want to work in the community, have a creative centre, something like that. And then they were like, ‘Okay, how are you going to make that happen? Where are you getting the money for that?' And the only thing that came to mind was, 'I'm going to be a really big superstar and then all that money is going to come back into this.'”
“And then I think that picture just stayed in my mind.”
The centre was the dream. The stardom was the only funding plan she could think of at the time. Everything since, the pause, the trading, the five days, the written plan, has been a search for a second answer to her friend's question. She hasn't found it yet, and doesn't say she has.
At the end, we asked her to speak to a 19-year-old who only knows she loves music. She named her Alice, and spoke to her directly.
“Gain the skills. And put yourself in the industry, put yourself in creative circles... practise, gain the skills, and I think just know people. Just continue to just surround yourself with people who share your passions, who share your drive, people who share your dream and don't bring you down, and I think honestly, you will go far, very far.”
Story: Recentred Africa. Sanara is a Mastercard Foundation programme delivered in partnership with HEVA Fund, SNDBX-Ubuntu, Baraza Media Lab and GoDown Arts Centre.