“You have to start the baby steps from free gigs, from gigs that are paying but now they don't pay you on time ama they don't even pay you. Pesa inapotea tu hivyo.”
DJ Jacy has been playing Mugithi for a living since 2018. She knows how the money in her trade actually moves, and it doesn't move monthly.
In July 2026, HEVA Fund told a room of journalists in Nairobi that creatives should stop begging and start borrowing, as KenyanVibe reported it on 17 July 2026. That was the headline, at least. Two weeks earlier, Sanara had published its numbers: more than KSh 1.2 billion in financing and grants, more than 330 creative enterprises financed, about 63 per cent of them led by women, and nearly 30 per cent of beneficiaries borrowing for the first time. Demand for its Ota loans, it said, stood at about KSh 4 billion.
Those are real achievements, and the loans are better than most of what came before them. Ota Kopa lends up to KSh 999,999 and Ota Kopa+ from KSh 1 million up to KSh 4,999,999, through partners such as Longitude Capital, Tenakata and Kenya Bankers Sacco. Ota Growth lends KSh 5 million to KSh 20 million directly. HEVA prices Ota Growth at 9 per cent, and told the July briefing that Ota Kopa carries the same rate.
But a loan rests on the money that will repay it. In Kenya's creative economy, that money is the fee, and the fee is where the system is broken.
Every 30 days
At a HEVA roundtable with live-events operators in November 2025, one of the lenders put the old problem plainly. Banks, they said, have scored credit in a traditional way: if your payments don't come in every 30 days, you probably don't qualify.
The Sanara products were built to get round that. The same session heard about an event facility that would be repaid automatically from ticket sales, with 90 days' grace from the date of the event and no penalty for paying early. The hosts said they wanted facilities that wouldn't push borrowers into negative cash flow. That's a lender listening.
The requirements for the larger loans tell a different story. At an online information session in June 2025, HEVA's investments team set out what Ota Growth asks of an applicant: at least two years of bank or M-Pesa statements, management or financial accounts, some credit history, tax compliance, a registered business with its insurances and legal paperwork in place, and a company profile on HEVA's own template. Anything else is an automatic disqualification. The loans had to be repaid monthly, and the window closes in December 2026.
None of that is unreasonable for a lender. All of it assumes a business whose income arrives as a record.
What the record shows
Here is how the people we've interviewed describe getting paid.
“You'll get free gigs a lot. Someone will tell you, oh, you never know who will see you there,” Jacy says. “You'll be paid with exposure. Sometimes you'll be paid with transport.”
Diana Kimwaki, a singer and songwriter who went through Sanara's business training, can't price her own work. “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.”
DJ Wiwa mixes with her feet. In December 2024 she told The Standard about being hired alongside a support DJ “who has no disability yet I end up performing longer” - “because I have good experience and grasp of instruments and am later paid less”.
The Kisumu Songbirds found a song of theirs registered to someone who'd paid for the studio session. “Because the person paid for the studio, ana-own the song. Na ni sisi ndio tumeandika, tukasing.” Before Sanara, one of them says, they performed in clothes someone else provided, “na pesa zinaenda tu kwa mfuko yake.”
The organisers aren't comfortable either. Allan Gitau, who founded Kikuyu Love Sessions, runs it without sponsors. “When we book them for gigs, we would like to be as competitive as other shows that are sponsored. We would like to pay rates that are just as good.”
A free gig leaves no statement. Neither does a fee that's agreed and never paid, or a fee paid in cash, late, to someone else. Two years of statements is a record of who paid you. Too often, in this sector, the answer is nobody.
The case for lending anyway
The strongest argument for the current approach deserves to be put fairly. Lenders aren't regulators. They can't make a promoter pay a DJ, and if they tried to police the people who pay creatives, they'd add cost and delay to products that already take six to eight weeks to approve. Credit is a discipline. Requiring records teaches record-keeping, and Sanara's training does teach it. Grace Lavina, a body artist in Mombasa, describes exactly that change: “After Sanara, now I know how much profit I made for every business and project.” On this view, the money comes first and the market sorts itself out. Thirty per cent first-time borrowers suggests the door is opening.
That's true as far as it goes. It still leaves the weight on the wrong person. A creative who keeps perfect records of being paid late is still being paid late. Training teaches her to count what she's owed. It can't make anyone pay it.
Put the payer in the due diligence
The better idea was already in the room. At a second roundtable the same day, HEVA's facilitator suggested where due diligence might go: a lender might one day ask an organiser to show, before getting a loan, that they had already paid their headliners and performers.
It should be policy rather than a passing thought.
Any facility that funds events, venues, productions or platforms should check how the borrower pays the creatives it books. Has it paid its performers on time for the last year? Does it issue written terms? Does it pay in a form that leaves a record? The organiser is the one borrowing against ticket sales. The DJ on its stage is the one whose unpaid fee never shows up in anyone's credit file.
There are three steps that follow, and none of them needs new money.
Make payment to artists a lending condition. For any event or venue loan, require proof of what performers were paid on past events, and disburse only against written fees for the next one. The ticket-deduction model already gives the lender sight of the revenue. Take the performers' fees off the top, before the lender is repaid, not after.
Count what creatives are owed. A written booking agreement that was honoured is a credit record. So is a run of paid invoices from the same club. Lenders that score Ota Kopa applicants should accept that history alongside bank and M-Pesa statements, so that a DJ who is paid in cash isn't scored as having no income at all.
Publish the terms the programme expects. Sanara funds organisers and trains artists. It can tell both sides what it considers fair: written fees, payment within an agreed number of days, no payment in exposure. Kenya's Persons with Disabilities Act, 2025 already treats a failure to accommodate as discrimination. Equal pay for the same set ought to be the floor, not the aspiration.
Parliament has two versions of a public answer in front of it. The Senate's Creative Economy Support Bill, passed in August 2025, would set up a Creatives Fund and a credit guarantee scheme for creatives. The Creative Economy Bill, 2026, brought to the National Assembly that August by the chair of its culture committee, proposes a Creative Industry Development Fund. Neither is law.
The programme's own figure for loan demand is about KSh 4 billion. If even part of that goes to the people who book creatives, then whether the people they book get paid is the most important question a lender can ask.
Pesa inapotea
Jacy describes the moment it changes in a single line. “And then you get to a point now where now they are the ones who are calling you. So of course, ukiitwa, unalipwa.”
Being asked for, in her account, is what turns a free gig into a fee. A lender that asks organisers how they pay could do the same thing for a whole sector, years sooner.
Sanara is a Mastercard Foundation programme delivered in partnership with HEVA Fund, SNDBX-Ubuntu, Baraza Media Lab and GoDown Arts Centre.