Nairobi's informal mechanics keep boda bodas running on an open market of Indian originals and Chinese copies. Electric motorcycles route repair through operators' service centres instead, and the fundis along the road are being left on the kerb. A field essay from two rounds of interviews.
During my fieldwork in Nairobi, the people with the most time to talk were the riders lying across their seats at the charging hubs, waiting three or four hours for a battery, and the people with the least time were the mechanics. Every mechanic I interviewed, across two rounds of fieldwork in January–February and September–October 2026, kept working while I asked my questions, and I learned to hold the recorder close to a pair of hands rather than to a face. One was patching an inner tube, roughening the rubber around the hole with a rasp, brushing on rubber solution and waiting for it to turn tacky before pressing the patch home and dunking the tube in a basin of water to watch for bubbles. Another was loosening the rear axle nut to slide the wheel back on its adjusters and take the slack out of a chain that had begun to slap against the swingarm, checking the sprocket teeth for the hooked profile that tells a fundi the whole set has to go. A third had the cylinder head off a 150cc petrol engine, with the piston and rings laid out on a rag and a feeler gauge ready for the valve clearances, while customers waited on the kerb for a bike that would carry passengers again by the afternoon.
That contrast between idle riders and busy mechanics is, I think, one of the clearest signs of how Kenya's electric boda boda transition is reorganising work. My earlier piece on this fieldwork argued that the scarce resource for riders is time at the hub. This one is about the people whose time was never scarce enough to waste, the jua kali fundis who keep the city's motorcycle taxis on the road, and about what happens to them when the bikes they repair stop running on petrol.
Jua kali is Swahili for "hot sun," and it became the name for Kenya's informal artisans because so many of them worked in the open air, beside roads and markets, without a workshop roof. A fundi is a skilled hand, the person you go to when something is broken, and in the motorcycle trade the word covers anyone from a teenager fixing punctures under a tree to a workshop owner with seven employees. King (1996) documented how this economy grew from the margins of colonial and post-independence Kenya into one of its main sources of skills and livelihoods, and the latest figures show that it has only grown since. According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics' 2026 Economic Survey, 716,800 of the 882,100 new jobs created in 2025 were informal, and the number of people working in the informal sector rose to 18.1 million.
Austin, a roadside fundi I interviewed on 28 September, is a good illustration of how people enter this economy. He started working at the same spot when he was 14, still in school, looking for pocket money, and at 23 he has nine years of experience behind him. Asked how he became a mechanic, his first answer was "it's all about hustle... it's all about us looking for money," and he learned the trade from Moses, the man who runs the spot and who "taught us how to repair bikes and motorbikes." There was no certificate at the end of that apprenticeship and no curriculum, only years of watching, handing over spanners and eventually taking the job yourself. Austin now specialises in wiring and mechanical work, which he described as harder for others "but easy for me," while the job he does most often, every single day, is the humble puncture.
What allows someone like Austin to make a living is an open market for spare parts, and that market has a very particular geography. Kenya's petrol boda boda fleet is dominated by Indian brands, above all the Bajaj Boxer and TVS models, which displaced a wave of cheaper Chinese motorcycles in the 2000s and 2010s by sitting in what one account called the "sweet spot" between cheap Chinese and expensive Japanese bikes on quality and price, and by building dealer and service networks across the continent. Bajaj alone is estimated to hold around a fifth of Kenya's two-wheeler market, and because so many bikes on the road share the same engine, the same clutch plates and the same chain sizes, a fundi can learn one platform and work on most of the bikes that stop at his spot.
China did not leave this market when its own motorcycle brands lost ground; it moved into the parts. A Nairobi spare parts shop typically stocks genuine Indian parts next to Chinese-made replicas of the same part at a lower price, and the rider, who pays for repairs out of the same daily earnings that cover the bike loan, decides which one goes into the engine. The line between a cheaper replica and a counterfeit is sometimes crossed outright. In 2022 Kenya's Anti-Counterfeit Authority raided an assembly yard in Homa Bay and seized 54 motorcycles sold as Bajaj Boxers, worth around KSh 7 million, with the brand's agent pointing out that genuine Boxers are made in India "as opposed to China as in this case." For all its problems, this two-tier supply of Indian originals and Chinese copies is what keeps petrol repair cheap and decentralised, since any fundi can buy a chain, a set of brake shoes or a piston kit over the counter without permission from anyone.
Austin described how thin that stock is in practice. He keeps only the parts "that go easily," such as inner tubes, and otherwise relies on customers to bring the part and leave the labour to him. A controller for an electric bike is another matter: "you can't buy a controller because it will be hard for us to sell." With an electric motorcycle, the parts that matter most are no longer the ones a fundi can find on an open shelf. Battery cells, motors and controllers are largely sourced from China, and Chinese manufacturers are now entering the Kenyan market directly, with Yadea, which describes itself as the world's largest electric two-wheeler maker, launching five models aimed at boda boda riders in June 2026. The supply chain still runs through China, but it now runs through operators' service centres rather than through the parts shops where fundis buy.
Electric bikes do still reach the roadside, though only for a narrow set of jobs. Austin said that electric riders "usually go to the company, so it's hard for them to come here," and when they do come it is for "brake pads, chain, bearings, something like that." On the electrical side his work on an electric bike stops at indicators and lights. James, who runs a workshop with seven mechanics and whom I interviewed in February, sees two to four electric bikes on a typical day out of the ten to fifteen motorcycles that come through, and riders themselves are wary of going further: Francis, a Roam rider, was clear that he would not let "anybody" handle a fault on his bike. When something goes wrong deeper in the drivetrain, a rider has nowhere to go but the manufacturer, and Georg told me about a friend whose bike stood idle for four months waiting on an insurance claim for a faulty motor and controller.
From the operator's side, the reasons for keeping that work in-house are serious. Elizabeth, who runs operations at one of Roam's neighbourhood service centres and trains its technicians, explained that every new hire needs a background in electrical, mechanical or automotive engineering, goes through an application, an interview and a practical session, and then completes an internal course on the bike's power flow and its electrical and mechanical components before being given any customer. The curriculum is written by Roam's after-sales team from the faults they see in the field, and the controllers run on firmware that has to be updated uniformly according to company procedures, which is why, in her words, this knowledge "is only left to Roam" for now. The bikes carry passengers through Nairobi traffic and are, for most riders, their main source of income, so a badly done repair can cost a livelihood or a life.
The consequence, however, is a training pipeline that runs parallel to the jua kali economy rather than through it. Roam trains its own technicians and those of its business partners, and the certificate at the end is internal, with no official standing that would let a technician take it to another workshop. Someone like Austin, with nine years of hands-on experience and no engineering diploma, does not meet the entry requirement, and Elizabeth was frank that this model will strain as the fleet grows, since "the volumes of the riders that we may need to attend to will be way higher and our current team might not be able to address that." Electric motorcycles were roughly one in seven new motorcycle registrations in Kenya in 2025, and every one of them will eventually need the kind of attention that, on a petrol bike, a fundi under a tree would provide.
What struck me most in the fundi interviews was the absence of resistance. Austin has received no training on electric bikes, and when I asked whether he wanted it, his only condition was time: "If I get time, well and good, I'll be glad to be trained." He knew exactly what he wanted to learn, which was "how to identify the fault and how to deal with the fault," and he was relaxed about the future: "If it becomes electric, we shift electric. You can't just stay at one place." He also had a sharper view of the transition than many policy documents, observing that "not everybody prefers electric bikes" and that the next generation of mechanics will need "knowledge on both ends," since for years to come Nairobi's fleet will be a mix of petrol and electric bikes passing through the same roadside spots.
Austin's condition about time connects the two halves of my fieldwork. The riders at the hub had hours to spare because the charging network was too thin, and the fundis had none because a day without repairs is a day without income. Any training offer that asks a roadside mechanic to close his spot for a week of classes in an industrial area is asking him to give up the very earnings that the training is supposed to protect, which is why so many well-meant skills programmes in the informal sector report low uptake. Hargadon and Douglas (2001) argued that new technologies succeed when they fit into the institutions and routines that already organise a market, and the Kenyan e-motorcycle has done this well at the level of the bike and its financing. The repair system is the routine it has so far bypassed, and in the terms of the multi-level perspective (Geels, 2002) the petrol regime's strength lies as much in its dense, cheap, open repair network as in the fuel station on every corner.
Three changes would let the repair economy move with the bikes rather than be left behind by them. The first is to split electric repair into tiers, so that the mechanical layer that fundis already handle, along with low-voltage work such as lighting, wiring harnesses and connectors, is formally opened to trained independent mechanics, while battery packs, controllers and firmware remain with operators until standards and liability rules are in place. Roam already trains its business partners' technicians, and extending a short module to roadside fundis, with referrals running in both directions, would cost little compared with the service capacity it would add.
The second is to make that training fit a fundi's working day and to make its certificate travel. Short modules delivered at or near existing repair clusters, a stipend that covers the lost day's earnings, and certification recognised through the national TVET system rather than by a single company would turn Austin's "if I get time" into a yes, and would let a mechanic trained by one operator serve riders of another. The third is to give the open parts market something to sell, by making fast-moving electric components, diagnostic information and basic tools available over the counter, so that the electric fleet develops the same broad supply that Indian originals and Chinese copies give the petrol fleet, with regulators watching quality as closely as they now watch counterfeit Boxers.
The fundis I interviewed never stopped working long enough to complain, and they will not be the loudest voices in the policy debate about Kenya's e-mobility future. They are, however, the people who make a motorcycle a dependable source of income rather than an asset that sits idle for four months, and if the transition is to reach beyond its early adopters, their hands need to be in it as well.
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