Activity that looks like enterprise, and does not compound

Kenya's Gen-Z cohort is the most digitally native generation in the country's history. The question is whether the enterprise ethic it has adopted builds productive capacity or substitutes for it.

There is a version of the digital economy story that is entirely about upside, and Kenya has good reason to tell it. There is also a structural question underneath it that the growth statistics have not yet caught up with.

A dominant entrepreneurial ethic anchored on social media virality, platform aesthetics, short-form commerce and influencer identity produces measurable activity. What it does not reliably produce is capital that compounds: durable firms, transferable skills, or productive assets that outlast a platform's ranking algorithm.

The policy question is therefore not whether young people are enterprising. It is whether the incentives around them reward the kind of enterprise that still exists in ten years, and what an industrial and skills policy would look like if it took that distinction seriously.