The news from Nairobi this week is that Kenyans abroad are sending less money home. For the first seven months of 2026, diaspora remittances came in at about Sh369 billion, roughly Sh9 billion below the same seven months a year earlier. That is the first year-to-date fall the Central Bank of Kenya has recorded in about 17 years. The headline is real, and the number is Kenya’s own.
If you are a UK Kenyan reading this and wondering whether the Sh9 billion is somehow about you, the short answer is no. The hole is almost entirely a Gulf story. Saudi Arabia sent about 25 percent less in 2025 than in 2024, mostly because the kingdom’s 15 percent VAT on money-transfer service fees and its expat work-permit rewrite squeezed low-wage foreign workers in the same window. The Iran war, which began in February 2026 and hardened into US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June, prompted CBK to cut its full-year Kenya forecast in April by Sh40 billion, on the expectation that Gulf inflows would keep weakening through the year. About half a million Kenyans work in the Gulf. Most of the shortfall was theirs.
The UK side has not fallen out of the count. The counted number is doing something else.
What CBK’s number is actually measuring
The Sh369 billion for January to July is CBK’s diaspora remittances series. It counts what commercial banks and licensed international money-transfer companies report as coming into the country. It is a formal-channel number. It has always been a formal-channel number. That is a strength on freshness (it lands every month) and a weakness on coverage (it misses everything that does not touch a bank or a licensed app).
The month itself was fine. July 2026 came in at $436.6 million, up 16.2 percent on June, and about 6.5 percent above July 2025. So the year-to-date fall is not a July collapse. It is the arithmetic of a soft spring and a soft early summer, with the loss concentrated in flows out of Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf.
Where the UK actually sits in the picture
For years the informal wisdom was that the UK was Kenya’s second biggest source of remittances, behind the United States. The picture changed when KNBS, CBK and Financial Sector Deepening Kenya finally ran a proper national household survey and published it in June 2026. That survey covered the 12 months to May 2025 and, unlike the CBK monthly release, it went looking for the money that never touches a formal app.
The survey came in at Sh931.8 billion for the year. About Sh797 billion moved as cash through the formal system, namely banks, mobile money operators, licensed money-transfer companies like Western Union and MoneyGram, and fintech apps like Sendwave and WorldRemit. Another Sh67 billion moved as cash through informal routes: hawala-style trust networks between London and Nairobi, cash pressed into a cousin’s palm at the airport, and small but real crypto peer-to-peer sales into M-Pesa. And about Sh83 billion arrived in-kind, as goods carried by relatives on flights or shipped home in barrels. Roughly one Kenyan shilling in every six that actually reaches Kenyan households was not being counted at all.
When the survey ranked source countries with the informal flows included, the United States held the top spot at 43.5 percent. Then came Germany, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Spain and South Sudan. The UK came in eighth, with about Sh35.9 billion in cash and in-kind flow, or about Sh20.8 billion in pure cash.
Two things are worth reading out of that. The UK is a smaller share of the counted formal flow than most people assumed, once the household survey put every source country on the same footing. And Kenya’s diaspora money is now clearly driven by the North American labour market first and the Gulf labour market second. The UK Kenyan diaspora is a real audience, but on the size of the money, it is not the audience Nairobi watches when a monthly release lands.
What has actually changed for UK senders
If the Sh9 billion is not a UK story, it does not follow that nothing has changed on the UK side. Two things have changed, plainly, and both of them hide inside the counted number.
The first is which app people open. Three years ago, most UK senders to Kenya were either paying too much through a high-street bank or opening Wise for anything over a couple of hundred pounds. That is still broadly true. What sits underneath it is a small group of specialist apps built for the exact send a UK Kenyan makes, which is a modest amount into a family M-Pesa wallet within minutes. Sendwave has become the default for sub-£200 sends; the fee at the transfer screen is often zero and the cost lives in a rate margin of about 1.5 percent. LemFi, WorldRemit and Remitly have widened their UK to Kenya coverage over the last two years, with fee-free recurring transfers common and first-transfer promotional rates that occasionally beat Wise outright. All five are licensed in the UK and all five are inside CBK’s formal-channel count. So the mix inside the counted number has shifted quietly toward the specialist apps, but the count itself has not moved because of it.
The second is that senders wait. When the shilling weakens through the summer, a portion of UK senders delay the non-urgent transfer by a week or two, hoping the rate steadies. When the rate looks fair, the same senders send in a lump. This shows up as a soft month followed by a slightly stronger one. July 2026’s rebound has some of that in it.
The routes the count still cannot see
The household survey said about Sh151 billion moved outside the formal system in the year to May 2025, roughly Sh67 billion of it in cash through informal routes and about Sh83 billion of it as goods carried or shipped in-kind. It did not slice that figure by source country, so nothing in the survey lets anyone say how much of the UK to Kenya flow is informal. The survey was designed to measure Kenya as a whole, not the UK slice.
What is safe to say is that all three informal candidates are present between the UK and Kenya. The hawala trust network has been running between East London and Nairobi for as long as the diaspora has existed there; it moves pounds informally against shillings released on the Kenyan side, often within a day, and it leaves no receipt visible to CBK. Personal carry is quietly the largest informal channel by the survey’s own numbers, and any Kenyan who has travelled home in the last year knows why: a returning cousin carries an envelope and everyone saves the fee. And stablecoin peer-to-peer is a small but growing route among the younger London tech-diaspora cohort, where the sender buys USDT and the Kenyan buyer releases shillings straight to M-Pesa. None of these three has a monthly release. Their combined weight was invisible until KNBS went and knocked on 4,440 doors.
What this actually means for someone sending pounds this week
Not much practical, and that is the point. The Sh9 billion fall is Gulf, not UK. The July rebound is real. The apps that shifted on the UK side are all still counted. The routes that are not counted are old and mostly ordinary: a returning aunt, a trusted broker, and a slowly rising sliver of crypto. If you are sending your mother her monthly amount to M-Pesa this week, none of what is in the news changes what you should do. The cheapest way to send from the UK to Kenya has not moved.
What has changed is that Kenya, for the first time, has a serious measure of the money its diaspora sends in ways the formal system was never going to catch. When the next headline arrives, the interesting question is not whether the counted number went up or down. It is whether the uncounted number moved with it, or against it. That is a question CBK cannot yet answer, and neither can anyone else. But the survey now exists, and the pretence that the monthly release is the whole picture has quietly ended.
CBK figures cited here are current as of Tuesday 25 August 2026, drawn from CBK’s July 2026 diaspora remittances release and the 2025 Remittances Household Survey (KNBS, CBK, FSD Kenya, published 16 June 2026). If the Middle East picture shifts in the second half of the year, the counted total will move with it.
Corrections
- 2026-09-02: An earlier version of this article linked “hawala trust network” and “stablecoin peer-to-peer” to
/hawala-and-hundi/and/stablecoin-cheaper-than-transfer-app/respectively. Both explainer pages actually publish under the/all/path, so the two links 404’d. The links now point at /all/hawala-and-hundi/ and /all/stablecoin-cheaper-than-transfer-app/. No number or claim on the page has changed. - 2026-08-25: An earlier version of this article said the household survey found Sh651 billion moved through banks and licensed apps and about Sh281 billion moved through everything else, and that roughly 30 percent of what reached Kenyan households was not being counted. The 2025 Remittances Household Survey actually reports Sh797 billion through the formal cash system (banks, mobile money, money-transfer operators and fintech), Sh67 billion through informal cash routes, and Sh83 billion in-kind – so the uncounted share is roughly one shilling in six, not three in ten. The paragraphs describing the survey have been rewritten to match the report.
- 2026-08-25: An earlier version said “the Iran war in June 2026” made CBK cut its full-year forecast by Sh40 billion. The Sh40 billion cut was announced in April 2026, citing the ongoing Iran conflict (which began 28 February 2026) and Saudi transaction taxes. The June 2026 US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites came after the cut. The wording has been fixed to reflect that timeline.
- 2026-08-25: An earlier version said KNBS knocked on 4,400 doors for the household survey. The actual sample was 4,440 households across 444 enumeration areas.