For Irungu Nyakera · private
A job-matching tool that already runs in Kenya, and three ways it could be yours in Makadara.
Ken Mwara
nairobi.jobscout.page
September 2026
Your record, as a ladder
| Years | Seat | What it was |
|---|---|---|
| 1989–2003 | Starehe Boys’ Centre | The first door of all |
| 2003–2007 | Stanford — BSc, Management Science & Engineering | The credential |
| 2007–2009 | Citigroup — Financial Analyst | The one that set the rest |
| 2009–2013 | NIC Capital — Senior Associate to Managing Director | Four years, four titles |
| 2013–2014 | GuarantCo — Regional Head, East & Southern Africa | Infrastructure finance |
| 2014–2015 | Equity Investment Bank — Managing Director | Running the book |
| 2015–2018 | Principal Secretary — Transport & Infrastructure | Delivery, at national scale |
| 2023–2025 | Chairperson — KEMSA, then KICC | Governance, twice |
| 2023–2025 | Oxford — Executive MBA | Finished last November |
Public record, as published.
The argument
Everything on the last slide followed from those two. The work was yours and the degree earned the interview — but each door still had to be there: a school that went looking for boys it would otherwise never have found, and a firm that reads a CV from a Kenyan graduate and calls him back.
Neither of us chose the first one — it chose us. I grew up in Kimathi, and the boys I grew up with there were not less able than we were. Most of them never found out whether a door existed at all, because nobody tells you which one to knock on, or that this particular one was never going to open.
You are standing to represent them. I am offering the thing I wish one of us had had.
The 2027 campaign
A promise, a rally, a bursary cheque, and a sentence in a manifesto nobody will hold them to after August.
A thing that already works. On their own phone, in their own hand, before the vote — and still working after it.
The difference is not the promise. It is that one of you can be checked.
04
Open it now
The day’s sweep re‑gated for a hire based in Kenya, with a rubric that asks first whether the employer can legally hire from Kenya at all. That is the question most “remote” postings answer only after a week of applying.
105 of the 110 on‑site Kenyan postings in a recent sweep gave their location as the single word “Kenya”. The page offers no town picker, because the sources publish no town and the page will not invent one.
No account, no download, no data plan beyond a page load. There is an Android app in closed testing on Google Play, and an iPhone one close behind — both running this same engine.
I am not asking you to imagine this. I am asking you to open it while you read the next slide.
05
Why it is worth your name
Every match is scored out of 100. Under 55, the app will not write a letter that pretends — it names the gap in the employer’s own words, and then still lets them apply, with a letter that leads on their strongest real experience rather than hiding what is missing.
A programme that tells a thousand young people they are perfect for everything produces a thousand rejections and no explanation. One that says “not this one, and here is why” produces fewer applications and more interviews.
When it carries your name, that honesty is yours too.
A real verdict: 47 out of 100. The employer wants three years this CV does not have, and the app says so up front — rather than letting her apply and wait for a reply that never comes.
47
Door one
BRANDED
A market of its own, the way Nairobi and Canada already are. Weeks of work, not months.
MEASURED
Thirteen named events are already instrumented, through to what happened after an application — applied, replied, interviewed, offer. Marked by the young person it happened to.
CHEAP
Rules kill most postings before any AI is called. A thousand young people, run weekly, is a hosting bill, not a budget line.
OUTLASTS AUGUST
Whatever the result, it keeps running. That is the difference between a campaign asset and a record.
07
Data protection
A youth programme that collects CVs is a register of young people’s personal data, sitting on someone’s server, under the Data Protection Act 2019 — with a controller, a retention policy, subject-access requests, and a breach waiting to have your name attached to it.
This one never writes a CV to storage. Not on the web, not in the app. The text is read for one scoring run and discarded, and a check on both surfaces proves it on every release.
No register to breach. No retention schedule to defend. No subject-access process to staff.
No question at a hustings about what happened to the CVs, and no answer you would have to check with a lawyer first.
And it is a reason for a young person to trust it with the one document they are most careful about.
08
The other two doors
DOOR TWO
JobScout runs in two markets and has no revenue, because money was designed out of it: no accounts, nothing stored, nothing sold. That was the right call for proving it works and the wrong one for keeping it alive.
You have financed infrastructure at GuarantCo and run many a bank’s book. You would be able to tell in one conversation whether there is a business here — which is worth more to me than the cheque.
DOOR THREE
The campaign site. A constituency app. A dashboard that tells you what is actually happening on the ground rather than what the ground team says is. Whatever the 2027 operation needs that software can do.
I build and run all of it myself, so the person you brief is the person who writes it and the person who is still there in July.
09
10
Who is writing to you
Nine products of my own, designed, built, deployed and operated by one person: an autonomous trading platform running on real money, a web studio, an operations dashboard, a sports-modelling brief, two YouTube studios, and JobScout.
I built JobScout for my own search first. The Kenyan market exists because I grew up in Makadara and wanted the answer for the people I grew up with.
Nairobi — a delivery business runs its dispatch, its rider statements and a live map of its whole fleet on software I wrote. Every bike sits on one screen, and each position is the rider’s own phone reporting where it is — never a dot the system guessed to fill the map. Live, and carrying real deliveries.
Uganda — Sacred Earth, a travel brand’s entire public site: fourteen pages built around the client’s own photography, with the pricing, the enquiry flow and the legal pages. Design through to deployment, by me.
No agency, no account manager, no subcontractor in another timezone — you brief the person who writes the code. Every claim in this deck is checkable in an afternoon; JobScout’s source is public at github.com/kenmwara/jobscout-app.
What I am asking for
Not a decision. Open nairobi.jobscout.page while we talk, paste in a CV — a young person’s from Makadara, or your own from 2007 — and watch what it says. Then tell me which of the three doors, if any, is worth walking through.
If the answer is none of them, I would still rather know that than not have asked.
Ken Mwara
kenmwara@gmail.com
+254 721 695449 · Kenya
+1 236 594 8584 · Canada
Your first door was Starehe, in 1989. This is a tool for finding the next thousand of them, and I would like it to have your name on it.
The deck is built for a wide screen. It reads much better in landscape.