WorthBuilding

Photo by Desola Lanre-Ologun on Unsplash Every young person in Kigali has heard the same career sermon by now. Learn to code. The internet doesn't care where you were born. Get a remote job, earn in dollars, work from your bedroom. Build your skillset and the money follows. It sounds like a door swinging open, and for a generation watching wages stay flat while everything gets more expensive, it sounds like the way out. I'm a software student. I've done the remote work. I'm not here to tell you the advice is a lie, because it isn't. But there's a part of the sermon nobody preaches, and it's the part that actually decides whether any of this works for you. The part where you overperform for an underwhelming job Here's what they leave out about getting hired. You don't just compete for a job, you overperform to get a worse one than you deserve. You study hard, you build the projects, you sharpen the skills everyone told you to sharpen. Then yo...

Photo by Omoniyi David on Unsplash I'm a young African scrolling the internet, and money advice finds me everywhere. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, the finance guys, the books. They mostly say the same handful of things. Buy index funds. Max out your 401k. Let compound interest do the work over the decades. Your house is your retirement. I haven't read or watched all of it, obviously. But I've seen enough to know the shape of it by heart. And the thing is, it's one move. Buy, hold, wait. It's not fake and it's not even bad, it works where it works. What gets me is that you're supposed to stake thirty years on that single move paying off, and if it doesn't, you find out far too late to do anything about it. Some of those accounts and apps and voices are useful. The advice usually isn't wrong. It might even be a fine first step. Two problems, though. Most people around me never get to take that step at all. And the step was drawn up for somebody livi...

Photo by Random Institute on Unsplash There is a particular feeling that financial technology has gotten very good at selling. You are standing at a checkout, online or in a shop, and you want something you cannot quite afford this week. A screen offers you a way out. Split it into four payments. Pay nothing today. The thing is yours now, and the cost arrives later, in pieces small enough to ignore. For a moment the gap between what you have and what you want simply disappears. That feeling is the product. Not the loan, not the item. The feeling that the gap is gone. It is the same feeling whether the screen says Klarna or Afterpay at an American checkout, or whether it is a menu on a basic phone in Kigali offering you a loan in under a minute. The technology is different. The currencies are different. The marketing is dressed up in different languages. But underneath, the offer is identical, and so is the trap waiting on the other side of it. Our generation, more than any before ...

Photo by Jean Claude Akarikumutima on Unsplash There's a plot of land near me in Kigali, a little under 500 square meters. In 2006 it was worth around 3.5 million Rwandan francs. By 2025 it was valued somewhere between 50 and 65 million. That's not a typo. The land got about fifteen times more expensive in under twenty years, and nobody I know earns fifteen times what their parents earned. I'm in my twenties. I look at the people younger than me, the ones still in school, and one question stays stuck in my head: will any of them ever own a home? Not a mansion. A home. Four walls that belong to them instead of a landlord. For a long time the honest answer felt like no. Then I started seeing a different kind of story online. People a bit over my age, some under, some exactly my age, in markets just as broken as the one I'm watching, actually buying houses. Set aside the trust-fund kids, the inheritances, the lucky breaks, all of which are hard to come by now anyway. ...