“Uber employs more than 12,000 drivers in Kenya. All of the more than 80 people who were interviewed expressed distress and said they were barely making ends meet.”
By now it’s a familiar story: Uber enters a new market, enticing drivers with big promises and relatively high pay. Drivers base their decisions — like whether to buy a car that meets Uber’s standards — on these initial terms. Then, as more drivers flood the platform, Uber drops rates, in many cases leaving the drivers saddled with debt and no way to pay it off.
In a new report based on interviews with more than 80 current and former Uber drivers, NBC News zooms in on how this pattern played out in Kenya, where Uber cut prices by about 35% after other app-based taxi services launched. In one example cited by the report’s author, Amanda Sperber, the owner of a dealership in the port city of Mombasa said that “while his sales doubled thanks to Uber, repossessions also spiked,” and that sometimes drivers come to him crying.
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