How SBM Bank is raising Kenya's next money-smart generation
Sponsored by SBM Bank
SBM Bank Kenya CEO Bhartesh Shah speaks during the launch of the SBM Bank Busara Kids Banking App on March 17, 2026.
Kenya's mobile money story is one of the most cited in the world. With over 52 percent of adults using mobile money daily, up from just 23 percent in 2021 according to the 2024 FinAccess Household Survey, the country has built a financial infrastructure that many nations globally are still trying to replicate.
Despite all this financial activity, only 18.3 percent of Kenyans are classed as financially healthy by the same survey, meaning that just one in five adults is truly managing money well, not just accessing it. It’s a case of high access, low financial health. That gap does not appear from nowhere. It is built, slowly, over years of childhood and adolescence.
Research by FSD Kenya found that Kenyan children begin picking up financial signals from their parents as early as age four or five. By the time they are nine or ten, most already understand that having money gives them options. By their mid-teens, they are spending on electronics, fashion, and experiences, and research shows that they increasingly resist talking about money with their parents.
Across homes, children are watching parents pay bills by tapping a phone screen; send school fees with two clicks; and top up airtime without ever reaching for a wallet. Money, to these children, looks effortless. It looks instant. And critically, it looks disconnected from any amount of work.
The physical signals that once made money feel real – counting change, handing over notes, watching a parent count coins at a shop – have largely disappeared from the daily rituals of urban and peri-urban life.
A generation ago, a child might watch their parent budget visibly, handle cash carefully, and explain why something was too expensive.
Today, the explanation is invisible, and so is the lesson. The deeper problem is that most Kenyan homes do not have a system that links the two most teachable elements of financial life: Effort and reward.
SBM Bank Kenya's Busara app was built with precisely this in mind. It is an integrated family finance platform that creates a visible, structured link between a child's effort and their earning, which is the foundational lesson that modern domestic life has largely erased.
Parents assign tasks, set their monetary value, and children complete them to earn into their own wallet within the Busara banking app. Nothing moves without effort nor is given without a reason.
For children aged 8 to 18, this is more than a savings exercise. It is an introduction to how the adult world actually works. The child who spends three weeks working toward a goal they set for themselves is learning something that no classroom lesson about budgeting can replicate.
They are learning what it feels like to wait, to work, and to arrive at something they earned. That experience, repeated over months and years, shapes how they will eventually manage their own finances as adults.
Parents, in turn, gain something equally valuable – a framework for financial conversations that most find difficult. Talking to children about money tends to happen reactively, in frustrating moments at the checkout. Busara creates the conditions for those conversations to happen proactively, within a structure the child already understands and accepts.
Kenya's savings rate, sitting at roughly 13 percent, is not going to improve by targeting adults whose money habits are already set. Neither is a generation of young adults going to develop financial resilience if the first time anyone systematically teaches them about money is when they are entering the workforce with debt already accumulating.
The financial window that matters most is childhood, specifically the years between 8 and 18. It is when habits are forming, identity is being built and children are beginning to make real decisions about real resources.
Busara is designed to operate inside that window. Not to overwhelm children with financial jargon, but to make a simple, durable truth obvious through lived experience: Effort producing reward, and reward requiring a choice.
Busara banking app gives families a tool to live these values in practice, every day, in a way their children can see, track and participate in.
For a country with Kenya's financial potential and financial challenges, that is exactly the kind of upstream investment the next generation needs.
