Stay in Nairobi, They Remember You. Stay in Toronto, They Underpay You: Kenya vs. Canada on Job Loyalty

🇰🇪 Kenya · 🇨🇦 Canada

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Kenya, 83 percent of workers are disengaged from their jobs, according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace, and yet most of them are not quitting — they are "quiet quitting" or "loud quitting" in place, because there is nowhere obvious to go. In Canada, over a third of workers have held their current job for a decade or more, per Statistics Canada, and yet the market quietly punishes them for it: switch employers and you can expect a meaningfully bigger raise than if you stay. Two countries, two very different definitions of what staying put actually costs you, and neither one is the version in the brochure.

Do's & Don'ts

🇰🇪 Kenya

🇨🇦 Canada

Start with the number that should unsettle anyone drafting a five-year plan around Nairobi: Gallup puts Kenyan workplace engagement at roughly 17 percent, meaning 83 percent of employees are either coasting or actively disengaged (Business Daily Africa, citing Gallup's State of the Global Workplace). A BrighterMonday survey reported by The Star found 54 percent of Kenyan respondents planned to leave their current employer within six months, while only 42 percent said they were actually happy where they were. That looks, on paper, like a labour market in full flight. It isn't, quite — Kenya's informal sector generated roughly 85 percent of new jobs in 2023, according to figures reported via People Daily and Business Daily Africa, which means for most workers "leaving" a bad formal job doesn't lead to a better formal job, it leads out of the formal sector entirely. Loyalty, in that context, is less a virtue than a hedge: career advice circulating in Kenyan outlets (The Star cites both Jack Ma's three-year rule and an HBR-style preference among lenders for two years of steady tenure) treats staying as the safer financial bet, even when the job itself is uninspiring.

What actually moves a Kenyan career forward is less often a market mechanism than a relationship one. Hofstede Insights' regional profile for Kenya scores power distance at 64 and individualism at just 27 — a hierarchical, relational culture where who vouches for you outweighs what your CV says. That tracks with how hiring is widely described on expat forums covering Nairobi's workplace culture: foreign or well-paid staff are expected to put in long and flexible hours in return, and getting hired at all often runs through a known contact rather than an open posting. Kenyans who do leave for work abroad frequently cite exactly this bottleneck — Kenyans.co.ke has quoted migrants heading to Canada saying their prospects at home depended on connections they simply didn't have, degree or no degree.

Canada's pitch is the inverse, and just as misleading if taken at face value. Statistics Canada's 2023 job tenure data shows 36.1 percent of workers aged 25 and over have held their job for ten years or more, up from 32.5 percent in 1976 — a nation, supposedly, of the institutionally loyal. But that stability is unevenly rewarded. Discussion threads on the professional network Fishbowl, debating job-hopping, cite employees switching jobs for average raises around 8.5 percent against roughly 5.9 percent for those who stay; one poster described a $30,000 jump after six months with a new employer, another said a nurse's pay more than doubled over a decade purely by moving between facilities. Loyalty earns you a pension and a parking spot; mobility earns you the raise.

For the newcomer specifically, Canada's reputation for order collides with a less tidy reality: credential recognition. The C.D. Howe Institute has estimated the underemployment of skilled immigrants costs Canada over a billion dollars a year in lost tax revenue alone, and the pattern shows up anecdotally everywhere — an expat.com forum thread features a British postgraduate with two degrees and solid recruiter feedback who could not land a single interview in Toronto, eventually advised by other posters to try Alberta instead, where competition is thinner. Vacancy data tells a similar story about the limits of "stability": Statistics Canada records a 6.8 percent vacancy rate in accommodation and food services against a 4.1 percent average across all industries — plenty of churn exists even in the land of the ten-year tenure.

So here is the reckoning. Kenya's labour market looks volatile from the outside — high disengagement, short planned tenures, an informal sector absorbing most new jobs — but loyalty there still functions as currency, because the relationships it builds are the actual infrastructure of hiring. Canada's labour market looks orderly from the outside — long tenures, formal processes, credentialed everything — but loyalty there is financially punished in a way Kenya's system rarely bothers to be explicit about. The brochure version has Kenyans imagining Canada as a place where sticking with one employer finally gets you somewhere; the data says Canada rewards the willingness to leave more consistently than Kenya does, while making you prove, with paperwork, that you deserve to be there at all.

The counterintuitive part is which mobility is actually voluntary. Kenyan job-switching is frequently involuntary mobility dressed up as ambition — people moving because the formal economy can't hold them, not because the market is rewarding movement. Canadian job-switching is closer to the textbook version: a rational response to a market that pays strangers more than it pays veterans. If you are weighing a move, the real question isn't which country is "more loyal." It's which currency you're better positioned to accumulate — trust, in a relationship economy, or negotiating leverage, in a transactional one — because arriving with the wrong one in hand is how a banker ends up sleeping outdoors in Ontario, as one Kenyan migrant's widely reported story made clear, having expected stability to simply be waiting for him on arrival.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Expat.com, Nairobi forum — Posters describe foreign or senior hires being quietly expected to work weekends and long hours in return for better pay, with one commenter noting bluntly that a high salary isn't an invitation to a vacation.

Fishbowl — In a thread on job-hopping, one commenter reported a roughly $30,000 pay jump after just six months at a new employer, while another described a nurse's income more than doubling over ten years purely by moving between facilities rather than staying loyal to one.

Expat.com, Toronto forum — A newcomer with two postgraduate degrees and consistently positive recruiter feedback couldn't secure a single interview in Toronto; other posters' advice wasn't to improve the résumé, but to leave the city, since Alberta had far less competition for the same skills.

Kenyans.co.ke (named first-person account) — A Kenyan banker who quit his job expecting to find housing and stability in Ontario instead ended up sleeping outdoors after shelters filled up, and is now pursuing a truck-driving licence to chase a labour shortage rather than return to his original field.

Kenyans.co.ke (named first-person accounts) — Multiple Kenyans heading to Canada cited the same root frustration with staying home: without the right connections, even a completed degree wasn't enough to get hired locally.

Conclusion

The honest version, for anyone actually packing a bag, is this: Kenya will ask you to be patient and well-connected, and will pay you back in access rather than cash; Canada will ask you to be credentialed and willing to leave, and will pay you back in cash rather than belonging. Neither country's system is designed around what either side's advertising implies, and both can strand you if you bring the wrong expectations — a CV with no referrer in Nairobi, or a foreign degree with no Canadian reference in Toronto.

If a friend asked me over a drink which one actually rewards loyalty, I'd tell her neither does, not really — Kenya rewards knowing the right people, and Canada rewards being willing to walk; the trick is figuring out which of those two things you're already good at before you buy the ticket.