Last updated 1 November 2026
Last-mile delivery in Kenya goes back further than the apps. Runners were carrying messages and goods on foot in 1848. Formal delivery systems arrived with colonial rule, as the Imperial British East Africa Company expanded through the region around 1889 and 1890.
Everything since has been a variation on the same job: getting a thing the last few miles to the person who wants it. Anyone who grew up in a Kenyan village knows the informal version — take your uncle's bike, carry this to so-and-so. That was last-mile delivery too, even if it felt mostly like an excuse to ride the bike.
The P.O. Box era
The Postal Corporation of Kenya ran the business well, and was formalised in its current shape in 1998. What it handled, though, was long-distance distribution to a P.O. Box rather than anything resembling doorstep delivery.
Anyone who wrote a letter or filled in a job application in that period remembers putting a box number on it. We still do, in places, even though almost nobody checks a box any more.
The 2010s, and two things that changed at once
App-based delivery accelerated sharply through the 2010s, alongside the rise of e-commerce sellers and online marketplaces. The usual explanation is mobile money, and M-Pesa's spread through urban Kenya was genuinely the enabling condition: once paying a stranger at a distance was trivial, ordering from one became reasonable.
But mobile money was only half of it. The other half was the boda boda.
Before 2010, boda bodas mostly carried people. What the digital startups did was recognise that an enormous, well-used, already-everywhere fleet could carry parcels instead — and turn it into an on-demand delivery network without having to build one.
Where it stands
Kenya is now the third-largest e-commerce market in Africa, behind Nigeria and South Africa, and the delivery market is projected to be worth more than KSh 200 million a year, growing at an estimated 19 per cent.
Set that against a population of more than 50 million, and against infrastructure investment that targets another 100,000 km of national fibre backbone, and online delivery stops looking like a city convenience. It starts looking like a utility that peri-urban and rural Kenya will expect as a matter of course.
What the growth has not solved
Two things, and they are related.
The first is cost. Businesses can deliver today, but when delivery is expensive enough they lose sales to it — the customer wants the product and balks at the total. A delivery network that only works at a high price point serves a narrow slice of the market.
The second is availability. Door delivery assumes somebody is at the door. A great deal of the time nobody is, which is how a delivery ends up attempted twice, rescheduled, or sitting with a neighbour.
There is also a practical constraint that anyone running deliveries in Nairobi runs into quickly: where riders may stop, how long they may wait and which parts of the CBD they may enter are governed by designated parking and access restrictions. A rider circling a block looking for somewhere legal to stand is a cost nobody put in the quote.
Which is an argument for going back to an old idea
The P.O. Box got one thing right that doorstep delivery gets wrong: it separated the delivery from the recipient's availability. The parcel waited, and you came when you could.
What it got wrong was everything else — limited hours, one location, a queue.
A Pod is that idea without the drawbacks. If you are not available to receive a delivery, you collect it from a secure compartment somewhere you already pass, at a time you choose, with a code that only you have. And if the week turns out worse than expected, you can convert the collection into a door delivery instead.
Pinned puts both halves in one place: send a notification, then decide whether a runner collects from you or you drop at a Pod. The receiver gets the same choice at their end — their address, or the nearest Pod. Same day, at a price that does not make the business think twice about offering delivery at all.