International · August 2026
Working for a company outside Kenya is a different market with different rules, not the same market at a better rate. This page explains how it actually works before it tells you where the work is.
Contents
01 · Why this is reported separately
Treating the two as one market is a common planning error. A skill with moderate demand in Nairobi can carry strong remote demand abroad, and the reverse happens just as often. A professional area that is crowded here may be scarce in a market that cannot recruit locally, and a specialism that feels rare here may be abundant somewhere with thirty years of the same industry behind it.
So the honest thing is to report them apart. Market Update covers what Kenyan companies are asking for. This page covers what companies outside Kenya are asking of professionals based here, which is a different question with a different answer.
Domestic demand rises and falls with what Kenyan organisations are funding this year. International demand answers to a budget set in another country, on another timetable, for reasons you cannot observe from here. The two are not correlated, so a quiet quarter locally tells you nothing about a quiet quarter abroad.
A skill can be well supplied in Nairobi and scarce in a market whose own training pipeline stopped producing it years ago. The reverse is equally common. Scarcity is local, which is the entire reason cross-border engagement exists.
An international rate starts from what the work costs the client at home and is reduced by what distance costs them: coordination, risk, time zone, and the administration of paying someone in another jurisdiction. It is not your local rate with a premium bolted on, and it is not their local rate transplanted.
A junior contractor in Nairobi can be supervised over a desk. The same role delivered remotely across six time zones cannot, so remote engagements tend to be written for people who need less oversight. This is a constraint of the model, not a judgement of the professional.
02 · Four ways to work internationally
Before rate, before country, before industry, the shape of the engagement determines what you need to arrange, what can go wrong and what you should be paid. These four are genuinely different jobs, and a contractor who has done one has not necessarily done the others.
You remain resident in Kenya and deliver to a client abroad. No immigration question arises for you, because you are not entering their country. The questions that do arise are commercial and fiscal: which entity contracts with you, in which currency, under which law, and who accounts for tax where.
This is the model most Kenyan professionals will encounter first, and the one where the paperwork is easiest to underestimate.
You are based in Kenya but travel to the client for specific phases: a design workshop, a testing cycle, a go-live. Project work often needs presence at exactly the moments when presence matters most, and this model is how that is usually arranged.
The commercial terms around travel are where this model most often goes wrong, and they are entirely negotiable before signature.
The client engages you through an entity that already exists in Kenya or the region, or through a partner organisation that does. Contractually this can behave much like domestic work while the project itself is international, which removes several of the hardest questions at once.
Where this model is available it removes most of the friction on this page. It is worth asking whether it exists before assuming it does not.
You move to the client’s country for the duration of the engagement, or longer. This is the model with the greatest change to your life and the greatest number of things that must be correct before you travel, most of which are administrative rather than professional.
Relocation is the model where the cost of getting the administration wrong is highest, and where independent professional advice is most clearly worth its fee.
03 · Working hours
Time zone is the single most underestimated factor in remote international work, and it is one of the few things on this page that can be calculated rather than estimated. Kenya runs on East Africa Time, three hours ahead of UTC, and does not observe daylight saving. That means our clock stays fixed while much of Europe and North America shifts twice a year, so the overlap you agree in July is not the overlap you get in December.
The table below counts the hours a standard Nairobi day, nine to five, shares with a standard local day in each market. Read it as the ceiling on live collaboration, not a prediction of how a team will actually work.
| City | Offset | Shared hours | Band | Seasonal change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NairobiKenya | Reference | – | East Africa Time, fixed all year | |
| LagosWest Africa | UTC+1 | 6 hours | Wide | No daylight saving |
| JohannesburgSouth Africa | UTC+2 | 7 hours | Full day | No daylight saving |
| DubaiGulf | UTC+4 | 7 hours | Full day | No daylight saving |
| MumbaiIndia | UTC+5:30 | 5.5 hours | Wide | No daylight saving |
| LondonUnited Kingdom | UTC+0 / UTC+1 | 5 to 6 hours | Wide | Shifts one hour in the northern summer |
| Berlin, Paris, AmsterdamCentral Europe | UTC+1 / UTC+2 | 6 to 7 hours | Wide | Shifts one hour in the northern summer |
| TokyoJapan | UTC+9 | 2 hours | Narrow | No daylight saving |
| SingaporeSouth East Asia | UTC+8 | 3 hours | Workable | No daylight saving |
| SydneyAustralia | UTC+10 / UTC+11 | 0 to 1 hour | None | Shifts one hour in the southern summer |
| New YorkUnited States, east | UTC-5 / UTC-4 | 0 to 1 hour | None | Shifts one hour in the northern summer |
| San FranciscoUnited States, west | UTC-8 / UTC-7 | 0 hours | None | Shifts one hour in the northern summer |
This is arithmetic, not a forecast. It assumes both sides keep standard hours and ignores public holidays and local working patterns. Agree the overlap window you will actually keep, in writing, and say who moves when it is inconvenient.
04 · The markets
These are the markets this publication tracks. Each entry separates what is structurally true today, which we can state, from demand and rates, which we cannot until the ecosystem is carrying real requirements.
The order is geographic rather than ranked. Publishing a league table of markets would imply measurement we have not done.
05 · Their diligence
A company engaging someone in another country carries risks it does not carry at home, and it manages those risks by asking for more upfront. None of this is suspicion of you personally. Knowing the list in advance is the difference between a two-week start and a two-month one.
06 · Your diligence
Distance makes verification harder in both directions. A company abroad has more ways to check you than you have to check it, and the imbalance is worth correcting deliberately. An overseas offer at an attractive rate deserves more scrutiny than a local one at the same rate, not less.
These are the questions that decide whether an engagement is sound. If a client cannot answer the first four clearly, that is itself the answer.
The rate is the last thing to discuss, not the first. A high number attached to an entity you cannot identify, under a law you cannot invoke, is not a high number.
07 · Payment
Cross-border payment introduces four things a domestic contract does not have: a currency that moves, a route the money has to travel, a tax authority in each country with a view on it, and a longer gap between invoice and cleared funds. Each is manageable. Each is expensive to discover late.
Tax residency, withholding, double taxation relief and exchange control depend on your circumstances, the contracting structure and both countries’ current rules. This page describes the questions, not the answers. Take advice from a qualified Kenyan tax professional before signing a cross-border engagement, and again if your pattern of travel changes during it.
08 · Work authorisation
Immigration rules differ by country, change without much notice, and turn on details of your specific situation. Publishing a table of permit requirements would mean publishing something that goes stale quietly, which is worse than publishing nothing. So this section does something more durable: it explains what determines the answer, so you know which question to take to which authority.
Immigration is quiet here, but tax and contracting structure are not. The questions in sections six and seven still apply in full.
Short business visits and paid work are treated differently in most jurisdictions, and the difference is not always intuitive. Confirm with the relevant authority or an immigration professional before booking travel.
09 · Experience
We do not yet have measured data on the experience levels foreign clients accept from Kenyan professionals, and we will publish it when we do. What we can offer meanwhile is the reasoning, presented as reasoning rather than as a finding, because the logic is visible from the structure of each model.
→ tends to favour experienced and senior professionals
Supervision is structurally thin, so clients carry more risk on someone they cannot observe. Experience is how they reduce it.
→ opens to mid-level as well
Periodic presence restores some oversight, which widens the range of people a client will consider.
→ the most open of the four
A local entity can supervise, onboard and support in person, which is exactly what earlier-career professionals need.
→ tends to favour scarce specialists
The cost of moving someone is only justified when the skill cannot be found locally, which selects for narrow expertise rather than seniority alone.
The pattern above is inference from how each model works, not measurement of who is being engaged. Treat it as a hypothesis to test against a real offer.
10 · Language
English is the working language of a large share of international professional projects, which is a real structural advantage for Kenyan professionals. It is not universal, and the distinction that matters is not whether a market speaks English but which parts of a project require the local language.
On many international programmes the delivery team works in English while workshops, user training and stakeholder meetings happen in the local language. A role can be entirely accessible or entirely closed depending on which side of that line it sits, and the job title rarely tells you which.
A requirement is a condition of doing the work. An advantage widens the roles you can be considered for without gating any of them. Ask which one you are looking at before you invest a year in a language.
Remote engagements weight written communication heavily, and some roles that would need spoken fluency on site do not need it at a distance. The two are worth assessing separately.
A functional consultant may need the local vocabulary of one business process rather than broad conversational command. Scoping the requirement honestly is usually cheaper than assuming the maximum.
ERP TOHAMA Group delivers across these languages today. It is a statement about the group’s own capability, not a claim about which languages the wider market is asking for.
11 · The group’s own footprint
Contractor is operated within ERP TOHAMA Group, which runs delivery entities in three countries. That is relevant here for one specific reason: it means international work is part of the group’s ordinary business rather than an ambition, and the Kenyan entity sits inside the same structure as the Japanese and American ones.
It should be read as context, not as a pipeline. An office in Tokyo is not a vacancy in Tokyo, and this page will not present one as the other.
ERP Tohama KK and MyResource CO., Ltd, Tokyo. The group’s founding market and where the platform family is operated.
ERP Tohama LLC, Austin, Texas. Serving clients across North America.
ERP Tohama Ltd, Nairobi. Serving East Africa, and the entity behind Contractor Kenya.
12 · Editorial standard
International opportunity is the easiest subject on this site to exaggerate. The rates sound better in another currency, the distance hides the detail, and the audience wants it to be true. That combination is exactly why it needs the strictest standard.
13 · Your next step
International work rewards preparation more than ambition, because most of what disqualifies a candidate is administrative rather than professional. The sequence below is the order that wastes the least of your time.
Contractor International is published by Contractor, part of the MyResource ecosystem. Nothing on this page is immigration, tax, legal or financial advice, and no part of it should be relied on as a statement of any country’s current rules. Time zone arithmetic assumes standard nine to five working days and does not account for daylight saving transitions, public holidays or local working patterns. No estimate has been substituted anywhere on this page.
