Young, Hip and Country

Hey, Maryann Kabiru here 👋

If your TikTok or Instagram feed looks anything like mine lately, you’ve probably seen young Africans planting maize, baking sourdough, building mud houses, and harvesting tomatoes under golden sunlight.

They’re calling it “trad life” or “slow living”.

And what began as an aesthetic has the potential to become a movement.

Or a quiet roadmap for the future, a new aspiration for a generation rethinking what success means.

Now, it’s about going back home on your own terms.

Scroll through #CountryLiving, and you’ll see a pattern: polished storytelling that makes rural work look desirable, modern, and profitable.

But here’s the thing: there’s a cultural logic behind it.

For decades, the dream for many young Africans has been: degree → city job → leave for greener pastures abroad.

The draw was simple: better jobs, stronger economies, and a version of success the world told them mattered.

But that story is starting to fray.

The dream of “going abroad” is becoming less accessible.

In 2024, Africa accounted for over 700,000 of the ~1.7 million Schengen visa rejections worldwide. Algeria alone had 185,000 rejections out of 529,000 applications.

Those rejections cost the continent about $70 million in non-refundable fees. 

The continent’s visa rejection rate stood at 27%, far above the global average of 16.9%.

Additionally, there has been a 13.5% increase in rejection-related costs hitting the continent.  Nigerians paid an extra £2 million trying to secure UK visas.

And it’s a sting felt by many Africans in the sizable non-refundable fees when applications fail.

With visa fees now pegged at €110 for Schengen and between £115 and £963 for the UK, a single failed application is a burden far too heavy to carry for most Africans.

Additionally, Africa’s unemployment crisis isn’t getting better.

Across Africa, over 140 million young Africans are underemployed.

And for many, the dream of the 9-to-5 has lost its shine.

With city jobs scarce and the cost of living rising, many young Africans turned to online gigs as a safety net.

Since 2022, jobs for African freelancers on platforms like Upwork have dropped by 21%.

Analysts also estimate that 40% of human tasks in Africa’s outsourcing sector could be automated by 2030.

Clients are hiring differently, platforms are paying less, and the gigs that once paid the bills are now done by bots.

So what happens when even your side hustle becomes software?

Young Africans are quietly rethinking what progress means.

And they’re finding answers in an unexpected place: back home, in rural towns.

And behind this quiet movement are real people making bold choices to start over.

When Makori Moraa graduated with a degree in Procurement, she was as optimistic as many wide-eyed young Africans.

She wanted a steady job, a fast-paced life, and a bright future.

And for a moment, it worked out.

She landed a job as a personal assistant in Westlands, Nairobi’s bustling, upscale commercial hub.

Shortly after, she moved to another corporate role.

In 2016, she started a fashion business, which proved demanding alongside her corporate work.

And so she quit her corporate job to focus on the business.

By 2020, during COVID, the long hours and growing responsibilities began to outweigh her earnings. 

She realized the trade-off wasn’t worth it.

One bright morning, she packed her bags and moved to Kisumu, a lakeside city seven hours’ drive from Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.

She specifically moved to rural Kisumu, trading city traffic and high rent for calm lakeside mornings.

And she shared snippets of her newfound life with a small but growing online audience.

While at it, she started farming oyster mushrooms as a smallholder and even branched out to poultry farming.

Today, Makori runs a thriving mushroom farm, teaches mushroom farming online, and documents her journey on TikTok.

Makori’s work now reaches a sizable audience.

She has over 100,000 followers across her Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube channels, where her videos have garnered millions of views.

Her story resonates widely because people can see the practical version of countryside life in real time.

And she’s part of a growing wave.

Across the continent, young people like Makori are blending agriculture with tech, storytelling, and entrepreneurship.

Lavender Awiti, a 25-year-old engineering graduate, left city life for Kisii, a hilly green town in western Kenya.

She opted to pursue the countryside life after a mindset shift from the 9-to-5 grind.

Lavender, like Makori, earns a living by sharing her countryside life.

And her influence is even bigger.

With about half a million followers across all her platforms, Lavender’s videos are viewed by millions monthly.  

She’s part of a new wave of creators turning rural storytelling into real economic opportunity.

Their reach isn’t just aesthetic.

It shifts how thousands imagine rural life, changes perceptions of what’s possible, and nudges more young people to consider the move home.

It’s not just farming, it’s farmfluencing.

For a lifestyle once seen as “uncool,” going back to the land might be the most forward move you can make in 2025.

In cities like Nairobi and Lagos, the math simply doesn’t add up anymore.

Most low-income earners in Nairobi take home under Ksh 25,000 ($162) a month, yet the cost of living for a single person ranges from Ksh 25,000 ($162) to Ksh 45,000 ($291).

In Lagos, entry-level workers earn between ₦85,000 ($57) and ₦100,000 ($67) a month.

Meanwhile, the minimum monthly cost of living for a single person exceeds ₦100,000 ($67), leaving many struggling to make ends meet.

But in the countryside, you own your time, grow your food, and build something that’s actually yours.

And as Africa’s small towns develop, the economic logic becomes even clearer.

These small towns now absorb most of the continent’s urban growth and are emerging as affordable hubs for agro-processing, logistics, and digital services.

Places like Eldoret, Jos, Arusha, and Ibadan are developing rapidly, offering lower living costs and more space to build.

For some young Africans, the countryside isn’t a fallback plan; it’s where the opportunity is shifting.

And the timing is right.

Africa’s agriculture sector is projected to hit $1 trillion by 2030.

Smallholder farmers already feed most of the continent.

And now, tech and creativity are making farming more accessible and profitable than ever.

Add cheap smartphones, fast internet, and audiences hungry for authenticity, and you’ve got the perfect mix: young Africans turning the “village dream” into digital gold.

There’s also a quiet shift in how people choose where to live.

As villages expand into small towns, many young Africans are finding they don’t need to move to major cities to access opportunity.

Today, about half of rural Africans live within 14 kilometers of a city, meaning they enjoy access to services without paying big-city costs.

It’s a subtle but powerful reason the countryside now feels closer to the future than the past.

In Kenya, towns like Kisumu have a daytime population of around 800,000 but shrink to nearly 500,000 at night because so many people commute in from surrounding rural areas.

The countryside is no longer isolated; it’s plugged in.

But this is bigger than economics.

It’s a cultural correction.

Work might be getting automated, but land and food?

Not so much.

Young people are combining low-cost tech (smartphones, mobile money), simple mechanisation (solar pumps, cold-storage), and direct-to-consumer channels (WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok) to create hybrid incomes.

Makori teaches mushroom farming online and sells starter kits.

Lavender documents countryside life and monetizes it through small value-adds like creator workshops for aspiring storytellers.

Multiply thousands of creators like them and you have micro-economies, new supply chains, and a cultural story that reframes rural life as modern and desirable.

And their timing matches a bigger continental shift.

Africa’s small towns and secondary cities are growing faster than its major urban centers.

The number of towns and cities on the continent more than doubled from 3,319 in 1990 to 7,721 in 2015.

Many of the fastest-growing places aren’t capitals but smaller hubs like Gwagwalada in Abuja, Nigeria, and Ruiru on the outskirts of Nairobi, which now has around 400,000 residents.

These towns are becoming affordable alternatives where young Africans can enjoy city-adjacent services while staying closer to home.

It’s a statement about Africa’s future of work, culture, and identity.

The most radical thing about this movement? It’s unglamorous. It’s slow. But it’s sustainable.

And for some young Africans, it’s starting to look less like a retreat and more like a reset.

Because the next chapter of Africa’s growth might not come from cities that never sleep.

But from villages that remember how to breathe.

So, could the next big African dream really be found in the small towns or villages?

👉🏾Let me know here.

Cheers,