Moving to Nairobi with Kids: What Nobody Told Me Before We Arrived
We arrived in Nairobi on a Tuesday in February, which is technically dry season, though nobody told our first afternoon about that. It rained so hard that the road outside our temporary apartment flooded to hubcap level and a small queue of matatus sat in it looking mildly inconvenienced, the way Nairobi traffic always looks mildly inconvenienced regardless of circumstances. My youngest was four, my eldest was seven, and both of them pressed their faces to the window and said, more or less simultaneously, “Is this normal?”
I had no idea. That was the honest answer. I had no idea if this was normal or unusual, whether we should be worried or delighted, whether the flooding would be gone in twenty minutes or three days. I had moved to a city I had never visited, in a country I had only read about, with two children and a suitcase full of information that turned out to be only partly accurate.
This is the post I wish I had been able to read before we came. Not the glossy expat guide version with curated restaurant lists and spa recommendations. The actual one.
Choosing a Neighbourhood
Nairobi is not one city; it is about fifteen different cities sharing a geography. The expat community is heavily concentrated in a handful of neighbourhoods – Karen, Runda, Gigiri, Lavington, and Westlands being the main ones – and your choice of where to live will shape almost everything else about your experience, including which school your children attend, how long your commute is, and how often you actually leave the house.
Karen is where I would tell most families to start. It is leafy, spacious, relatively calm by Nairobi standards, and has a strong expat community that is welcoming to newcomers. The trade-off is that it is far from the city centre and the UN campus, so if your partner works downtown, the commute is real. Runda and Gigiri make more sense if the UN or embassies are the destination. Westlands and Lavington are increasingly popular with younger families who want to be closer to the city’s restaurant and social scene.
Whatever neighbourhood you choose, the Nairobi Expat Facebook group is indispensable. It is chaotic and overwhelming and full of people asking the same questions you are, and it is the fastest way to get real, current, on-the-ground information from people who arrived last month and are figuring it out alongside you.
Schools
Schools are the decision that shapes everything else, and in Nairobi, you have more options than you might expect. The main international schools – ISK (International School of Kenya), Braeburn, Rosslyn, Greensteds, and the French School among them – each have their own character, curriculum, and waiting list situation, and the right fit depends heavily on your children’s ages, your likely posting length, and where you might be going next.
ISK follows a US curriculum and is the largest international school in Kenya, with a long-established expat community and strong sports and arts programmes. Braeburn follows the British curriculum and has multiple campuses across the city. If you are likely to move on to another East African country, the IGCSE/A-Level pathway at Braeburn travels well. My advice: apply to two or three schools simultaneously before you arrive. Waiting lists are real and move slowly.
Daily Life
Daily life in Nairobi is more comfortable than most people expect, and more challenging in ways they do not anticipate. The infrastructure is genuinely improving – there is good supermarket shopping, reliable medical care at facilities like Aga Khan and Nairobi Hospital, a thriving food scene, and a social calendar that can be as full or as quiet as you want it to be. What takes adjustment is the pace of everything administrative, the traffic (which is legendary and deserves its reputation), and the mental recalibration required when things do not work the way you expect.
Load-shedding – power cuts – are a part of life, though better managed in some neighbourhoods than others. Most expat homes and compounds have backup generators. Water can be intermittent. Internet is generally good in established expat areas. Crime is a real consideration and takes some adjustment, but the expat community is well-networked about safety and the practicalities become routine relatively quickly.
What the Kids Will Love
Here is what I was not prepared for: how quickly and completely children adapt. My seven-year-old had Kenyan friends within three weeks. My four-year-old started picking up Swahili phrases that she then deployed at the dinner table with tremendous satisfaction. The outdoors life here is extraordinary for children – the Nairobi National Park is a forty-minute drive from most expat neighbourhoods, the Giraffe Centre is a genuine thrill at any age, and weekend trips to the Mara or the coast become the rhythm of your school year in a way that is, honestly, just wonderful.
The Giraffe Centre in Karen allows children to hand-feed Rothschild giraffes at eye level from an elevated platform – it is one of those experiences that stops being something you plan and becomes something you do every time visitors arrive, because it never gets old. Not for the kids, and not for the adults either.
Moving to Nairobi with children is not easy. The first three months are genuinely hard, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either very resilient or not being entirely truthful. But it gets better, and then it gets good, and then one day you realise that your children are growing up with a kind of ease with the world – a comfort with difference, a curiosity about other ways of doing things – that is worth every difficult Tuesday in February.
