Paying Casual Campaign Workers Without Breaking the Law

Campaigns employ people. Not the way a company does, but drivers, mobilisers, ushers, cleaners, agents and the crowd that puts up posters are all doing work for money.

Kenyan campaigns tend to treat that as an informal arrangement, and it is the area where informality creates the most exposure. Employment and tax obligations sit on one side of it, and election offences on the other.

The line between a wage and an offence

Paying a person for work done for your campaign is lawful. Giving money or goods to a voter to influence their vote is an offence under the Election Offences Act 2016.

The difference is not the amount and it is not the channel. It is whether work was actually done, agreed in advance, at a rate that reflects the work.

Which means the record is the defence. A named person, a stated task, a rate agreed before the work, a date, a signature and a payment that matches all four is a wage. The same money handed out on polling day with no task, no list and no rate is something else, and it will look like something else to anybody who examines it.

Agree the rate before the work

Write a short schedule of the roles your campaign uses and what each is paid per day. Agent, driver, mobiliser, cleaner, usher, loader. One page.

Circulate it internally. When a coordinator recruits, they recruit against the schedule rather than negotiating individually, which stops the rate drifting upward through the campaign and stops three people doing the same job for three different amounts.

It also removes the most common source of polling-day conflict, which is not non-payment but disagreement about what was promised.

The payroll list is the record

Prepare it before the day, not on it.

Name, identification number, phone number, role, station or ward, agreed rate, days worked. That is the list you pay from and the list you file. Every person signs against their own row, or acknowledges by a message you keep.

Pay in a single run rather than continuously through the day, from a campaign line rather than a personal one, and reconcile the same night while the list and the money are both in front of you. Related: how to run the mobile money side of that.

Polling day is the largest single payroll most campaigns will ever run, which is why the list has to exist in advance. Related: why agents are recruited months out.

Most polling-day disputes are not about the rate. They are about whether transport and a meal were included in it.

Settle that in the schedule. State the daily rate, state separately what the campaign provides on top of it, and state what happens if somebody has to travel further than expected. Then say it out loud at the training rather than leaving each coordinator to explain it in their own words.

Record those items separately too. Fuel for a vehicle carrying agents and food for a training session are campaign expenditure whether or not you think of them as pay, and a payroll that quietly absorbs them tells you neither what the people cost nor what the day cost.

Deductions, and where to get the current rates

Kenyan employment and tax law applies to people who work for you, including casual and short-term workers, and what is owed depends on how a person is engaged and for how long.

Do not take current rates or thresholds from this article, from a peer, or from what a campaign did in a previous cycle. Get them from the Kenya Revenue Authority for tax and from a qualified accountant for the rest, and get them before you build the payroll rather than after you have paid it.

If your campaign will run a payroll of any size in 2027, this is the single question most worth paying a professional an hour to answer.

Volunteers are volunteers, and should stay that way

A volunteer reimbursed for fuel and given lunch is a volunteer. A volunteer paid a daily rate is staff, whatever you call them.

Decide which each person is, tell them, and be consistent. The trouble comes from the middle case, where nobody said and expectations formed anyway.

Build the polling-day payroll now

You already know roughly how many people you need and where they will be. Build the list in 2026 with the columns above, leave the names blank where you do not have them yet, and fill them in as you recruit.

Then price it against your budget. Related: the five lines campaigns get wrong.