24-year-old Simon lives among the lush, green hills of Kenya’s central highlands, near the bustling regional town of Nyeri. His father owns a small plot of land where the family grows tea, making him one of an estimated 600,000 smallholder tea farmers in the country. The industry provides around half of the tea that we drink in the UK.
As things stand, Simon works online as an “academic writer”: One of thousands of highly-eductated, unemployed young Kenyans ghost-writing essays, PhD dissertations and other academic papers for students in wealthy countries like the UK and US. But he hopes that one day he will be able to save enough money to buy a plot of land so that he too can become a farmer.
