As Treasury Cabinet Secretary Mbadi delivered this year’s Sh4.2 trillion budget speech, Florence Akinyi sat quietly by her shoe-shining stall in Nairobi’s CBD, barely listening. Her focus was elsewhere—on how to survive another day in a city growing more expensive by the minute.

For the past 19 years, Florence has polished shoes and scraped together enough to feed her children, pay rent, and maintain a modest sense of independence. But now, that fragile balance is slipping through her fingers. “These days by noon, I’ve only made Sh450,” she says, wiping a brush across a client’s shoe. “Before, I’d have earned Sh1,200 by that time. Now, I don’t even know how to plan.”

It’s a quiet kind of despair. She says she’s stopped expecting things to get better. Instead, she has joined a church choir, clinging to hymns for comfort when money can no longer offer stability. “After work, I just sing. It helps me forget what’s waiting for me at home.”

Home is where three unpaid months of rent and unanswered questions from her children await her. Sometimes, Florence says she deliberately stays in church through three masses just to delay facing the day’s hunger. “I buy time so breakfast becomes lunch,” she says. “It’s the only way I can manage.”

Like many Kenyans working in the informal sector, Florence puts not value  to the promises laid out in government statements. The 2025 budget, meant to drive economic recovery and reduce the debt burden, feels distant and abstract to people like her.

“I haven’t even paid for my child’s school certificate—just Sh3,500, and I don’t have it,” she says, shaking her head. “If I could get a job as a maid and stay in the servant quarters with my kids, I’d take it. I’m not ashamed anymore. I just need something that works.”

A few blocks away, a security guard voiced similar frustrations, asking not to be named. “The budget should be focused on lowering the cost of living, not just paying debts,” he said.

“We keep hearing about growth, but what about the pain we’re living through now? Corruption keeps eating away everything.”

For both Florence and the guard, national figures and projections mean little when each day is a gamble. Their stories echo a deeper unease among low-income earners who say they feel left behind by economic policies that promise recovery but rarely touch the ground where they live.

“Life is just hard,” Florence says simply. “You can’t even budget anymore—there’s no money to budget with. You just try to survive.”

In the background, city life rushes on as the youths engage the police in running battles, teargas canisters and stones rent the air. But for Florence, every polish, every coin, and every borrowed minute in church is part of a larger fight—not just to get by, but to hold on to dignity in a system that’s moving too fast for people like her.