Outgoing UN Resident Coordinator recalls paying 10 bob for room in Nairobi
By Kenneth Mwenda, March 26, 2026Stephen Jackson, the outgoing United Nations Resident Coordinator in Kenya, has spoken about his first night in Nairobi and how it shaped his career.
Speaking during a morning interview on Thursday, March 26, 2026, Jackson said he arrived as a student and backpacker in 1986, long before joining the UN.
“Got the bus up from Moshi, I was in Tanzania, came up to have a look and that changed my life, genuinely,” he said.
Jackson stayed in a tenement on River Road with three friends.
“We made the mistake of saying to the taxi driver we needed somewhere cheap. We kind of meant cheap for a mzungu. He took us to cheap, yes… I seem to remember it was liket 10 bob for the room, but it was 100 bob for the padlock. That was memorable,” he recalled, laughing.
He described the contrast between rural Tanzania and Nairobi.
“Moshi was villages, agricultural, rural. Then the bus dropped me off in front of what I didn’t know then, but was KICC. I had never seen a skyscraper before. Didn’t have any in Ireland. It blew my mind. I expected desert and zebra, and instead, already 40 years ago, this was a cosmopolitan global centre. And you could see where it was headed. That was what made me want to do this job.”
Jackson reflects on Kenya
Jackson took up the UN role in Kenya in 2021, having previously served in Gabon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Burundi. Over five years, he led the UN’s 25 agencies in Kenya, representing the Secretary-General in driving development goals.
“Everything that has changed for the good in Kenya – the growth, the development, but also the things that have remained constant – the warmth, the enthusiasm, the hard work, and the optimism of the Kenyan people,” he earlier said.
Jackson reflected on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the challenges in achieving them.
“On the one hand, Kenya is making good, steady progress towards quite a number of the goals. But the bad news is, yes, we’re off-track on others of them, and Kenya’s not alone in that – in fact, the SDGs are off-track around the world,” he said. He cited global crises, conflicts, and pandemics like COVID-19 as major obstacles.
Funding changes, such as the closure of USAID, also complicated development work.
“And international solidarity for me is the principle on which we live together, or we die together,” Jackson said. He urged countries to explore new funding models, including private sector contributions and domestic resource mobilisation. “That means raising money responsibly through taxation and spending it responsibly for projects that really make a difference,” he said.
As he prepares to take the Resident Coordinator role in China, Jackson described his time in Kenya as “an amazing privilege.” Despite serious responsibilities, he will remember his first night in Nairobi fondly, with the cheap room and the expensive padlock.