The Creative Economy Owning Itself, Part 1: Where It Started

Kolekta isn't just a tax tool. It's what happens when the creative economy decides to own part of its own infrastructure.

Where it started

From working as a freelancer to registering a company ,Wona Films, a production company in Nairobi. But it’s a two person operation and we all had to deal with our taxes in one way or another. The idea for Kolekta didn't come from a market analysis or a gap-in-the-industry deck. So during tax season, running around looking for answers. Then finally meeting our accountant, asking why this and why that, always asking him to generate invoices.

Kolekta came from doing the work, chasing WHT certificates that never arrived, reconciling invoices against a KRA figure that seemed to come from nowhere, watching the stress around tax because nobody had ever built a tool to help and all other tools didn’t necessarily serve the average freelancer.

Tax ndio ina kushinda. Not because the law is impossible. Because nobody built the tools for the way creative work actually happens: a job here, a contract there, cash today, an invoice paid in ninety days, no HR department, no finance team, no accountant on staff. The tools that exist were built for accountants, for companies with a finance function, for people who already have someone else doing this for them.

So the first version of Kolekta was simple: build the tool that should have existed already.

The decision that made it different

Somewhere in building that tool, a second question showed up, and it mattered more than the first one.

Who should own this?

The easy answer is: whoever builds it, in the normal way software gets built and sold. A company, a subscription, a founder, eventually maybe investors, and the people who use it stay exactly that: users. That's not a bad model. Most useful software in the world works that way, including plenty of tools freelancers already rely on.

But it's worth asking, once, whether that's the only model, especially for infrastructure meant to serve an entire economy that doesn't currently have much collective power of its own.

The Mondragón reference

The clearest precedent for this isn't in tech. It's in the Basque Country, in 1956, in a converted storehouse where five engineering graduates and a priest named José María Arizmendiarrieta started making paraffin heaters.

What they built became Mondragón: today a federation of over 260 co-operative businesses, tens of thousands of worker-members, and more than a billion euros in revenue, still governed on a simple rule: one worker, one vote, regardless of role or seniority. No outside shareholders extracting profit. No founder walking away with the upside while everyone else stayed an employee. Workers who join build up a personal ownership stake over their working life, paid out when they leave. The business is run professionally and competes on real market terms. The co-operative structure isn't charity, it's ownership design.

Mondragón isn't a perfect model, and its failures are as instructive as its successes. But the core mechanism, that the people who create the value can also hold a permanent, structural claim on it without needing to found the company themselves, is exactly the mechanism Kolekta wants to emulate by creating a tool with input from the community it will serve. Not a copy. An adaptation, built for Kenyan market, for a creative economy.

In Part 2: who gets to lobby, who doesn't, and why the difference between a tool and infrastructure is the whole point.