“Make Your Own Investment, Not in Children”: What One Conversation Taught Us About Retirement

Sometimes the most important lessons about the future come from people who have already lived through it.

There are some conversations that stay with you long after they end.

During a recent community engagement in Donholm, Nairobi, we had one of those conversations with Robert, a man in his mid-sixties whom we met while he was working as a boda boda rider.

At first glance, there was nothing particularly unusual about the encounter. We began talking, and as we shared about Amazing Potential Ltd’s work around retirement preparedness, his response immediately caught our attention.

He wanted to know more.

Not because retirement was something he was thinking about someday.

He had already lived through it.

Robert had previously worked at the airport and eventually opted for voluntary retirement. His decision was influenced by something he had observed among some of his former colleagues: people would retire from employment without adequately preparing for what came next.

For him, retirement was not simply about leaving a job.

It was about what happened after the job.

And that distinction is important.

Retirement is not the end of work

For many people, retirement is imagined as a finish line.

You work for several decades. You reach a certain age. You leave employment. Then you figure out what comes next.

But what if the preparation for retirement started much earlier?

Robert’s experience challenged that assumption.

He explained that after observing the experiences of former colleagues, he began thinking seriously about how he would live after employment. He chose to invest in assets, including land and rental property, and continues to build what he described as his investment base.

Then he gave me a statement that has stayed with me:

“You see me here with an old motorbike, you may feel pity, but I sleep in my own home in Njiru. I own rentals and continue to acquire more. Make your own investment, and not in children. Give children their right to education, but they are not your investment.”

There is a lot to unpack in those words.

The first is that appearance does not always tell the full story.

A person may appear to be struggling from the outside while quietly building assets and security for themselves.

The second is that retirement preparedness requires personal responsibility.

And perhaps most importantly, Robert’s story raises a question that many of us do not ask early enough:

What exactly are we building for ourselves?

The danger of making children the retirement plan

Robert’s statement about children is provocative, but it points to an important conversation.

Across many African families, children are raised with an expectation of supporting their parents later in life. Family responsibility is deeply important, and there is nothing wrong with children supporting their parents.

The problem arises when supporting parents becomes the primary retirement strategy.

Education should give children opportunities to build their own lives. It should not automatically become a financial contract for the parent’s future.

This is where retirement preparedness becomes more than a financial conversation.

It becomes a conversation about dignity, independence, planning and responsibility.

Instead of asking, “Who will take care of me when I retire?”, perhaps we should also be asking:

“What can I begin building today that will take care of me tomorrow?”

Preparation has to begin before retirement

One of the biggest lessons from Robert’s story is that retirement preparedness cannot begin on the day someone receives their retirement benefits.

By then, many of the most important decisions have already been made.

The investments that could have been started years earlier were not started.

The skills that could have been developed may not have been developed.

The business that could have been tested may never have been explored.

The relationships and networks that could have supported a different chapter of life may not have been intentionally built.

Preparing for retirement therefore means preparing for life after employment, not simply preparing for the day employment ends.

That preparation can include financial planning, investment, entrepreneurship, personal development, relationships, health and identifying meaningful ways to spend one’s time and contribute after formal employment.

Listening before designing solutions

Robert’s story was only one of several conversations from our engagement in Donholm.

We also spoke with county staff and local leadership and heard about challenges facing young people, the difficulty of organising into groups and communities whose needs can sometimes remain less visible.

For Amazing Potential, these conversations matter because they remind us that programmes should not be designed from a distance.

Before developing a training programme, we need to understand the people who will receive it.

Before assuming what a community needs, we need to listen.

And before telling people what they should do differently, we need to understand what they are already experiencing.

That is one of the things community engagement continues to teach us.

People already have knowledge.

Sometimes our role is to create the space for that knowledge to be heard, connected and transformed into action.

The question we should all be asking

Robert’s old motorbike was not really the story.

Neither was his house.

Neither were his rental properties.

The bigger story was the decision he made years earlier to think about his future before that future arrived.

That is the heart of retirement preparedness.

It is not about predicting exactly what life will look like twenty or thirty years from now.

It is about refusing to leave the future entirely to chance.

At Amazing Potential Ltd, we believe that human potential is not only about what people can achieve today. It is also about helping people prepare for the different seasons of life that lie ahead.

And perhaps Robert’s words give us a simple place to begin:

Don’t only work for today. Build for the life that comes after the work.