It been ages! I know and I am sorry. Things got buffallo and thick. Reminds me of Dj Watene of Strathmore school. Well this has been a pending post until we had this conversation with one @g33kmate.
Conversation we had been having
Now my sample space consisted of people who filled in a questionnaire(ex campus mates). If you did not get it, there will be a second round. I needed to confirm if the methodology first works where I could narrow down to the average earnings. Kenyans love beating around the bush and the best way to actually get information on how much they earn is to ask different bush beating questions. By doing the safari of questions then you look at probability. No more details till here.
Well being on a start up advisory board, remuneration was a factor we had to consider and proved to be very challenging especially given the Kenyan market. Also given that the start up has some of the industry’s best devs. The average standard deviation is very high! Meaning, we do have the Karumaindo Technologies that offer a campus grad 30,000 KSH. As many students are desperate they jump on to the deal without negotiating for better pay akin to a lion jumping onto their prey. Many never pause to think how much they value their skillsets, or how their skillsets match with industry needs. Of course if you are the only dev in Kenya to knows Erlang, then do not bill the same as PHP devs?
Employers on the other hand have acres and acres of space to play around. Where do you think that cash of the end year bash will come from and mileage for the C.E.O’s car? Of course from the pay cut they take once they sign on the dotted line. So who are the best employers? What is the market rate? Of course you need to narrow down your search to employers to avoid, employers to bear with, and employers you would love to work for, and employers you dream to work for. From what I collected so far, the industry leaders pay a minimum of 100,000KSH. This is entry level. With more experience this pans out to around 250,000 KSH. So use this guiding principle find the how many years you have been in the industry and perform a quartile function of those years with respect to the market rates. Of course there are firms that allow ‘mpango wa kando’, hence that fella taking home 250K may be taking more than that home. Na jamaa bado anainsist kupanda matatu na wewe.. 
I love billing per hour or per day. Its always best to have an average of how much you hourly work costs. Of course writing a Python library is not the same as uploading data, but having an average helps. This also helps in quantifying projects. Averagely a developer with 2 years experience charges around 2000 KSH minimum per hour. So performing a quartile function of the same then the first year one should charge 1000 per hour. Assuming that you work 8 hours in a day, you pocket 8K. In a month you take home 160K. Of course having to give to Ceaser what belongs to Ceasar, then you take home around 100K.
This reminds me of a statement iddsalim once made,
Instead of getting like 6 clients each paying 40K. Get one that will pay you 200K
Why? You will have less meetings to satisfy each, you become more proficient with more focus, you will have your weekends to yourself and better half(if there is one). Juggling six clients is not easy, especially having to play cat and mouse games with them. Oh ati sijui PHP ikona shida, C++ code imekataa ku run kwa hii ingine, kuna bug ya Fortran fulani. Jeez get a life. I would rather have a css pro who has done a rendering library than a programming language (malaya) Excuse me.For lack of a better word.
I also think employers have a part to play. By underpaying their staff, turn-over is ridiculously high. I know of firms that have employed some very nice tricks to get staff to be kind of attached to the company, such as negotiating morgage rates with banks for their staff. Hence you have an anchor doing what it does best? Well such tricks are short lived.
This also applies to quantifying your products. Many devs do not know costing. How do you cost that internet connection? That kabambe you had to buy to do application testing? That amazon server you had to initiate as a staging server? That chai mama boi brings you every day in the morning?. Having a look at fixed and variable costs could play a great deal here.
How much does a GeoDev cost? Well the rates for Kenya are the same as depicted above. In order of relevance, look for Non for profits. They manage most of the GIS budget in Kenya. Closely followed by government and government agencies. In terms of agencies, agencies that are in the energy sector and what we call ‘agenda four’ are ideal. By ‘agenda four’ i mean any of the reform institutions in Kenya, then followed by multinationals. In last position are private firms. I hope this helps.