Whether you call it academic writing or doing assignments for money, academically gifted people in Kenya can write their way to a great income. Learn how to turn your qualifications and expertise into a money machine.
Nothing is more frustrating than being a degree holder who just can’t secure a job. Especially when you’ve been conditioned to believe that a good education will secure your future.
A good education can open opportunities to earn a good income and live well. But increasingly those opportunities don’t come in the shape we imagined.
If you change your perspective and open your mind to alternative ways of leveraging your education and expertise for money, you will find that you don’t have to despair over your failure to secure formal employment.
There is an opportunity for academic writing that is begging for people with the expertise and skills you have. You have the experience from writing your own essays, dissertation, and course work and the knowledge you acquired through your degree that you can share with current students.
You, of course, can get paid well for it.
In this article, we will tackle the subject of academic writing and doing assignments for money in Kenya. We will share everything you need to start earning money online providing assignments and homework help to students.
Let’s get started.
What is academic writing?
Academic writing is a formal style of writing that emphasizes structure, clarity, facts, and citation of facts. Impersonal and unemotional, academic writing has its own rules that are different from web article and blog writing.
Unlike blog writing which is used to educate and sway opinion, academic writing is primarily used to showcase the author’s knowledge. That is why it must have a formal tone and a logical flow.
Students who master academic writing improve their chances for higher grades. On the other hand, professors and researchers must have good academic writing skills to convince funders and get research grants.
Types of academic writing
There are different types of academic writing, all of which fall under two main categories. There is academic writing produced by researchers and university professors, which includes the following types:
- Reports,
- Journal articles,
- Books.
The type of academic writing produced by professors and researchers is commonly published in university journals and scholarly publications. Some of it is published as textbooks.
Then there is academic writing produced by students, which include the following:
- Essays,
- Lab reports,
- Research papers,
- Dissertations or theses,
- Literature reviews,
The best examples of academic writing for students are persuasive yet analytical, descriptive, and critical. This is the type of academic writing that students often pay you to help them with.
How to make money from academic writing in Kenya
Academic writing offers a big opportunity for university graduates and tertiary students looking for ways to make money online. This opportunity has been variously described in Kenya as:
- Doing assignments for money,
- Getting paid to do homework,
- Earning money by writing assignments.
Of course, students use different language for this. They call it assignment or homework help. To them, academic writers are no more than online tutors that help them grasp concepts they would not have understood during lectures.
Whatever you call it, the student market for academic writing is worth a lot of money. Millions of students in countries like the USA, the UK, Australia, and Canada look for qualified people to help them complete assignments.
Some of the courses these students are studying are highly demanding both in terms of the time investment and the studying and assignments they must do. Some students work part-time jobs to help them pay tuition and often miss some lectures because of it, which forces them to seek outside help.
Kenya produces an estimated 50,000 university graduates every year, many of whom will not find work because the economy does not create that many jobs.
Academic writing, which offers plenty of work opportunities online, offers these unemployed graduates a way to apply their newly acquired knowledge while earning a good income.
Can you earn a living doing assignments for money in Kenya?
Thousands of people in Kenya earn money online by helping students complete their assignments. In fact, Kenya is considered one of the top sources of academic writing and assignment help talent in the world.
Kenyan graduates and tertiary students earn side income by providing assignment help to students in Kenya and in countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia, and the UK. Whether you can earn enough to live well from offering academic writing services depends on a few factors, namely:
1. The market you serve
You can provide assignment help to students at different levels, including those in high school, college, and even postgraduate students studying for PhDs.
As you would expect, serving students at each level demands a certain level of expertise. A PhD student should expect to pay more than a high school student.
2. The academic writing platforms you use
Where you look for clients also determines how much you can potentially earn from academic writing. Most academic writers in Kenya search for work on websites where students post requests for assignment help.
These websites take their cut from what you earn. The students who look for homework help on these websites pay through the website, which then takes their cut and gives you the remainder.
Some of these websites take as much as 20 percent as their cut. Many don’t even tell you what they take from what you earn. Like Edusson above, they may however tell you what you should expect to earn.
3. How much you charge
If you prefer to look for your own clients and not use websites like Edusson, you can charge what you want. There are Facebook groups where writers and assignment help resellers post jobs.
With these jobs, you can negotiate a price. Everything you charge and the student agrees to pay is yours. The risk you get looking for assignment help work this way is there is no payment protection.
One of the benefits of working for large academic writing platforms - and possibly why they take a cut from what you earn is the payment guarantee they provide. With these platforms, students pay upfront and the payment is held in escrow. You are essentially working for a guaranteed income.
4. Your level of education or expertise
No matter what your area of expertise is, there is a student somewhere looking for help with their assignments. And if you are in some niches, there may not be many of you available to help students with their homework.
If you are like Rabia Abbas above, you could potentially charge premium fees to help students with their mathematics assignments. There aren’t many people who are that good at mathematics, so you should be able to find work.
5. How much time you devote to academic writing work
Of course, with academic writing and assignment help, how many hours you work or how much writing you can produce for clients is directly related to how much you can earn. If you do this work part-time, a person who works 8 to 5 serving clients is going to out-earn you.
How much does academic writing pay in Kenya?
The Kenyan academic writer cited in this article says he earns around USD 1,000 per month and sometimes much more. This person is, however, highly experienced, which means they know where to look for high-paying jobs and have developed good negotiation skills.
As a beginner, you will not earn as much as the writer in our example. You will earn more with experience. Your goal should be to earn more with each client by gradually upgrading the quality of clients you serve, which also means not looking in the same places for work.
If you look in places like PayScale, Glassdoor, and ZipRecruiter, you are going to get misleading numbers on how much you can potentially earn with assignment writing or when doing assignments for money in Kenya.
The reason is most of those sites pull their information from job boards and company websites where vacancy ads for formal academic writer jobs are posted. These are not the jobs most academic writers in Kenya end up taking.
Many academic writers and assignments helpers in Kenya are freelancers or independent contractors that serve one or more clients at a time, which means their income can vary widely from month to month and depending on experience.
Where to Get Academic Writing Jobs in Kenya
There are many places online where you can connect with students looking for academic help. These include Facebook, Craigslist, Reddit, and many other forums. You can also register on platforms that subcontract academic writing work.
These sites have already done the marketing grunt work for you. All you have to do is register or, with some that only work with a certain calibre of an academic writer, show proof of qualifications and pass an entrance test.
When you choose to work on academic writer platforms like the ones we will list below you get the benefit of a constant stream of jobs, even though some of them may not be the most lucrative.
Here are some good places online where you can get academic writing and assignment help work:
1. Edusson
Edusson is home to some of the best academic writers from across the world who are drawn by the constant stream of projects posted on the platform every day.
Elite academic writers on Edusson can earn up to USD 2,000 a month. There's such high potential to earn on Edusson there is a secondary market on Facebook where expert and advanced level accounts are sold.
Edusson claims that every beginner that has yet to accumulate enough good ratings to attract clients can find work. It says it supports all major payment methods and that payments are made promptly.
To register and start taking assignments on Edusson, academic writers must pass a short test and submit their identification documents and qualifications. This process takes about 15 minutes to complete.
2. Course Hero
Course Hero’s model pushes the boundary on what can be considered academic help, with many expert educators of the opinion that all the platform does is help students cheat. Course Hero and many tutors who earn a living answering questions students post there don’t agree.
Course Hero says it helps its tutors leverage their knowledge and expertise and help students from all over the world for money. Earnings on Course Hero can vary depending on the question subject, question difficulty, answer quality, and the number of questions answered.
3. Homework Market
Homework Market has a system that allows students to post homework questions along with their budget and deadline. Writers will then place bids.
Homework Market says it has a diversified team of academic writers who can help answer homework questions on any subject. Some of the types of academic writing you can expect to be doing on this platform include speeches, essays, book reviews, business plans, university assignments and coursework.
4. Elite Homework
Elite Homework guarantees that academic writers who sign up on its platform have the opportunity to work on all manner of writing tasks, including admission essays, revision, and editing support.
Looking at the order form on the Elite Homework website home page, we can see that the platform has four levels of academic writers, namely high school, undergraduate 1-2 years, undergraduate 3-4 years, master’s, and PhD. You would assume that PhD level academic writers enjoy the best rates.
5. Essay Pro
Essay Pro is another academic writing platform that offers a consistent flow of projects to work on. Once you get accepted on the platform you can work on different types of essays and assignment help.
The platform even says it offers physics help. The great thing about working on a platform like this is you are almost guaranteed to find academic writing tasks that align with your expertise and education.
EssayPro has an honour code, which it says affirms its support for academic integrity. It says it is strongly against cheating and plagiarism, adding that freelancers on its platform will not take tests for students.
6. Assignment Access
Pitching itself as the platform for ‘prime student help’, Assignment Access hires academic writers to answer questions posted by students. One of the better platforms out there, Assignment Access isn’t always hiring writers so you have to keep checking for when they open new spots.
Assignment Access has over 6,000 academic writers on its books. These writers have helped deliver over 5,000 client projects working on such writing tasks as coursework, dissertations, and conventional papers.
7. TeacherOn
TeacherOn connects tutors and academic helpers with students in their own locales. This means when you work on the platform, you can search and work with students from Kenya.
Academic writers on the platform come from all over the world. And because many mostly work in their countries of residence, rates that helpers charge vary wildly.
Tutor requests on TeacherOn are posted right through the day. And there is a healthy stream of requests from within Kenya. This means this is one of those online writing jobs that can pay through M-Pesa.
On TeacherOn you are free to negotiate and receive payment directly from clients. The platform does also offer the safer option of getting paid through its system, which offers payment protection.
There are many instances where freelancers enter into private payment arrangements with clients but end up getting cheated when clients simply choose not to pay. When that happens you have no recourse, especially when the client is on the other side of the world.
There are many other websites where you can go to find academic writing and academic help work. Many of them require you to take a test and submit your qualifications. You can also look for academic writers on large freelancer sites like Upwork, where a lot of Kenyans work every day.
Academic help vs academic cheating. Where do you draw the Line?
Is doing assignments for money in Kenya or anywhere else akin to aiding and abetting academic cheating?
This is a highly debated topic that has divided opinion for a long time. What is clear though is that the question of cheating only applies to the student. As an academic writer, you are simply writing for money.
Whether it is homework, a dissertation, or a research paper, to the contracted writer, this is any other writing assignment for which you are being paid for your time and knowledge.
What the client does with the text you provide them is out of your control. You can genuinely say that you are being paid for providing academic help in the same way an online tutor earns money.
You can only be accused of academic cheating - or being an accessory to such - if you posed as the student in question and actually sat and wrote an exam for them.
So there is plenty of work out there for qualified Kenyans who are looking for legit ways to make money online. Academic writing, doing assignments for money, getting paid to do homework, or whatever you call it are proper ways to earn a living in Kenya.
The one part of this whole gig we haven’t discussed is how to access your payments. You shouldn’t have to worry about that, though:
How to access your academic writing payments easily and safely
Many academic writing platforms provide several ways to withdraw your earnings. These include PayPal, Payoneer, and ACH. While these are all good options, for Kenyan academic writers, IntaSend, which some of these platforms support, is a cheaper local option that offers a lot more.
IntaSend is a payment platform that was built with the needs of gig economy workers in mind. We have all the tools you need to invoice clients, request payments, and get paid.
If you look for your own clients, you can use our invoice generator to create your invoices online and our no-code payment links to easily request payments from clients. No-code payment links are convenient for your clients too, who will be able to complete payments easily.
Once the payments are in your IntaSend account, there are many ways you can manage them. You can withdraw directly to your M-Pesa or bank account. Or you can choose to make your own payments from your account. You can even order a virtual Visa or Mastercard and use it to pay for your Netflix subscription and shop your favourite online shops.
Sign up for an IntaSend account to get paid from anywhere and enjoy the best financial tools and services for freelancers and online business owners.
