A flowering trend in East Africa is reshaping how people express love — and alarming the region’s central banks in the process
Every February, Nairobi turns red. The city’s streets, storefronts, and roundabouts bloom with the colour of romance as vendors lay out armfuls of fresh roses harvested from farms in the Rift Valley and the highlands around Lake Naivasha. Kenya is one of the world’s largest producers of cut flowers, exporting billions of stems annually to Europe and beyond. For decades, Valentine’s Day has been one of the industry’s most reliable windfalls.
But something is changing on Koinange Street, Nairobi’s famous flower corridor. Squeezed between the traditional red-rose displays, a new kind of bouquet has quietly taken root — one whose petals are brown, blue, and purple, and whose stems are built not from flower stalks but from neatly rolled, folded, and fastened Kenyan shilling notes. The money bouquet has arrived, and it is proving every bit as divisive as it is popular.
A Currency in Bloom
Angela Muthoni stands behind the counter of the Gift and Flowers shop in central Nairobi, surrounded by the tools of her evolving trade: ribbons, cellophane wrap, floral wire, and thick stacks of freshly pressed banknotes. A florist by training and temperament, she has spent the past two years adding a new skill to her repertoire — the art of arranging legal tender into arrangements that look, at least from a distance, like something you might find in a garden.
“Everyone loves money,” she says simply, explaining why she pivoted. Her clients, she notes, find cash gifts practical and unambiguous in their generosity. “You might not know what someone likes, but money is the solution.”
In the lead-up to this Valentine’s Day, Muthoni was fielding between 15 and 20 orders per day — a pace that would have seemed extraordinary just a few years ago. The bouquets she creates vary enormously in scale. A modest arrangement might contain as little as 1,000 Kenyan shillings (roughly $8 or £6). The grandest commissions have run as high as one million shillings — a sum that transforms a romantic gesture into a headline-worthy statement of wealth.
The designs themselves range from the purely monetary — fans of folded notes arranged like petals, secured with elastic bands or wire — to elaborate hybrid creations that blend real flowers with cash, tucked into elegant gift boxes or incorporated into custom cake designs. Some clients request themed arrangements: currencies aligned by colour, notes folded into origami-like shapes, or compositions designed to photograph particularly well on social media.
That last detail matters more than it might seem.
A Trend Driven by Social Media — and Social Pressure
The money bouquet craze did not emerge from thin air. Its rise over the past two years in Kenya tracks closely with the explosion of TikTok and Instagram culture, where gift-giving has become a public performance as much as a private exchange. Elaborate “unboxing” videos and Valentine’s Day hauls have made receiving an impressive bouquet — and being seen to receive one — a social event in its own right.
Scott Ian Obaro, a Kenyan commentator who addressed the trend on TikTok, put it bluntly: the culture of money bouquets has encouraged a culture of “showing off.” The gift is no longer just between two people. It is content. And content, by its nature, benefits from scale and spectacle.
This dynamic has not been lost on younger Kenyans, some of whom describe the trend with ambivalence. “It’s some form of peer pressure,” says 24-year-old Haskell Austin. He is uneasy with the direction things are heading. A romantic at heart, he prefers giving flowers — the soft, perishable kind — and finds the cash bouquet “materialistic.” If he were to give money at all, he says, he would simply transfer it digitally, without the theatrics of folding it into a floral arrangement.
University student Benjamin Nambwaya is more pointed in his concern. He notices that women are overwhelmingly the recipients of money bouquets while men are the givers — a dynamic he sees as reflecting social expectations rather than genuine affection. More troublingly, he worries that the trend creates financial pressures and emotional traps: “It can end up destroying relationships,” he says, particularly when recipients come to expect lavish cash gifts that their partners cannot sustain. “It’s a bad thing.”
Yet for every critic, there are enthusiasts. Lynn, a Nairobi resident who declined to give her surname, was looking forward to receiving a money bouquet this Valentine’s Day — and was irritated when an intervention from an unexpected quarter threatened to dampen the mood. Nicole Rono is equally direct: “Who doesn’t love money? Flowers are OK, yes, but money is better.”
The Regulators Step In
That unexpected intervention came from the Central Bank of Kenya, which issued a public warning just days before Valentine’s Day — a piece of timing that struck many as tone-deaf, even if the underlying concern was legitimate.
The CBK’s worry is not about romance, but about currency. When notes are glued, taped, stapled, pinned, or otherwise affixed to form bouquets, they are damaged in ways that can render them unreadable by automated machines — the kind used in banks and businesses across the country. Damaged notes may be rejected outright by ATMs and cash-counting equipment, creating headaches for the recipients of what were supposed to be generous gifts.
Kenya’s central bank is not alone in its concern. The money bouquet trend has spread far beyond Nairobi, taking hold across East and Southern Africa with remarkable speed. The central banks of Uganda, Rwanda, Botswana, and Namibia have all issued their own warnings, suggesting that the phenomenon is no longer a Kenyan curiosity but a genuinely regional cultural shift. The regulators are worried enough that coordinated messaging has become necessary — an unusual step for institutions that typically concern themselves with inflation targets and interest rates rather than Valentine’s Day customs.
The intervention sparked an immediate backlash online, with Kenyans flooding social media with reactions ranging from outrage to humour. Meme-makers were particularly inventive: one popular format reimagined the money bouquet using rolled chapati flatbreads — a joke that managed to skewer both the trend and the regulatory overreach in a single image. Others pointed out that the central bank’s warning, while technically valid, had landed with all the grace of a deflating balloon at a surprise party.
A Cultural Conversation About Love and Money
Behind the debate over banknotes and regulations lies a more substantive question: what does the rise of the money bouquet say about how Kenyans — and Africans more broadly — understand love, generosity, and the social function of gifts?
Economic expert Odhiambo Ramogi offers a framework. He sees the trend as an expression of “our capitalistic approach to life,” driven by the same forces that have made Valentine’s Day a commercial juggernaut globally. “Capitalistic societies are driven by advertising, by marketing, and special days like Valentine’s are a very good opportunity,” he observes. The money bouquet is, in this reading, simply the local adaptation of a globalised commercial holiday.
But Ramogi also raises a point that complicates easy comparisons to Western gifting norms: flowers, as a romantic gesture, are in many ways the foreign import, not cash. The tradition of giving cut roses on Valentine’s Day was shaped by European and American marketing, exported globally over the past century. In many African cultural contexts, giving money — as a mark of respect, generosity, and care — has a far longer and deeper history than giving flowers. “The natural flower has been replaced with the currency flower,” Ramogi says. In that framing, the money bouquet is not a corruption of romantic tradition but its most authentic local expression.
Muthoni, for her part, grounds it in a simpler philosophy. “Love people the way they want to be loved,” she says. It is a line that sidesteps the culture war between romantics and pragmatists, and lands on something like a universal truth about gift-giving: the best present is the one the recipient actually wants.
Innovation and Adaptation
The CBK’s warning has not killed the money bouquet. If anything, it has sparked a wave of creative problem-solving among the florists and gift-makers who have built livelihoods around the trend.
Muthoni says she has already designed bouquets with transparent pockets that hold notes without requiring any gluing, pinning, or affixing — a solution that satisfies her customers while keeping the banknotes intact and usable. She is exploring other innovations, including digital bouquets that convey the aesthetic of a cash arrangement while allowing the underlying funds to be transferred electronically.
Others have found a simpler workaround: switching from Kenyan shillings to US dollars. American currency is not subject to the CBK’s warning, and the dollar’s status as a prestige currency arguably adds a layer of conspicuous generosity to the gift. Whether this counts as a loophole or a genuine solution depends on who you ask.
The demand, in any case, remains strong — and not only on February 14th. Muthoni notes that the celebrations have long since escaped the confines of Valentine’s Day, spreading to birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, and other milestones throughout the calendar year. The money bouquet has become a year-round gift category, a permanent addition to Kenya’s gifting landscape rather than a seasonal novelty.
The Bigger Picture
In a country where economic pressures are real and inflation has eroded purchasing power in recent years, there is something both poignant and revealing about the money bouquet’s rise. It reflects a pragmatic streak in Kenyan gift culture — the sense that the most loving thing one person can do for another is to give them the means to address their own needs and desires, rather than guessing at them. Flowers wilt. Money, spent wisely, can be transformative.
It also reflects a generation shaped by social media, where the performance of generosity has become inseparable from the act itself. A dozen roses, however beautiful, does not go viral. A bouquet containing 50,000 shillings, artfully arranged and filmed in golden-hour light, very well might.
What is clear is that Kenyans — and their neighbours across East and Southern Africa — are not merely following a global trend but reshaping it, making Valentine’s Day their own in ways that reflect their values, their humour, and their cultural priorities. The central banks may grumble. The romantics may despair. But on Koinange Street, the orders keep coming in, and Angela Muthoni’s nimble fingers keep folding banknotes into something that, against all logic, looks very much like a flower.
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