Chamaa, a Phil It Productions drama about five women, a Sacco and a death nobody can explain, premiered on Maisha Magic Plus on Monday 5 October 2026, giving DStv and GOtv viewers a story about the savings circles many of them already belong to.
MultiChoice Kenya, a Canal+ Group company, calls the series “a raw and resonant look at modern Kenyan life through the lens of friendship, ambition, and survival.”
Meet the women of Gakoe
You know this chama. Someone always collects early, someone is always late, and everyone knows more about everyone than they admit. Chamaa starts in that familiar room.
The series follows Lydia, Njambi, Halima, Cyndy and Phoebe on Gakoe Estate in Ruiru, a setting the writers created for the show. Their merry go round chamaa, in the statement’s words, “has long been the quiet engine” behind the lives the women show the public.
When the savings circle becomes a Sacco
Then Phoebe moves in. She convinces the group to turn their informal savings circle into a Sacco, and the statement calls what follows “a lifeline out of debt.” It does not stay quiet. A fixer who works for politicians offers “a real estate deal too good to refuse.”
The Sacco grows, the risks grow with it, and the money vanishes. A death follows, and the women are “forced to choose between protecting each other and protecting themselves.”
Why it lands close to home
MultiChoice says Chamaa “holds a mirror to contemporary Kenyan life.” The series explores curated online personas, the realities of chama culture, and “the widening gap between the lives people project and the ones they actually live.”
It also covers financial independence and predation, corruption and the “wash wash” economy, and, in the statement’s words, “the quiet cost of maintaining appearances in the social media age.”
Real numbers sit behind those themes. FSD Kenya’s report on the 2024 FinAccess survey records strong Sacco membership growth and high engagement in savings and credit, and it warns of affordability barriers and consumer protection problems, including system downtime and unethical practices.
One analysis of the same survey puts Sacco usage up from 9.6 percent to 11.7 percent. When a drama builds its plot on a Sacco, viewers bring their own savings group to the screen.
Shirleen Wangari on Phoebe
Wangari plays Phoebe and describes her with obvious affection.
“In chama I play Phoebe, a lady who hosts too many secrets and is running away from her past,” she says, hoping for a new life. Then Phoebe moves to the estate and “finds her past right there and things begin to unravel.”
What does Phoebe want? Wangari keeps it simple. Phoebe wants “a fresh start for her and her son” and “community with the women of Gakoe.” The role caught Wangari for a reason. “The mystery drew me to Phoebe,” she says, and as filming continues, “I’m fascinated by her and I hope I do the role justice.”
She also has a clear view of the title word. “A chama is a community,” she says, and in a community people have a great time together and also have many differences, “some life altering, but people find a way to work things out and continue living as a community.”
Phoebe’s world, she says, is filled with those ups and downs, and “she has to fight for the relationships she treasures.”
Wangari rates the women of Gakoe as problem solvers. “The problem solving at Gakoe by the women is on another level,” she says. She hopes it inspires viewers “to show up everyday as themselves and face the day.”
A set that laughs together
Ask Wangari about the crew and the pride shows. “The energy on that Phil It set is something special,” she says. She credits Kola Agnes, whom she describes as first assistant director and director, with handling a cast of different personalities and mood swings.
“Her showing up at 100% with respect and joy makes us have no choice but to follow in her footsteps.”
One day stays with her. On a random shoot day, Gathoni Njuguna, who plays Njambi, “cracked us up so bad we had to stand down.”
She is honest about what the job means. It is “a blessing” to play a character, to entertain, and to possibly reflect some of the women in society. “Not to forget the daily bread,” she adds.
Her advice to young creatives is short: be bold and do what you want to do. “Life is not a rehearsal.”
Meet the cast
Chamaa leans on actors who have carried Kenyan drama before, so it helps to know who is in the room.
Shirleen Wangari (Phoebe). Wangari came up through Tahidi High, appeared in MTV Shuga, and has a credit in the Netflix series Sense8. She also runs Blackwell Films.
The company backed her first feature, Cards on the Table: A Christmas Movie, which opened at Century Cinemax, Garden City Mall, on 29 November 2025.
Joyce Musoke (Lydia). Musoke works across screen, stage and voice, with roles as Lizzy in Second Family, in Mpakani on Netflix and in Crime and Justice. Crime and Justice launched in 2021 as Kenya’s first Showmax Original, and its lead, Sarah Hassan, won Best Lead Actress in a TV Drama at the Kalasha Awards.
Makena Kahuha (Cyndy). Kahuha started acting at six, when she auditioned to play her mother’s daughter in the show Wingu la Moto. She later played Zuri Tandala in Kina on Maisha Magic Plus.
She also joined the cast of The Chocolate Empire, which premiered on Showmax on 20 March 2025, with Subterranea listed as her earlier credit.
Wakio Mzenge (Mrs Omollo). Mzenge grew up in Mombasa, studied English Literature at Moi University and first worked on a professional stage with Heartstrings Entertainment in 2008. She played Nerimah, Bwatele County’s first female governor, in the Showmax political thriller County 49.
Her awards include Best Actress in a Film at the 2021 Lake International Pan African Film Festival for Tales of the Accidental City, and the 2023 Kenya Theatre Awards prize for a female actor in a monologue.
Gathoni Njuguna (Njambi) and Melissa Lesilale (Halima). The statement lists Lesilale’s earlier credit as Lazizi, a telenovela that debuted on the same channel on 6 October 2025. It lists no earlier credits for Njuguna, whom Wangari names as the cast member who stopped a shoot with laughter.
Who made it, in their words
Director and producer Philip Karanja pitches Chamaa as a story about identity. “Chamaa is a story about the masks we wear and what it costs to keep them on,” he said. He expects viewers to see themselves in the cast. “These are women Kenyans will recognise immediately, the chef, the influencer, the pastor, the socialite, because we’ve all met versions of them, or been them ourselves.”
The chama itself drives the plot, in his view. “What excites me most is how the chama, something so familiar and communal, becomes the thread that pulls their whole world apart,” Karanja said.
“We wanted to tell a story that feels both intimate and unmistakably Kenyan.” Karanja also directed Untying Kantai, written by Abel Mutua, which was billed as a Showmax Original.
Nzola Miranda, CEO of MultiChoice Kenya, framed the series as part of the channel’s strategy. “Chamaa is exactly the kind of storytelling we want to keep bringing to our audiences, stories that are unmistakably Kenyan, deeply relatable, and unafraid to explore the realities beneath the surface,” he said.
He added: “Through partnerships with talented local producers like Phil It Productions, we continue to invest in homegrown content that reflects who we are, while giving our audiences more value, content and choice.”
How MultiChoice builds Kenyan content
The series reflects MultiChoice’s “continued commitment to investing in bold, homegrown storytelling that speaks directly to local audiences,” giving Kenyan creators a platform to tell “stories rooted in the realities and rhythms of everyday life.” The record behind that pledge has three parts.
First, commissioning. MultiChoice Kenya is a joint venture between MultiChoice Africa and the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, formed in 1995, and its Maisha Magic channels carry Kenyan content, much of it commissioned by M-Net in Kiswahili. The channel sets the terms. One M-Net drama brief for Maisha Magic Plus sought 120 episodes of 26 minutes aimed at Kenyan middle class families. Producers such as Phil It then pitch into those briefs.
Second, people. The MultiChoice Talent Factory trains emerging filmmakers from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia. At the 13th Kalasha International Film and TV Awards, MultiChoice Kenya shows earned 37 nominations across 11 programmes, and the Talent Factory class of 2022 won two awards
Third, open casting. When Maisha Magic Plus launched Lazizi last year, close to 1,000 hopefuls auditioned for roles, and channel head Margaret Mathore framed the show as part of the channel’s investment in Kenyan storytelling, as Khusoko reported. The company has pushed this line for years. In 2021, executives called the group the biggest investor in local content as they launched the Maisha Magic Movies channel. Khusoko’s Maisha Magic Plus coverage tracks the rest of the slate.
How much does Kenya matter to the parent? MultiChoice Kenya does not publish its own split. Its parent group reports Kenya inside a Rest of Africa segment, which held 60 percent of the group’s subscribers in the year to March 2023, and Nigeria led that segment on subscription revenue in an earlier report.
Currency is the risk: in the year to March 2024, steep falls in local currencies in Nigeria, Angola, Kenya and Zambia cut the segment’s US dollar revenue by 32 percent.
Where Chamaa sits in African drama
Chamaa arrives at a tense moment for African series. Streaming took a hit first. MultiChoice shut Showmax on 30 April 2026 after Canal+ cited heavy losses. Canal+ says it will keep investing in premium content for MultiChoice subscribers. That puts more weight on channels such as Maisha Magic Plus.
African stories still travel. The South African drama The Polygamist recorded more than 23 million views in its first month in 2026, and Netflix has invested in subtitling and dubbing so African productions reach other markets.
At the top of MultiChoice’s own slate, Shaka iLembe cost more than any other South African drama and holds the record for drama wins at the SAFTAs, with 12.
Volume lags, though. A 2025 analysis found that only 2 percent of more than 60,000 titles on African streaming services are fully local productions. The appetite is there.
One forecast has subscriptions to streaming services in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda rising from 1.2 million in 2026 to 2.1 million by 2031. An industry guide adds that East African viewers respond strongly to Swahili language drama.
Chamaa makes a different bet from the big budget epics. It stays on one estate with five women and one Sacco, and it trusts that a familiar institution can hold a Monday night audience.
What to watch next
New episodes air every Monday from 8:00 pm on DStv channel 163 and GOtv channel 503, so the next one lands on 12 October 2026. Further out, MultiChoice and FAME Week Africa will hear drama pitches from 28 to 30 October 2026 in Cape Town.
Shortlisted producers pitch a panel from MultiChoice Group, CANAL+ and StudioCanal, and the brief asks for eight to twelve episodes of 50 minutes each. The commissioning call shows where MultiChoice may take its drama slate after Chamaa.
