Making ends meet: Nairobi’s informal economy and Africa’s urban future
Nairobi, like many other cities across Africa, relies on a different kind of worker to keep it moving, one without any formal employment, writes Samuel Derbyshire. What does this mean for a rapidly urbanising continent?
Nairobi never stands still. Generation after generation, it draws its population from the length and breadth of Kenya, manifesting, in these 269 sq miles of cityscape, the energy and confidence of the entire country. Like all great cities, it seems always to be in the process of becoming something new. As soon as you think it has arrived, it has moved on.
This is not only true in a metaphorical sense. Anyone who lives here will be able to tell you about the radical transformations rippling through the very fabric of their neighbourhood. Multi-story apartment blocks rise ever higher above once quiet suburbs. New roads and bypasses take shape around them. The entire urban infrastructure grows both firmer and more elaborate with each passing year. But this restless growth is not unique to Kenya. It is a story that characterises cities across the African continent, which has the fastest growing urban population in the world and where, according to the Institute for Security Studies, more than half of all citizens will live in towns and cities by the year 2050.
What is the lived reality of this trend? For some, it is jobs with regular office hours that come with health insurance and pension plans: a sense of security, and stability. The recipients of such jobs – Africa’s ever-expanding middle class – are shaping democracy, and propelling region-wide processes of social change through links back to family homes in rural villages. But this is only one side of the story.
Nairobi, like many other cities across Africa, also relies on a very different kind of worker to keep it moving, one without any formal employment at all. There is an “informal economy” that percolates through every inch of the city, shouldered by freelancers, without official contracts, who depend purely on personal reputations and relationships to ply their trades. Though increasingly, many of them are also finding a large portion of their work through delivery and ride-hailing apps.
In workshops on roadsides, skilled carpenters make furniture that flies across town in all directions, filling offices and homes. Motorbike taxi drivers, or “boda bodas,” whisk passengers to their destinations through heavy traffic. Mechanics fix cars with stunning efficiency, in all weathers. Market traders furnish customers with clothes, electronics, fruit, vegetables, and a host of other essential commodities. Cleaners take care of homes. Nannies take care of families. These fluid, informal workers are Nairobi’s lifeblood. They keep its residents fed and clothed. They get people to the office on time each morning.
It has never been easy to know what to do about this informality. In fact, the question has been debated for decades. The pioneering research of the sociologist Dr Kinuthia Macharia, undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s, emphasised the need not to draw simple conclusions about an issue that, as he saw it, was fundamentally complex. The precarity people face is no trifling matter, whatever their ingenuity and skill may be. But, Macharia argued, informality in general should not be seen as an outright failure. There are many who thrive in a fluid and dynamic working environment. They make a decent living and are proud of it. The answer to the problems they face might not necessarily be more regulation.
Nairobi grapples with this dilemma today as much as it did 40 years ago. Kenya’s recent general election was interpreted by many as a political reorientation away from ethnicity toward economic policy. It was closely run, and at its heart were contrasting approaches to the ongoing economic challenges that much of the world is facing.
The winner, William Ruto, spun a story that seemed to reach across deeply entrenched divisions. He was a man who rose from a youth spent selling chickens at a roadside stall to vying for the highest office in the land. He pitched himself to the people as the anti-establishment candidate, the person who would put an end to powerful political dynasties too long in power, and who was, above all else, the champion of the “hustler nation.” Ruto’s answer, his pledge, was to foster growth, and to support those who are already striving for a better life – the “hustlers.”
But is it right to celebrate this hustle? Many of Kenya’s informal urban workers are only there because of a lack of opportunity and access to education. They would jump at the chance to find a job with a more predictable income.
Dorcas Baraza makes ends meet by cleaning the apartments of clients in the affluent suburb of Lavington. Back at her home in Kawangware, a low-income settlement nearby, her children are watched by friends and neighbours with similarly flexible livelihoods, many of them selling spinach and kale to other residents. This is a help that Dorcas reciprocates, of course, when her schedule is free.
Her journey has been one of great adversity. When she first arrived in Nairobi from her home in Bungoma, her only contact suddenly fell silent. She had taken a bus with money she had saved up, trusting in advice and support proffered over phone calls by a man who abandoned her halfway to a city she did not know. Her first few nights were spent in the tumult of homelessness, negotiating new hazards with only her wits to guide her. In the eight years that have ensued, she has persevered with great dexterity, at times working several different trades at once. She has accumulated a solid and reliable network of friends, forged a new life and a new home in Kawangware, but still there are days when it is impossible for her to cover basic needs.
A short walk from Kawangware, Alen sits behind a table on Ngong Road, wrapped up in a blanket to protect her from the cold morning air. She is a young woman from Uganda, who only arrived in Nairobi last year. She has found a niche amongst the furniture makers here; she prepares tables and chairs for finishing. “I had a brother who came here first,” she says, “he was already working, so I came to join him.” Then she jumps up to attend to a customer who has brought a table to be sanded.
Calvin bought his first motorbike several years ago, now he is 25 and highly optimistic about the future. To him, becoming a rider was a choice made through aspiration, not desperation
Her workplace, an elaborate tangle of workshops that borders Ngong Road, is so complex as to defy any straightforward characterisation, and its dynamics change all the time in relation to a much wider economic and political context. Shipping containers abut makeshift lean-tos and showrooms made from iron sheets or posts covered by tarpaulins. Opulently painted shopfronts lead out into interlocking yards filled with everything from four-poster beds to giant metal garden sculptures.
It is a territory awash with the hum of industry and elbow grease. The sounds of angle grinders, hammering and sanding spill over the calls of middlemen who earn a living from their carefully perfected sales patter. Here there is an entire ecosystem of skill and expertise; an assemblage of specialists who have undergone lengthy apprenticeships by the roadside. They make furniture with spectacular efficiency, to the precise specifications of their customers.
“I just showed up here,” Alen says, “I didn’t know anyone. I started asking people for work, then someone called me over and said, ‘do you know how to sand furniture?’ I didn’t know, but I just said that I did, and I started earning small amounts that way, 50 shillings here, 100 there.”
There are a few others who provide this service amongst the furniture makers, but Alen is the only woman. Before she started working here, she was a domestic maid for a small family. She cooked and cleaned and looked after the children. “The money was good,” she says, “but the wife and children went back to their village, and I couldn’t work for the man alone, so it just ended.”
Like Dorcas, her experience of Nairobi’s uncertainty has not, for the most part, been a positive one. If there was an opportunity for a stable, reliable job, one that brought a steady monthly salary and the security of other benefits, she would snap it up in a second. But to others, job stability is less of a concern, and unpredictability is a feature of informal urban work worth weathering in the pursuit of prosperity.
Even the quietest street in Nairobi is not impervious to the familiar stutter of a small engine motorbike. Their drivers hurtle people and goods across the city for bartered fees, using implausible routes that cut between roads on small footpaths, or backwards through lines of waiting cars. The last few years have seen massive growth in their numbers not only in Kenya but across Africa.
The correlation between this growth and heightened numbers of accidents has, in many countries, fuelled debates about the need for better regulation. In Nairobi, boda boda riders are regularly the subjects of heavy-handed police crackdowns. Their proclivity for banding together in response to accidents with other motorists has earned them a bad reputation among many.
Nevertheless, they are as essential here as they have ever been, their pick-up points, or “stages”, adapting to the changing shape and architecture of the city from one year to the next. In a place where disparities in wealth serve to partition populations off from each other and disconnect residential areas, motorbike taxis relentlessly chart new connections between them. If you want to know how diverse Nairobi’s residents truly are, both in terms of their lifestyles and their living arrangements, ask a boda boda rider about their day.
Calvin bought his first motorbike several years ago, now he is 25, and highly optimistic about the future. To him, becoming a rider was a choice made through aspiration, not desperation. In fact, he used to have a job with a regular and predictable income, working for a large telecommunications company. He felt stifled living from one pay packet to the next and saw no room for career progression.
“A friend introduced me to a group of riders in Langata,” he says, “so I joined them and started working by renting someone else’s motorbike. It didn’t take me long to earn enough to buy my own.” He has plans to buy more motorbikes and rent them out to other riders in Eastlands, where he lives, and eventually to buy a car that he will drive as a taxi. He says his earning potential has improved since becoming a rider because his salary rises in line with the energy he puts into his work.
A motorbike ride away from Eastlands, on Lower Kabete Road, another ephemeral industry draws customers from across town. Along the roadside, roof tiles, cut stones, bricks and other building materials are piled up and stacked in neat rows. Further down, there is a line of porcelain toilets, and another of window frames and doors.
All these materials have been salvaged from demolished buildings around the city and are now waiting to be sold to customers seeking to renovate their own homes. It is an extremely well-organised operation. “Even if we don’t have what you need straight away,” Lydia Njeri says, “we can get it within hours, whether it is a new wooden floor, or a particular kind of tile. We have contacts across the city.”
She only started working here a few months ago but she has already opened a small café for the others who sell salvaged materials alongside her. “It’s better,” she says, wiping down a table, “because even if you aren’t making any sales, you can still sell food and tea, and make something.” The salvage industry relies on networks of scouters, negotiators, drivers and labourers that stretch across the entire city, moving from one site to the next. Many of them frequent her café.
Like Calvin, Lydia is positive about her work, often she can make enough to send back home to relatives outside of Nairobi. But this was not always the case. For several years, she worked at a large market called Gikomba near the centre of town. Her stall, from which she used to sell second-hand clothes, was burned to the ground three times in fires that engulfed large parts of the market, and whose origins are yet to be determined. Time and again she was left with nothing but the will to salvage what she could from the wreckage and rebuild.
Working on Lower Kabete Road is far less precarious, she says. The sellers band together and employ night watchmen to patrol the roadside at night, looking after their materials. She is saving to buy land back home in Murang’a and start farming.
According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), across the world, more than six workers among 10, and four enterprises out of five operate in the informal economy. Moreover, informal employment has shown no signs of diminishing over time. In many regions, it is increasing. Without formalisation and regulation, the ILO say, it will never be possible to eradicate the endemic poverty that characterises so many of the places in which informal livelihoods predominate.
The challenge, though, is working out how this process could take place without stamping out the flexibility and adaptability that makes many informal industries so dynamic. Kenya’s informal economy represents over 32 per cent of GDP. The Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE) point out that it is a massive contributor to employment creation, poverty reduction and economic growth. For many of its workers, the costs and time commitments involved in acquiring licences and certificates are simply not possible to meet in contexts where constant change rules the day.
The FKE have argued that if Nairobi’s informal industries are to be better regulated, this will need to take place through a streamlined and efficient formalisation process. Tax administration will need to be simplified, and better infrastructure and government support will need to be put in place. Workers and entrepreneurs will need more training opportunities and, critically, improved access to credit.
Those who say that Africa’s future is urban do so with a degree of certainty that disguises the complex nature of this shift. The question of what this future will look like, what it will mean for those who already work so hard to keep African cities moving, remains unsettled.
In Nairobi, the informal sector is not a singular, uniform entity. The questions it poses cannot be answered straightforwardly. It is an unstable spectrum of occupations and trades, which reconfigure themselves from day to day in line with the physical city itself and the constant development of its formal spheres, from finance to manufacturing. Nor does it amount to one set of needs or aspirations. To some, it is the grounds for great accomplishment, to others hardship, and stagnation.
Amidst all this, the only thing that seems certain is that Nairobi would be hollow without the flexible workers who find problems to solve at every juncture, and demand for new products and services that others lack the foresight to even imagine. Whatever the future holds, for them and all of us, their grit should be acknowledged.
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