While women in much of Africa have struggled to gain urban citizenship and continue to be weighed down by poor education, low income and confinement to domestic responsibilities due to patriarchic norms, a new form of urban dynamism - partly informed by the informal economy - is now enabling them to manage poverty, create jobs and link to the circuits of capital and labour. Relying on social ties, reciprocity, sharing and collaboration, women's informal 'solidarity entrepreneurialism' is taking them away from the margins of business activity and catapulting them into the centre.
Bringing together key issues of gender, economic informality and urban planning in Africa, Kinyanjui demonstrates that women have become a critical factor in the making of a postcolonial city.
While women in much of Africa have struggled to gain urban citizenship and continue to be weighed down by poor education, low income and confinement to domestic responsibilities due to patriarchic norms, a new form of urban dynamism - partly informed by the informal economy - is now enabling them to manage poverty, create jobs and link to the circuits of capital and labour. Relying on social ties, reciprocity, sharing and collaboration, women's informal 'solidarity entrepreneurialism' is taking them away from the margins of business activity and catapulting them into the centre.
Bringing together key issues of gender, economic informality and urban planning in Africa, Kinyanjui demonstrates that women have become a critical factor in the making of a postcolonial city.
Women and the Informal Economy in Urban Africa: From the Margins to the Centre
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Women and the Informal Economy in Urban Africa: From the Margins to the Centre
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Overview
While women in much of Africa have struggled to gain urban citizenship and continue to be weighed down by poor education, low income and confinement to domestic responsibilities due to patriarchic norms, a new form of urban dynamism - partly informed by the informal economy - is now enabling them to manage poverty, create jobs and link to the circuits of capital and labour. Relying on social ties, reciprocity, sharing and collaboration, women's informal 'solidarity entrepreneurialism' is taking them away from the margins of business activity and catapulting them into the centre.
Bringing together key issues of gender, economic informality and urban planning in Africa, Kinyanjui demonstrates that women have become a critical factor in the making of a postcolonial city.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781780326337 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 06/12/2014 |
| Series: | Africa Now |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 152 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Mary Njeri Kinyanjui is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi. She holds a PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge. She researches on economic justice, small businesses, economic informality, social institutions and issues of international development. She has published articles in the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, Hemispheres, African Studies Review, African Geographical Review and Journal of East African Research and Development. She has been a visiting scholar at the International Development Centre (IDC) at the Open University in the UK and at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development in Geneva. Some of her publications include 'Women informal garment traders in Taveta Road, Nairobi: from the margins to the center', African Studies Review 56(3): 147-64 (2013) and Institutions of Hope: Ordinary people's market coordination and society organisation alternatives, Nsemia Publishers (2012).
Read an Excerpt
Women and the Informal Economy in Urban Africa
From the Margins to the Centre
By Mary Njeri Kinyanjui
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Mary Njeri KinyanjuiAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78032-633-7
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Urban analysts in the global South are concerned with the failure of African urbanization to resonate with the theories of urbanization. Countries in the global South are urbanizing at a very fast rate into what Davis (2004) calls 'a planet of slums'. Rather than a strong middle class evolving in the cities, a larger subaltern population is emerging that lives in slums and ekes out its livelihood in the informal economy (Beall et al. 2010; Simone 2001b). Urban planning theorists are therefore interrogating whether a metropolis that is based on subaltern urbanism can actually be formed.
Economic informality abounds in Africa. Its activities include hawking, market trade, craftsmanship, manufacturing and repairs. While economic informality provides livelihood and employment to a majority of the urban population, it has been a major source of conflict with modernity and order in the city. In southern Africa, for example, Kamete (2013a) documents how the cities in the region, faced with informality, have faced an uphill task in restoring order. In Nairobi, city authorities have for a long time struggled with the management of economic informality.
African cities have tried to address economic informality without understanding how it functions. Women constitute an important constituency of the urban population and the majority are in the informal economy. One cannot speak of the informal economy in Africa without thinking about women. Urban markets in Nairobi, Lagos and Accra are dominated by women, who are responsible for a massive trade in food and clothes. Any analysis of the role of women in African city dynamism is fairly limited and tends to treat women as victims (Potts 1995). The crucial question is whether women in economic informality have the agency to be a productive part of the urban dynamism that is taking place in contemporary African cities. Kinyanjui (2013)has demonstrated how women in economic informality have navigated the journey from the margins to the centre in Nairobi.
Cities are highly complex social, economic and physical systems, and the success of these systems depends on various actors, elements and forces. The dynamic dealings between people, place and economy can be mutually supportive and self-reinforcing. Addressing these relations effectively also requires an integrated approach that considers the ripple effects of each action on the other aspects of the situation. Using the case study of women in economic informality in Nairobi, on the one hand this book illustrates women's agency and how they are negotiating their way into the centre of the city to be part of the urban dynamism, and on the other it recounts how the city of Nairobi has struggled with economic informality over time and how economic informality has resisted removal and penetrated the central business district (CBD).
Two incidents prompted me to write this book: a YU mobile phone advert on television and a visit to Taveta Road in Nairobi's CBD in 2009. The YU commercial depicted two women transacting business in one of the gated communities in Nairobi. One of the women, an African mama mboga (greengrocer) had bought a new mobile phone and was using it to contact her Asian customer in a high-rise building. To receive the vegetables, the Asian lowered a bag towards the vegetable vendor using a rope. Undoubtedly, the two women are confined to specific spaces in the city but one physically crosses the boundary and is further aided by mobile phone technology to bridge the socioeconomic gap in pursuit of livelihood negotiation.
While on a window-shopping spree in Nairobi's CBD in 2009, I visited Taveta Road. I observed that the street no longer looked the way it had when I visited it in 1994 when I started working at the University of Nairobi, situated at the western end of the CBD. Most of the shops on Taveta Road had been subdivided into stalls or kiosks and the shops were no longer dominated by male Asian and African shop attendants. Women had taken over. I wondered how this had happened within a short time, given that women had been historically disadvantaged by patriarchal planning ideologies.
The advert and the visit triggered me to think about the state and the impact of African women in economic informality after two centuries of urbanization in Nairobi. I carried out a questionnaire survey of women in selected areas of Nairobi where economic informality thrives, including Gikomba, Kenyatta Market, Kamukunji, Uhuru Market, Githurai, Westlands Market, Kawangware and Taveta Road. I supplemented the information garnered from the survey with semi-structured interviews of 53 women along Nairobi's Taveta Road and I followed this up with in-depth interviews involving key informants and case histories of selected women in Taveta Road. My sole aim was to find out about the role of women in economic informality, what participation in economic informality meant to them, and the strategies that the women in question used to overcome the barriers created by planning ideologies and gender insensitivity.
This book is about the struggle of women in economic informality to leave the city margins and access the city centre, the planning and gender insensitivity of which largely excluded them. It uses the example of business activity along Taveta Road to illustrate how women who were restricted to the margins of the urban economy have infiltrated Nairobi's CBD and have introduced the African indigenous market system through mobility, solidarity, entrepreneurialism and collective organization. The women are thus contributing to the complexity of the urban morphology, and, in order to do this, they have dealt with the African city reality, effects of planning ideologies, gender inequality and economic informality.
The African city in reality and theory
Women encounter the reality of the African city as it is presented in both theory and practice in their everyday livelihood negotiation. Harris (1992: x) observes that cities in developing countries are characterized by vast squatter settlements, shanty towns, a poor supply of basic amenities, rapid environmental degradation, traffic jams, violence, crime and urban sprawl that eats into the countryside. Murray and Myers (2006: 1) observe that African city life has been reduced to a dystopian nightmare manifested by limited opportunities for formal employment, a lack of decent and affordable housing, failing and neglected infrastructure, the absence of social services, pauperization, criminality and increased inequalities. Due to these flaws, cities in Africa and the developing world are considered structurally irrelevant in the realm of world cities and attract hardly any global investment (Robinson 2002).
The rapid urbanization, dominant economic informality, gender inequality and unplanned nature of African cities make them different from cities in Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East. According toUN-HABITAT (2006), Africa will experience the most rapid urban growth in the world until 2050. It is estimated that Africa's urban population will reach 742 million by 2030, up from 294 million in 2000. The projected 152 per cent increase in Africa's urban population will be fairly large compared with Asia's (94 per cent) and Latin America's (55 per cent); this rapid growth in population is attributable to rural–urban migration as well as to natural birth rates in cities.
The question of why the making of African cities is flawed has been the subject of debate among African urban theorists (Freund 2007; Mabogunje 1968, 1984;Macharia 1997; Mbembe and Nutall 2004; Murray and Myers 2006; Robinson 2002; Simone 2004; Watson 2002,2009). In his seminal work on cities in Africa, Mabogunje (1968) demonstrated that Nigerian cities were not different from cities in Europe and attributed their problems to their parasitic nature and to over-urbanization, whereby cities were growing at a faster rate than the creation of jobs and the development of physical and social infrastructure. In his work on backwash urbanization (Mabogunje 1984), he argued that urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa is not based on economic development but is more the product of failed development policies in both cities and rural areas, with the failure of development in rural areas generating rural–urban migrants who flood the cities. This backwash urbanization has resulted in the peasantization of cities, whereby peasant migrants with rural origins dominate the cities and introduce peasant-type lifestyles and norms of survival. These peasant-type strategies are reflected in housing and in the city environment.
In an attempt to answer the question of the urban problematic, Macharia (1997) first attributes it to the informality of the African state, which hinders Western-educated planners from creating formal nation states and cities. According to him, the Kenyan state is based on a social structure permeated by networks that operate along familial, ethnic, friendship and overwhelmingly patrimonial lines that affect its performance (Macharia 1997: 105). Second, he links it to the prevailing strong social networks that lead to informal-sector dynamism. These networks attract more people into the city and determine entry, choice of sector and transfer of skills. As more people join economic informality, they contribute to the growth and expansion of the African city.
Using the case of Johannesburg, Mbembe and Nutall (2004) highlight the complexity of the city-making process in Africa. They urge urban scholars to desist from viewing Africa as a residual entity and to negate the predominant readings on Africa that emphasize difference. They argue that Johannesburg's history, architecture and capitalist formation reflected in the city's money economy, individuality, calculability and fortuitousness (Mbembe and Nutall 2004: 365) closely fit a metropolis as defined in classical urban theory. The city, however, has shortcomings, such as ugly agglomerations and insecurity (Mbembe and Nutall 2004: 367).
The African city should be seen through its complex history, culture and economy. It should also be understood by the way in which people have transformed it and how it has in turn changed them. While literature abounds that illustrates how urbanization and urban planning have victimized Africans by condemning them to slums, street trade and the informal sector (Brown 2006; Garland et al. 2007; Mitullah 2007), there is little in the way of literature to show how Africans have configured the city through their participation in economic informality, hence the quest of this book to examine the state and impact of women in economic informality in Nairobi city.
Freund (2007) attributes the problems in the evolution of African cities to the colonial origins of African cities, arguing that the urban dystopia in Africa accrues from the fact that a large majority of African populations were denied citizenship in the emergent cities. In Nairobi, for example, the whites who dominated the city council struggled constantly for the enforcement of pass laws, repatriation of vagrants, removal of informal housing wherever it was deemed inconvenient, and establishment of curfews and no-go areas for Africans (Freund 2007: 93). This made the African population straddlers, with one foot in the city and the other in the rural area, and as a result their participation in civic action and investment in the cities was greatly affected. However, there is significant investment and a large amount of civic engagement in African cities, particularly in economic informality: for example, 70 per cent of the population of Lusaka is dependent on the informal economy (Moser and Holland 1997). In Nairobi, 2.7 million people are engaged in the informal economy, according to the 2011 economic survey of the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.
In addressing the evolution of cities, Robinson (2002)challenges the urban theory that categorizes cities as global cities, world cities or developing world cities. She proposes an urban theory that focuses on the ordinariness of cities in terms of their diversity, creativity, modernity and distinctiveness. This entails looking at cities in greater detail in terms of their spatiality, ideas, resources and practices drawn from a variety of places – not infinite but diverse – beyond their physical borders (Robinson 2002: 549). This is in line with the objective of this book, which urges the need to investigate the diversity and creativity within the African city in terms of the African indigenous market concept, solidarity entrepreneurialism, inclusion of women in urban planning, and collective organization as a method of organizing business spatially in the centre of the city. It also means including gender in the construction of urban theory.
Urban planning
To a large extent, urban planning may be said to be gender blind. Women have had to deal with an urban planning ideology that does not include them. The failure of African planners to plan for economic informality means that they do not plan for women, who form the majority. Lack of urban planning in cities in the global South in general and in African cities in particular is a major problem; the urban sprawl that surrounds cities in Africa has defied urban planning. Informal settlements characterized by a mix of residential, economic and agricultural activities are dominant features in cities such as Nairobi, Kampala, Lagos and Dar es Salaam, where they pose significant planning challenges. In an attempt to come up with planning models in African cities, Watson (2002) proposes that planners should first seek to understand the social and political environment of the cities in which they are operating. She observes that, while the three normative planning models – communicative, multiculturalism and just city – have relevance to city planning in Africa, their application is affected by a dysfunctional civil society and a client-based relationship between state officials, politicians, political groupings and identity politics in African societies. This analysis suggests that planning an African city is a fairly complex phenomenon because of the inherent conditions existing in African societies. Further, Watson (2009) observes that:
the planning systems were inherited from previous colonial governments or were adopted from northern contexts to suit particular local political and ideological ends. In most cases, these planning systems and approaches have remained unchanged over a long period of time even though the contexts in which they operate have changed significantly (Watson 2009: 2260).
The problem of planning cities in the global South is also echoed by Roy (2009), who argues that rational planning in India is undermined by informality and insurgence. Informality in India exists because land is managed informally without fixed purposes and without being mapped according to regulations or laws. There are no clear guidelines about what is legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate, authorized and unauthorized (Roy 2009: 80). According to her, while informality is a key feature of planning, it creates territorialized flexibility and paralyses state development by rendering governance, justice and development impossible. Essentially, her analysis illustrates that an informal city is also an insurgent city and does not necessarily represent a just city because the policing of the arbitrary and fickle boundary between legal and illegal, formal and informal is not just the province of the state but also becomes the work of citizens, in this case insurgent citizens (Roy 2009: 85). She concludes that informality rather than failure of planning is responsible for the Indian urban crisis.
The planning systems in Harare (Zimbabwe) apply different measures in dealing with the spatial unruliness of the affluent and those in informality. In Operation Restore Order, illegal structures were destroyed and vagrants, street children and vendors violently relocated; however, illegal land users in affluent spaces were given a reprieve and time to regularize their properties (Kamete 2012: 67). It appears that sovereign and disciplinary power is exercised when the deviants are on the bottom rungs of society and hail from the less privileged parts of town, whereas more refined versions of disciplinary power are deployed when the offending parties are wealthier people in more affluent areas (Kamete 2012: 76). For effective planning, there is a need to reorient this kind of power-based planning whereby the sophisticated mode of pastoral power-based planning is extended to marginalized communities. This will facilitate their incorporation into orderly urban settings.
In a more recent paper, Kamete (2013b) argues that normalizing the informal sector by enforcing compliance with technical criteria such as health and safety, aesthetics and accessibility detaches the informal sector from economic and governance settings. He argues that planning standards that are generally considered normal are technical, and so the question of how to address informality has been removed from the realm of social, political and economic governance into the privileged realm of technical expertise (Kamete 2013b). This divorces informality from questions of social justice that are crucial to its existence: for example, how can women be incorporated into the urban economy if planning selectively destroys the informal economy where they abound?
Commenting on the planning of African cities, Miraftab (2009) calls for the decolonization of planners' city visions and images, emphasizing that the modernization pursued during the colonial period and perpetuated in the neoliberal era excludes some populations from the city. Using the case of South Africa's Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, she demonstrates how insurgent planning is replacing hegemonic colonial planning regimes. The insurgent planning model aims to decolonize planning by taking a fresh look at subaltern cities and by understanding their uniqueness and values rather than seeing them in the light of planning prescriptions and fantasies of the West (Miraftab 2009: 45). This book argues that de-westernizing or decolonizing planning theory is not enough: African aesthetics, architecture, philosophies, values and norms relating to the economy and space occupation should be introduced into the city. Women, who have been excluded from the planning realm for a long time, should be included. This means having a planning model that incorporates informality. This book documents women's struggle against urban planning ideologies, as they move from the margins to the centre, by drawing on their past cultural experiences and linking them with the present.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Women and the Informal Economy in Urban Africa by Mary Njeri Kinyanjui. Copyright © 2014 Mary Njeri Kinyanjui. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction2. Theorizing planning and economic informality in an African city
3. Economic informality in Nairobi between 1980 and 2010
4. Women in Nairobi
5. Women, mobility and economic informality
6. Women in economic informality in Nairobi
7. The quest for spatial justice: from the margins to the centre
8. Women's collective organizations and economic informality
9. Conclusion