![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
This article examines the alternative economic strategies of youth in the informal waste management sector living and operating within one of Nairobi's largest and oldest informal settlements, Mathare. These youths' expressions of place and work within the informal waste economy are continuously entangled in references to “hustling” that reflect three spheres of meaning: hustle as a “last resort” survival mechanism; hustle as a “livelihood strategy” and risk management; and “hustle” as the contestations that cross-cut waste management practices amongst youth living in urban poverty. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research, the article explores and articulates the meaning of “hustling” within Mathare's informal waste economy where other forms of formal institutions and social services are otherwise absent or inaccessible, and where the choices between entrepreneurship, opportunistic group crime and “idling” are integral to youth's daily struggle.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to all my informants and friends in Nairobi for sharing their time, points of view and stories. I thank numerous Cambridge colleagues, as well as Craig Jeffrey, Michelle Osborn and Justin DeKoszmovszky for their helpful comments on earlier drafts, and my supervisor Bhaskar Vira for his continuous support. I am also grateful to fellow Ph.D. researcher and friend Meghan Ference with whom numerous informal conversations during and following the fieldwork helped me theorize the notion of “hustling.” The Ph.D. research was funded by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, grant number is: ES/I901914/1) Case Studentship with SC Johnson.
Notes
1. Mathare Valley is situated approximately seven kilometers east of Nairobi's Central Business District, home to an estimated 300,000–500,000 residents.
2. Cameroff and Cameroff, “Reflections on Youth.”
3. Myers, African Cities; Ferguson, Global Shadows; Mbembe, On the Postcolony; Diouf, “Engaging Postcolonial Cultures”; Pieterse, City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development.
4. Roitman, “Politics of Informal Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
5. Sommers, “Urban Youth in Africa.”
6. Lonsdale, “Conquest State of Kenya,” p. 21.
7. I borrow this expression from colleague and Boston University Anthropology PhD candidate Lynsey Farrell's paper titled: “Redefining urban identities: Youth in Kibera” (presented on March 15, 2010, BIEA, Nairobi), drawing on Victor Turner's work on rights of passage and liminal phases.
8. Mabala, “Youth and ‘the hood’ – livelihoods and neighbourhoods.”
9. I suggest that the gendered status of “youth” and the activities that youth “hustle” comprises in relation to the waste economy is often (though not always) male centric.
10. This urban youth sub-pop-culture is expressed through creative outlets including local hip hop, street theatre and independent film productions on the “untold stories” of the “ghetto.”
11. Corbridge et al., Seeing the State.
12. Jeffrey, Timepass.
13. Focus group discussion with youth group members, Mlango Kubwa, January 2010.
14. Anderson, Code of the Street.
15. Sundaram, Pirate Modernity, p. 12.
16. Jeffrey, Timepass.
17. McFarlane, Learning the City.
18. Jay-Z, Decoded; Anderson, Code of the Street; Venkatesh, Off the Books.
19. Gudeman, Anthropology of Economy.
20. Hart et al., Human Economy.
21. Roy, Slumdog Cities, p. 223.
22. Davis, Planet of Slums; UN-HABITAT, Challenge of Slums.
23. Burton, African Underclass; Comaroff and Comaroff, “Reflections on Youth,” p. 28.
24. Simone, City Life from Jakarta to Dakar, p. 41.
25. Jay-Z, Decoded, p. 27.
26. Roitman, “Garrisson-Entrepôt.”
27. Vigh, Navigating Terrains of War.
28. Jeffrey, “Fixing Futures,” p. 205, discussing the Hindi term Jugãr.
29. Weiss, Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops.
30. Ntarangwi, East African Hip Hop; Jay-Z, Decoded.
31. Davis, Planet of Slums.
32. Butler, Gender Trouble.
33. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Reflections on Youth,” p. 23.
34. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Reflections on Youth,” p. 23.
35. According to UN-HABITAT's State of the World's Cities (2008) report, Nairobi has a population exceeding 3 million inhabitants.
36. Lonsdale, “The Conquest State of Kenya, 1895–1905”; Huchzermeyer, Tenement Cities; Ogot and Ochieng, Decolonization and Independence in Kenya.
37. Potts, “State and the Informal in Sub-Saharan African Urban Economies”; Chant, “Making a Living in Cities.”; Hutton, The Urban Challenge in East Africa.
38. Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya, p. 181.
39. Saunders, Arrival City.
40. Hart, “Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment,” p. 65. See also ILO Employment Mission to Kenya Report, Incomes and Equality: A Strategy for Increasing Productive Employment in Kenya; and Skinner “Street Trade in Africa: A Review.”
41. Chiuri, “Mathare Valley.”
42. Chant, “Making a Living in Cities,” p. 166.
43. See for example Lindell. Africa's Informal Workers.
44. Population Reference Bureau. Accessed August 29, 2011. http://www.prb.org/Countries/Kenya.aspx/.
45. Kasarani Youth Congress, Mobilization Without Emancipation, p. 9.
46. Ferguson, Global Shadows; Yaqub, “Independent Child Migrants in Developing Countries.”
47. Chant, “Making a Living in Cities,” p. 170.
48. Saunders, Arrival City; Moser, “Reassessing Urban Poverty Reduction Strategies.”
49. Chant, “Making a Living in Cities,” p. 157.
50. Chant, “Making a Living in Cities,” p. 156.
51. Moser, “Reassessing Urban Poverty Reduction Strategies.”
52. Moore, “Excess of Modernity.”
53. Gill, Of Poverty and Plastic.
54. Njeru, “Political Ecology of the Plastic Waste Problem.”
55. Nchito and Myers, “Four Caveats for Participatory Solid Waste Management”; also Myers, Disposable Cities.
56. Fredericks, “Doing the Dirty Work.”
57. Lawhon, “Relational Power in the Governance of a South African e-Waste Transition.”
58. Hansen, Salaula.
59. Interview with Professor Ngau, April 2010; discussion based on his research and collaboration with United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on municipal solid waste management.
60. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Beck's risk-society thesis suggests that political struggles have not been about the distribution of goods but rather of “bads,” including environmental and health risks.
61. Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley; Huchzermeyer, Tenement Cities.
62. Huchzermeyer, Tenement Cities.
63. Etherton, Mathare Valley: A Case of Uncontrolled Settlement in Nairobi.
64. King, Jua Kali Kenya.
65. Informal discussion with a Mathare youth group member, October 2009.
66. Interview with a youth activist, Nairobi, November 2009.
67. Muniafu and Otiato, “Solid Waste Management in Nairobi,” p. 346.
68. Weru, “Community Federations and City Upgrading”; Appadurai, “Deep Democracy.”
69. See for example SDI's Slum Inventory for a unique compilation of data, stories and anecdotes from communities living in slums across Nairobi. This report inventory highlights their voices and “how they understand and define their situation” (3).
70. These remarks are based on experience as a participant observer during numerous PT staff and community meetings.
71. Personal communication, November 2009, Nairobi.
72. Baraza means “place or council” in Swahili; Haugerud, Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya.
73. See Makau “‘Like we don't have enough on our hands already!’: The story of the Kenyan slum youth federation.” The articles highlights first hand experience with the challenges of building a youth program (“Mwamko”) within Kenya's federation of slum dwellers (formally Pamoja Trust). Two issues are worth noting here: The fact that the youth program's entity was difficult to define internally within the organization, as was its identity vis a vis its targeted demographic, perhaps because youth is a “fleeting moment” (206) and thus a youth program difficult to “institutionalize.”
74. Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville.
75. Harvey, “The Right to the City,” p. 23.
76. UN-HABITAT, State of the World's Cities, p. xv.
77. Dikeç and Gilbert, “Right to the City,” p. 59; Attoh, “What Kind of Right.”
78. Simone, “The Right to the City,” p. 60.
79. Appadurai “Capacity to Aspire.”
80. Informal conversation with a youth activist in Huruma, 24 February 2012.
81. In December 2009, the Kasarani Youth Congress launched a social audit report on KKV seeking to ensure that public service programs targeting youth are “effective, responsive and accountable”; notes from the Kasarani Youth Congress Conference, Nairobi, 10 December 2009). As the program manager of the Youth Congress pointed out, “The idea is good, the concept is flawed and the implementation is poor! The concept of KKV is to deal with drought and idleness not right to food and unemployment! So it only seeks to get youth occupied … it is like a behaviour change programme! This is not sustainable!” (personal communication, April 2010).
82. Informal conversation with a youth entrepreneur, Korogocho, October 2009.
83. Focus group discussion, Mlango Kubwa, January 2010.
84. Focus group discussion, Mlango Kubwa, January 2010.
85. Clay and Phillips's forthcoming book The Misfit Economy (Simon & Schuster) equates gangsters and other “misfits” operating in informal, often extra-legal, market economies with “entrepreneurs” in Silicon Valley (http://www.misfiteconomy.com). I thank Alexa Clay for a series of thought provoking informal exchanges (in person and via email) discussing “hustle” and “misfit” economies.
86. For reasons of discretion, I am using single-letter pseudonyms rather than full names in this article when referring to specific individuals.
87. CCS is a non-profit social enterprise operating a micro-franchise model for toilet cleaning services in low-income communities across Nairobi. For more information on the history of CCS, see Thieme, “Youth, Waste and Work in Mathare”; and Thieme and DeKoszmovszky, “Community Cleaning Services.”
88. These figures are drawn from youth groups whose livelihood depended on garbage collection, including “hiring” street kids to collect garbage from the plots they manage. Given the challenges of getting youth to speak candidly about their earnings and what they paid others, I triangulated the information relating to wages with observations regarding qualitative indicators of relative “wealth” to assess the economic status of certain youth – notably affording to live on your own, affording to pay school fees and, lastly, personal dress.
89. Typically, “vertical” housing in low-income settlements are four-storey buildings with about 10 single-room apartments, and one shared toilet and shower stall, per floor.
90. Field notes: informal discussions with youth groups in Mlango Kubwa, Mathare 10 and Huruma, October 2009–March 2010.
91. Personal communication with Mzee Kijana, Huruma, February 2011.
92. Informal focus group discussion, Mathare 10, February 2012.
93. Methodologically, it was always more feasible to get an answer to questions concerning income during a walk-about with one person, rather than pose the question in a focus group discussion.
94. Informal discussion with youth entrepreneurs, Huruma, April 2010.
95. Informal conversation with a youth activist, Kariobangi, October 2010.
96. “Urban programs” supporting entrepreneurial youth included a Ford Foundations grant helping Mathare Environmental Youth Group acquire a shredder for its plastic recycling business, Comic Relief supporting a youth group in Ngei 1, Huruma which was known for being the only youth group with trucks to transport its garbage, and the work of NGOs such as Carolina for Kibera focused on supporting youth initiatives through peace-building activities such as sport, community clean-ups and skills training.
97. Informal conversation with the co-founder of CCS, June 2010.
98. Informal conversation with a CCS trainer, February 2012.
99. Personal communication with a youth entrepreneur, February 2011.
100. Interview with the NCC Solid Waste Department Deputy Director, Nairobi, May 2010.
101. Field notes triangulating interviews and informal conversations with three NCC staff, Mathare youth residents and activists, April 2010.
102. Banerjee and Duflo, Poor Economics.
103. Saunders, Arrival City, p. 21.
104. Huruma is one of Nairobi's 70 wards; it produces the most household waste as the most highly dense low-income estate.
105. Informal discussion with a youth entrepreneur, Huruma, May 2011.
106. King, Jua Kali Kenya, p. xiii.
107. Interview for the documentary Story Yetu with a youth activist and the Manager of the Youth Congress, May 2010.