ASR FORUM: ENGAGING WITH AFRICAN INFORMAL

ECONOMIES

Women Informal Garment Traders in

Taveta Road, Nairobi: From the Margins
to the Center
Mary Njeri Kinyanjui

Abstract: This article investigates the Taveta Road phenomenon, whereby women
garment informal traders occupy a whole street in the central business district in
Nairobi, Kenya. It also discusses the implications for urban planning of the presence
of women informal traders in the central business district. The article demonstrates
that the ability of these traders to move from the margins into the heart of the city
is based on their ability to cross borders, organize collectively, and develop entrepre-
neurial skills that make use of social networks, group agency, and personal initiative.
It also illustrates that over time, their gradual encroachment has led to an acceptance of
their presence and their integration into the urban economy. These developments—
which are referred to as “subaltern urbanism” or “solidarity entrepreneurialism”—have
far-reaching implications in terms of the traders’ relationship with the city, state
laws, and the national economy.

Résumé: Cet article examine le phénomène de la route Taveta, par lequel les femmes
du commerce informel de vêtements occupent toute une rue dans le quartier des
affaires du centre de Nairobi, au Kenya. L’article examine également les implications
pour le plan d’urbanisme tenant compte de la présence des vendeuses informelles

African Studies Review, Volume 56, Number 3 (December 2013), pp. 147–64
Mary Njeri Kinyanjui is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Development
Studies, University of Nairobi. Her research concerns the role of economic
informality in development, with a special focus on women and urbanization.
She is the author of Vyama, Institutions of Hope: Market Coordination and Society
Organization (Nsemia Publishers, 2012) and of Gender and Economic Informality in
Nairobi: From the Margins to the Centre (Zed, forthcoming), and has published articles
in the International Journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship and the African
Geographical Review. E-mail: mkinyanjui@uonbi.ac.ke

© African Studies Association, 2013

doi:10.1017/asr.2013.83
147
148 African Studies Review

dans le quartier central des affaires. Cet article démontre que la capacité de ces
vendeuses à se rapprocher du cœur de la ville tient à leur aptitude à traverser
les frontières, à s’organiser collectivement, et à développer leurs compétences
d’entrepreneuses en utilisant les réseaux sociaux, la dynamique de groupe, et les
initiatives personnelles. Il illustre également que leur empiètement progressif a
engendré au cours du temps un consentement à leur présence et une intégration à
l’économie urbaine. Ces développements, que j’appelle “urbanisme subalterne” ou
“entreprenariat solidaire,” ont des implications d’une grande portée au niveau de
la relation des commerçantes avec la ville, les lois d’état, et l’économie nationale.

Key Words: Nairobi; subaltern; women; economic informality; urbanization

Introduction

Economic informality has taken over most of Nairobi’s central business district
(CBD).1 Most shops in the main streets have been subdivided into small
cubicles that serve as kiosks or stalls for small-scale garment traders who also
sell household accessories, electronic goods, and mobile phone accessories,
among other items. In some streets like Taveta Road, women informal garment
traders occupy the ground floor of buildings where they display goods
on tables, as in any typical African market. This takeover by the informal
economy has occurred on Moi Avenue, Du Bois Road, Accra Road, Taveta
Road, and Luthuli, Latema, Ronald Ngala, and Tom Mboya Streets. Only a
few streets in the CBD remain unaffected (Ngwala 2011).
The entry of economic informality into the CBD is somewhat similar to
the phenomenon observed by Bayat (2000:45) which he called “the quiet
encroachment of the ordinary” into the city—the entry of subaltern popu-
lations that do not belong to the dominant elite classes. I prefer to call
it “subaltern urbanism” or “solidarity entrepreneurialism.” The people
include market traders, garment makers and traders, hawkers, metal fabri-
cators, shoe traders, and traders in household goods. According to official
city by-laws, they should be excluded from the CBD, and therefore they
have to operate differently from the dominant city classes of civil servants,
five-star hoteliers, lawyers, and doctors, who are considered to be the legiti-
mate business operators. They operate on a small scale, sell products in
small batches, and make wide use of social relations and self-help associa-
tions in their transactions. They are also self-employed. In the colonial days
these ordinary people were confined to lower-class residential areas in the
eastern areas of the city referred to as Eastlands. After Kenya attained inde-
pendence, efforts were made to license some of the hawkers to trade on street
corners, but the rest were confined to markets such as Gikomba, Uhuru,
Jericho, Kenyatta, and Kariokor. The CBD was the preserve of Asians and a
few African businesses until the late 1990s, when the takeover by micro-
retailers began. According to Ngwala (2011), this development caught the
 ASR Forum: Women Informal Garment Traders in Nairobi 149

city planners unawares. This article examines the changes that have taken
place on Taveta Road in particular, where informal traders have steadily
taken over spaces formerly occupied by Asian business owners.
Beginning with the works of Hart (1973) and the ILO (1972), the sub-
ject of economic informality in cities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia has
attracted significant attention among scholars, international development
agencies such as the ILO, and financiers such as the World Bank. Informal
economy activities include petty trading, manufacturing, street hawking, and
shoe shining, among others, and are carried out by unemployed or under-
employed individuals or groups on the streets of big towns (Bengasser 2000).
The category also can be extended to include carpenters, masons, tailors,
cooks, drivers, and other tradesmen who have the skills needed to provide
goods and services for a large but poor section of the population.
In most cases, economic informality is defined pessimistically, in terms
of what is wrong with it or what it does not do. In the early writings, the
informal sector economy is differentiated from the formal economy by
certain characteristics: modest scale, ease of entry, reliance on indigenous
resources, family ownership, labor intensiveness, use of adapted technology,
reliance on skills acquired outside the formal school system, and operation
within unregulated and uncompetitive markets (ILO 1972). In some
instances, economic informality is viewed through a moral lens that high-
lights its perceived wrongs or weaknesses, such as its failure to provide social
protection or insurance (Chen 2009). Lund and Skinner (2005) observe that
informal workers lack business-related insurance, a basic infrastructure,
funds, access to credit, information about existing service providers, and
security against crime. The informal economy is also considered to be illegal
since it operates largely outside the formally stipulated parameters (Tockman
2007). Success in economic informality is attributed to political connections
(Benjamin & Mbaye 2012), although some scholars point out that informal
economy associations are also likely to gravitate toward criminality (Meagher
2011). In some instances urban planners view economic informality as a
“planning pathology” that undermines the city’s modern status and they
call for its formalization (Kamete 2012).
According to the ILO (2000), many of the informal sector workers are
poor. Empirical evidence has shown, however, that the informal sector as a
whole is highly heterogeneous and not necessarily synonymous with poverty
(see Benjamin & Mbaye 2012 on Francophone Africa). The very poor are
engaged in subsistence activities at the bottom of the ladder, while profit-
able economic ventures thrive at the top. In this latter category individuals
earn income well above the minimum wage in the formal sector economy.
The urban informal sector also has its own mechanisms and networks of
financial services, challenging the perspective that the informal sector is
not organized (ILO 2000).
As I have argued elsewhere (Kinyanjui 2010), economic informality
needs to be treated as an economy in its own right rather than as an object
of comparison with the formal sector. The evolution of the informal
150 African Studies Review

economy in African cities is in fact closely associated with a transition

from Western to African modes of production, especially in matters of
business norms. The formal sector in Kenya is operated by multinational
corporations, state enterprises, or Asians (Kinyanjui 2010), while most of
the small firms in the informal economy are owned by Africans (Bigsten &
Kimuyu 2004). It is in the informal sector that a large number of people in
African cities repair their cars and buy groceries, clothes, shoes, and house-
hold goods like furniture. Thus economic informality in African cities can
be understood only in the context of the creation of an African indigenous
social economic order. The salient issue is not “normality” versus “abnor-
mality,” but rather differences in world views in the realm of business ethics.
Gibson-Graham (2006) refers to economic models that do not fit into
the capitalist model of organization as “community economies.” These rep-
resent a postcapitalist socioeconomic order that is emerging as one of the
effects of globalization. While most critics of the informal economy view
it through a pessimistic lens, in terms of the standards that it does not meet
and the problems it creates, in this article, the informal economy is exam-
ined in terms of what it does right. As a community economy, it makes wide use
of social relations and applies African institutional values of utu (humanness)
such as sharing, reciprocity, loyalty, and altruism. Its organization is hori-
zontal rather than hierarchical, and holdings are diversified. Rather than
operating one large shop, for example, an individual may have two or
three stalls or diversify her business by investing in land, housing, or animals.
Informal operators also rely on informal social groups known locally as
vyama (singular, chama) for financial support. It is a postcapitalist social
economic order in the sense that informal operators, on the basis of trust
and interdependence, are able to reduce transaction costs involving trans-
portation, space, information acquisition, or bulk purchasing. The collabo-
ration involved and the solidarity that develops lead to the creation of
nested communities (Kinyanjui 2008, 2010, 2012).
The Taveta Road case study of women traders exemplifies this type of
economic informality or “solidarity entrepreneurialism” in which individuals
take risks along with others and form alliances for dealing with information
asymmetry, business transaction costs, and economic uncertainties. Significantly,
this entrepreneurialism has also involved what Bayat (2000) calls “border
crossing,” the movement of individuals and families from low-income
neighborhoods and periurban locations into the CBD in order “to acquire
basic necessities of their lives (land for shelter, urban collective consump-
tion, informal jobs, business opportunities and public space) in a quiet and
unassuming, illegal fashion” (2000:45). It is also important to note the vibrancy
and entrepreneurship that has been observed in slum localities such as
Dharavi, Mumbai, India, where over 70 percent of the residents work in the
informal economy (see Nijman 2010). This vibrancy and entrepreneurship
in economic informality cannot be ignored in theory and practice.
This article interrogates how subalterns penetrated the CBD in Nairobi
and the implications of their entry. It begins by highlighting the factors that
 ASR Forum: Women Informal Garment Traders in Nairobi 151

led to the exit of Asian-owned businesses and then documents the entry of
economic informality, which caught the town planning department unawares.
There is fear among planners that the CBD may be overcrowded and that
the informal economy strains the existing infrastructure (Ngwala 2011).
On a positive note, the entry has a bearing on equity, particularly with
regard to the entry of women and their access to trading opportunities
on Nairobi’s major streets. This development has also generated a mood of
informality and relaxation in the city center.
Information for this article was obtained from selected news stories
from the Daily Nation (Nairobi) newspaper spanning a number of years.
The more current information on Taveta Road was obtained from inter-
views conducted in 2012 with fifty-three of the estimated three hundred
and fifty women operating micro-businesses there. The women were asked
what they did before establishing their retail businesses, what their sources
of finance were, how they learned about the business space, and how the
chama has helped them in business. The information was coded and two
specific themes of self-organizing and “solidarity entrepreneurship” were
identified. The article is organized into six sections. The following section
provides the analytical framework of the analysis and is followed by a discus-
sion of the exit of elite businesses from the CBD. The next sections discuss
the movement of women from the economic and geographical margins
to the city center. The article concludes by discussing the implications of this
relocation.

Analytical Framework

While urban theory classifies cities into “global” and “world” categories, the
majority of African cities do to not fit into either of these two categories on
the basis of the poor service provision and lax governance standards found
within them (Robinson 2002). In the case of Indian cities, terminologies
such as “slumdog” are used (Roy 2011). A city like Johannesburg in South
Africa has been called an “elusive metropolis” (Mbembe & Nutall 2008).
These terminologies denote the cities’ perceived incompleteness and infor-
mality in comparison to cities in the West. But while such cities, according
to Yiftachel (2009), tend to be characterized by frequent evictions, destruc-
tion of property, and lack of safety, the city of Nairobi, with more than
2.7 million people engaged in informal economic activity, hardly fits this
description.
Nairobi, rather, is characterized by what I call “subaltern urbanism,”
referring to efforts of ordinary people engaged in informal, grassroots eco-
nomic activity and struggling to capture the city from the dominant elite
planners and businesspeople and reconfiguring it as their own territory.
This article depicts the subalterns as active participants striving to find an
exit from their condition of material deprivation and builds upon the
insights of Nijman (2010), Bayat (2000, 2007) and Crerar (2010; cited in Roy
2011), among others. Crerar (2010), for example, speaks of the activities in
152 African Studies Review

the slums of Mumbai as inspired by the “alchemic ability to thrive when

chips are down” (cited in Roy, 2007:223). Bayat (2000, 2007) critiques the
assumption that subalterns gravitate toward criminal activities and states that
the urban poor have their own religiosity, a relatively autonomous informal
life, and an intimate politics of the everyday. Because the informal economy
tends to operate differently from the mainstream, scholars and planners
consequently need to appreciate this difference before embarking on
attempts to formalize it or integrate it into the formal economy.

Women’s Entrepreneurship

Women’s entrepreneurship is receiving considerable attention both in

scholarship and in development discourse. This is because more than
80 percent of the women engaged in nonagricultural activities in sub-Saharan
Africa are engaged in the informal sector (ILO 2002). Individual countries
such as Kenya (83 percent), South Africa (58 percent), Benin (97 percent),
and Guinea (87 percent) register particularly high proportions of women pur-
suing informal economic activity (ILO 2002). This makes economic infor-
mality high in the developmental agenda of countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
Chen (2009:199) observes that the informal economy is increasingly
becoming feminized. Richardson (2004) advocates for the rescue of women
from economic informality by formulating strategies geared at growing
their businesses. This involves providing them with an enabling environ-
ment through provision of credit, property rights, entrepreneurial training,
and attention to their practical needs such as water, health, and education
(see also Ellis et al. 2007).
Empirical studies on women entrepreneurship have shown that compared
to men, women in the informal economy are constrained and perform poorly
in terms of earnings, poverty avoidance, and the growth of their businesses
(Chen 2009; Iyenda & Simon 2006; Njeru & Njoka 2001; Rono 2001).
Munyua (2009) observes that women entrepreneurs are concentrated in sec-
tors that do not conflict with their gender roles such as community, social, and
personal services. They resort to informal activities because of the longstanding
gender segregation of work, constrained access to credit, limited training,
skewed land rights, lower levels of education than men, inequalities in social
relations, and the reproductive work burden (Tsikata 2009). However, besides
being pushed into informal entrepreneurship, women are also motivated to
start businesses out of ambition and a drive to achieve, the desire for autonomy
and flexibility, or the need to finance children’s education (Cohoon et al. 2010;
Munyua & Mureithi (2008). I wish to reinforce this latter perspective by
emphasizing women’s agency. This case study illustrates how women are using
strategies such as border crossing, solidarity entrepreneurialism, and collective
alliances in running garment stalls along Taveta Road.
Perhaps inadvertently, studies comparing men and women in business
tend to frame the qualities of successful entrepreneurship—such as asser-
tiveness and the will to achieve—as inherently masculine (Baron 1999).
 ASR Forum: Women Informal Garment Traders in Nairobi 153

But as Cohoon et al. (2010) observe, women do not differ from men in terms
of entrepreneurial abilities. As I argue elsewhere (Kinyanjui 2008), entre-
preneurship among women in the informal sector existed long before the
scholarly interest in the subject, dating at least from the 1970s. Robertson
(1997), for example, has shown that the participation of women in the bean
trade is traceable to the precolonial era, and it is only the commodities
traded that have changed with circumstances. What has been particular
to women is the protracted struggle that generations of women have waged
in order to overcome an anti-woman stance in the city. As McFadden
(2005:5) says,

For long, men in Africa have been accomplices to relegating women to

rural spaces. In Nairobi’s urban areas during colonial times, black women
could only traffic publicly under the auspices of a recognized black male
figure as a wife. Women who could not show their husband were labeled
prostitutes and socially stigmatized. During colonial times and shortly after
independence, women who fled to the cities were repatriated to villages by
their male relatives where they were humiliated and branded as traitors.
All this served to ensure that young women remained within the boundaries
of such communities. Nonetheless women left for the urban spaces, express-
ing their resistance to patriarchal surveillance.

Unfortunately, as Mohanty (1988) and McFadden (2005) say, some contem-

porary scholars continue to present Third World and African women as
powerless victims with little ability to work as agents of change.

Insurgency and the Exit of Elite Businesses from the CBD

The arrival of women traders along Taveta Road was triggered partly by the
exit of Asian businesspeople as a result of the occasional harassment they
were receiving from those who perceived foreigners as receiving preferential
treatment in business matters. In addition, in the 1990s Kenya in general
and Nairobi in particular were the sites of an insurgency mounted by pressure
groups clamoring for multiparty democracy. While political rallies took
place in public parks, rowdy gangs took advantage of the chaos to terrorize
Asian businesspeople, with heavy losses resulting from looting. According
to an article in the Daily Nation (1997a),

There were running battles between traders, askaris [security guards]

and administration policemen in the Nairobi Central Business District.
Passersby and hawkers scampered to safety while others threw stones at the
askaris and policemen. Shop owners closed their businesses but many were
affected by the looting that took place during the melee and they lost
goods and property worth a great deal.

The 1990s and 2000s also witnessed a massive entry of informal workers
in the CBD (Kamunyori 2007) as a result of the neoliberal policies that were
154 African Studies Review

imposed upon developing countries by the World Bank and International

Monetary Fund. The policies entailed trade liberalization, the freeing of
foreign exchange rates, a reduction in government spending by cutting
costs in social services, and privatization of government services such as the
railway and industry (Easterly 2005; Simutanji 1996; Williams 1994; Kraus
1991). These policies led to massive job losses and a general impoverish-
ment of the people in Kenya and sub-Saharan Africa (Bangura 1994), and
the victims of these policies sought alternative livelihoods in the informal
economy. In Nairobi, street hawking increased, and these informal workers
became a nuisance on the city streets as they obstructed movement and
competed with established businesses that were paying taxes. They were
also viewed as a security threat (Kamunyori 2007). The city authorities
responded by either arresting the hawkers or chasing them from the city
streets. The hawkers, for their part, put up a strong resistance and street
battles between the informal workers and the combined forces of the
police and the city council askaris became common in the city. Stories of
these battles became regular features in Kenyan dailies such as the Daily
Nation:

Armed policemen and city council askaris are accused of harassing

vendors and hawkers along Nairobi streets, and in discriminatory fashion.
The effort by police to clear the streets of hawkers followed riots
sparked by the dispersal of a constitutional reform rally at Central Park.
Hawkers were blamed for the chaos and looting that took place after
the rally. The hawkers were evicted from the streets together with shoe
shiners and the disabled traders. City Council askari had a few days
earlier also flattened kiosks near the Railway Station in Nairobi, an
operation that rendered hundreds of people jobless, and caused damage
and loss of property worth thousands of shillings. Most kiosk owners
did not know what to do after the destruction of their property. (Daily
Nation 1997b)

Despite the effort put up by the country’s security apparatus to control

the insurgency, Asian business operators succumbed to the intensity of the
looting and the environment of fear and uncertainty, and exited from the
CBD. The informal traders thus saw an opportunity in the vacated open-
plan shops and either subdivided the buildings into stalls and kiosks or
occupied the shops as a group. The inclusion of these subaltern workers
thus resulted from an insurgency and a power dynamic involving a class
struggle, rather than any technocratic urban planning procedures.

Women in the Margins

Historically, women in Nairobi have undergone formidable struggles in the

search for space and opportunity in the city. Women were locked out of
modernity and capitalist enterprise by the colonial powers. While colonial
policies encouraged the migration of male laborers to work on farms,
 ASR Forum: Women Informal Garment Traders in Nairobi 155

mines, factories, and shops, women were forbidden by law to migrate from
rural areas to the city.2 It was feared that women’s mobility would lead to
a breakdown of the family order that was crucial to the sustenance of the
labor supply.
Most communities in Kenya also discouraged women’s migration. Bujra
(1975) documents that the early women entrepreneurs in Nairobi, especially
single women who migrated into the city, were prostitutes. Okuro (2006)
documents the activities of the Ramogi African Welfare Association, which
worked with the colonial government in the 1940s and 1950s to repatriate
women from towns to rural areas; “The women would be shaved, dressed in
gunny bags and walked through the street in an endeavor to humiliate
them” before being sent home (2006:71). Among the Gîkuyu of central Kenya,
some popular music in the 1960s, such as the song “Cumî Cumî î Nguo
Cianyu Nguhî” (Miniskirts, Miniskirts), stigmatized women who moved to
Nairobi as miniskirt-wearing loose women. Another song, “Cehûra Cehûra”
(Strip Strip), informed women supported by men who were not their
husbands that they would be stripped, the way bread is stripped from its
wrapping.
With independence, the official antimigration stance was relaxed, and
the number of women migrants in the city has been growing considerably.
In 1969 the proportion of women in the city was 40.4 percent. In 2009 the
population of women in Nairobi had risen to 48.8 percent (see table 1).
However, it was not until 1979 that women in Kenya were issued identity
cards, and the lack of these cards denied women the chance to transact
business with banks or own land. Moreover, in 1968 Parliament passed the
vagrancy and prostitution act which enabled policemen to arrest women
whom they suspected to be prostitutes or vagrants. Since the law did not
spell out how the police would identify a prostitute, many women became
victims of the law. They would be arrested, taken to court, and jailed in
Lang’ata Women’s Prison. After the jail term, they would be repatriated to
rural areas to be taken care of by their parents. Together with male hawkers,
women were evicted from the streets by the city police in an attempt to keep
the city clean, modern, and secure. In the 1980s and 1990s it was common

Table 1. Distribution of Women and Men in the City by Sex

Year Men % of Total Women % of Total Total
2009 1,605,230 51.2 1,533,139 48.8 3,138,369
1999 1,153,828 53.9 989,426 46.1 2,143,254
1989 752,597 56.9 571,973 43.1 1,324,570
1979 479,448 58.0 348,327 42.0 827,775
1969 303,219 59.6 206,067 40.4 509,286
1962 ‒‒‒ ‒‒‒ ‒‒‒ ‒‒‒ 343,500
1948 ‒‒‒ ‒‒‒ ‒‒‒ ‒‒‒ 64,397

Source: Population census

156 African Studies Review

to see women scampering away from the police with children strapped on
their backs and their goods scattered all over.
There were also limited educational opportunities for women apart from
the Government Secretarial Training College, programs to train teachers
and nurses, and the Maendeleo ya Wanawake Organisation, which taught
modern housekeeping skills and arts and crafts. No institutions trained
women for the world of work in industry or the retail trade. Government or
City Council involvement in the welfare and general advancement of women
was minimal, and women were left to fend for themselves in the informal
economy. The only issue about women that concerned the City Council in
the early days was the problem of single women parents. To deal with this
issue, a hostel for such women was set up at Jamaa on Juja Road and run by
Catholic nuns belonging to the order of the Sisters of Charity.
A review of the Nairobi City Council hawker’s license file between 1973
and 1975 revealed letters written by women who were making requests to
the Town Clerk to be issued a license so that they could trade in the city
without harassment from the City Council askari. The files contain numerous
statements from the women about their desire to provide for their families,
their lack of employment, and the constraints imposed by their lack of
education. Having a license, however, did not provide automatic security
for the women traders. The women continued to face regular harassment from
the askaris, as is evident in a 1973 case from a woman names Namuruana
Munyi, who protested against harassment by returning her license and leaving
her four children at the office of the licensing superintendent.3 The licensing
superintendent retaliated by confiscating her license and issuing it to someone
else. He also took the children to the police station. This single case testifies
the desperate situation of the women in the city.

Case Study: From the Margins to the Center

The new millennium has witnessed a new kind of urban development in

Nairobi’s central business district. Shop floors are being subdivided into
micro-retail stalls, and a shop that earlier held only one shopkeeper is now
holding as many as twenty. Ngwalla (2011) observes that only a few streets
in the CBD—namely Kenyatta Avenue, Kimathi Street, Koinange Street,
City Hall Way, Mama Ngina, Standard Street, and Banda Street—have not
been transformed in this way, and the reason is that they house major banks,
government and private offices, and five-star hotels. These changes have
brought in a large population of people, including women, most of whom
initially worked or were situated in peripheral spaces in the city.
The entry of women into the CBD has been momentous. On Taveta Road
alone, they occupy six buildings: Jitihada, Annas Arcade, ECT, Taveta Mall,
Iqba, and Istanbul Centre. These buildings accommodate about three
hundred and fifty women micro-traders selling garments and other acces-
sories such as handbags, beauty products, shoes, and jewelry, as well as
baby clothes. The women traders share shops that are subdivided into small
 ASR Forum: Women Informal Garment Traders in Nairobi 157

cubicles/stalls or use separate tables to display their goods. These traders

differ in many ways from the street vendors of the 1980s and 1990s. They
do not bring babies with them; they dress formally, and are younger and
relatively better educated than their predecessors. However, their work still
exhibits attributes of informality such as the small scale of the business
operation and the reliance on informal social networks and trade associa-
tions to start up and maintain the businesses, even among women who are
competing at the same time.
In many ways, the women traders have benefited from the reformist
work of Nelson Kajuma, a trader who in 1999 pioneered the idea of exhi-
bition stalls in response to the problem of street hawking in the CBD.
Initially he rented empty buildings and spaces in which he constructed
stalls that he in turn rented out to vendors. Despite the success of this
initiative, the markets were burned down in 2000. Kajuma’s attempt to
reconstruct the stalls was denied by the City Council, which withdrew his
license because the stalls did not meet the city planning regulations. The
hawkers, however, had learned that if they traded in sheltered space they
would not be considered a nuisance. They started renting spaces in groups
and displaying their goods in buildings where Asian clothing shops were
closing down. This new method of marketing came to be referred to as
“exhibitions.” The conversion of shops into exhibitions was stepped up by
the liberalization of the economy, which saw many shops that were dependent
on garments produced by import-substituting industries cease operation
along Moi Avenue, Tom Mboya Street, Ronald Ngala, Taveta Road, Latema
Road, and Accra Road. Import substitution was a trade and economic policy
that advocated replacing foreign imports with domestic production.
Kwadwo (2000) notes that this kind of industrialization policy was aban-
doned by developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s due to the indebted-
ness that resulted from related policies imposed by the IMF and World
Bank through their structural adjustment programs. The vacant spaces left
by these industries were taken over and subdivided for use by operators in
the informal economy. Women who were already organized or had the ability
to organize themselves into groups took advantage of this change.
Another attempt made by women to gain entry into the city garment
market was through the occupation of hotel rooms. Women traders would
disguise themselves as hotel lodgers and use the rooms—for example, in
Mombasa House Lodge—to display and sell their goods. This business
transaction was largely illegal and customers would often be arrested while
they walked in and out of the hotel. Several hotel owners, however, started
embracing the traders’ initiative and consequently more women began to
occupy lodges in the city. Today several buildings house women informal
garment traders, with the most notable ones situated along Taveta Road.
Some fifty-three women traders from Taveta Road were selected for
interviews in 2012. Although the results of conversations with such a rela-
tively small number cannot be generalized, they do provide insights into
the changing nature of women in the city. For example, most of the women
158 African Studies Review

informal garment traders in Taveta Road (45.3%, or 24) had completed

secondary school, while 24.5 percent (13 women) had a college certificate.
Some 13.2 percent (7 women) had completed an even more advanced level
of education, including three women with university education. Only one
woman in the survey had attended only primary school. The participation
of women with college and university education in informal trade is a new
trend, precipitated by the high level of unemployment in the country. Some
had begun their Taveta Road business immediately after leaving school
(6, or 11.3%) while others had been unemployed (8, or 15%). Another
eight (15%) had been employed as garment sellers or had worked in govern-
ment offices, while others had been hawkers selling food, second-hand clothes,
green groceries, or potatoes. Others had worked as receptionists, tea girls,
or accounts clerks. The youngest woman in the survey was twenty-one years
old, while the oldest was fifty-five. The mean age was thirty-three, while the
modal age was thirty. Roughly half (50.9 percent, or 27 women) were married.
The majority (22, or 43.1%) had come from peri-urban locations. The next
largest category was drawn from low-income neighborhoods (19, or 37.3%).
The rest of the women came from middle-income (8, or 15.7%) or high-
income (2, or 3.9%) areas.
The women in the Taveta Road case study obtained start-up capital
from a variety of sources (see table 2). The most important source was
personal savings (15 women, or 28%). The next most important source
(9 women, or 17%) was the chama, the organized social group or guild that

Table 2. Sources of Capital of the Case Study Women

Frequency Percent Cumulative Percent
Commissions from properties 2 3.8 3.8
Small savings from chama 9 17.0 20.8
Parents and banks 1 1.9 22.6
Own savings 15 28.3 50.9
Loan and savings 2 3.8 54.7
Loan from the bank 5 9.4 64.2
From same green grocery 1 1.9 66.0
Parents and friends 1 1.9 67.9
Husband funded me 1 1.9 69.8
Loans from friends and chama 1 1.9 71.7
Previous job 2 3.8 75.5
Loans from husband and chama 2 3.8 79.2
Boyfriend 5 9.4 88.7
Family members 2 3.8 92.5
Retrenchment package 3 5.7 98.1
Father 1 1.9 100.0
Total 53 100.0

Source: Field survey, 2012

 ASR Forum: Women Informal Garment Traders in Nairobi 159

commonly is used for mobilizing resources. Other sources included banks,

relatives, spouses, and friends. Previous earnings were also an important
source of startup funding.
The entrepreneurial journey of subaltern women from the margins to the
center has required the ability to cross socially and economically defined
borders and boundaries in the city. Such moves on the part of the political
and economic elite are well-known phenomena; they move to different zones—
including low-income neighborhoods—to open supermarkets and establish
industries in the name of creating jobs and providing goods and services.
At the same time, they extract profits from these neighborhoods and trans-
fer the surplus to their own locales. While such boundary-crossing is not as
familiar to the poor, or to women, the case study illustrates that women have
indeed overcome actual or implied barriers imposed by a patriarchal culture
and masculine planning ideologies. The movement has also been literal
in the most basic sense—many take daily matatu (minibus) rides to the city
or walk to the city center.
For many women, organizing themselves into vyama has facilitated their
entry into the city center. These solidarity networks extend mutual support
to members in a rotational manner. The women contribute a fixed sum of
money every market day, and this money is given to one member who uses
it for business expenses or to meet household demands. The chama also
has a loan fund derived from the registration fees paid by each member
upon joining the group. The money is loaned at an interest rate of 10 percent.
The chama is thus a source of collective agency that helps the members
enhance their businesses. By using their organized group as security, they
are also able to bargain with formal banks such as the Equity Bank in Kenya
and the Kenya Women Finance Trust to obtain loans. Other collaborative
efforts reduce transaction costs. For example, women may import goods
from overseas—say, from Turkey, Thailand, China, or the United Arab
Emirates—and send one representative to carry out the transaction while
they all share the cost of the trip. They also share the cost of the rent in the
group occupancy setting, which itself boosts business through economies of
agglomeration. Customers are drawn to one setting where traders congre-
gate. This kind of entrepreneurship is based on trust. The women bond in
the chama through weekly meetings and visiting one another. The weekly
or monthly contributions they make also bind them together as a community
in the spirit of the ubuntu adage: “I am because you are and since we are,
therefore I am” (Mbiti 1969:108).

Implications of Moving to the Center

The infiltration of the city by a subaltern population has often been met
with acrimony from elite planners, whose first impulse has been to curtail
this development rather than determine how to accommodate it. The plan-
ners have worried about overcrowding and strains on the infrastructural
facilities within the city, among other problems (Ngwalla 2011). But the
160 African Studies Review

women are by now an established presence, and as such they have forced
their way into being noticed and included in city planning rather than wait-
ing to be invited or to have special zones created for them. Through group
occupancy, sharing spaces, and collaboration they have initiated a new way
of appropriating space in the city in a legitimate manner. Their presence is
also perfectly legal. It is therefore incumbent upon the city planners to
come up with imaginative planning models to accommodate them.
The women traders pay for City Council‒issued business licenses and
are completely visible to income tax collectors. They comply with city laws and
by-laws and cannot be accused of hiding. Regulations related to health
and fire safety are taken care of by the various landlords. Most of the women
no longer trade anonymously (see Kinyanjui 2010); some have a business
name and a stall number and advertise their business. This is partly a strategy
to increase profitability, since such visibility makes it is easy for them to
establish regular customers. As one woman testified,

Customers can easily identify me by the building name and the stall number.
I no longer rely on passersby as I have regular customers who come to the
shop. I even keep their cell phone numbers to alert them when I have
brought new supplies. The personal relationship I develop with customers
means that I am able to dispose-off my stock quickly. (Interview, Jitihada,
Feb. 17, 2012)

As far as the employer‒employee relationship is concerned, the women

traders do not operate within formal labor laws. Often employees receive
no written contract. Hirings are based on the implicit understanding that
the employee should be competent enough to ensure enough sales profit
to cover the rent of the premises, the employee’s own wages, and the profit
margin expected by the employer. Since garment prices are not controlled,
an employee has the latitude to pocket whatever profits accrue above and
beyond what the owner expects. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that any
such employee would even want to report nonremittance of dues to the
National Social Security Fund and the National Hospital Insurance Fund.
This flexibility has allowed some of the hired workers in the exhibitions to
make enough money for themselves and start their own businesses.
Perhaps the key question should be: what happens when a noncolonial
model of doing business takes over the CBD? Will the urban authorities and
the state be able to recognize the significance, contribution, aspirations,
entrepreneurial prowess, and sheer numbers of these businesswomen? These
are some of the questions raised in a previous paper on the integration
of informal business written for the United Nations Research Institute for
Social Development (UNRISD) (Kinyanjui 2010). As I concluded there, the
power centers need to invite the women into the city and state administration
or at least accept their presence; they can no longer ignore the significance
of these businesswomen to the fabric of city life, both the contributions they
are making to the exchange of goods and services and the alterations they
 ASR Forum: Women Informal Garment Traders in Nairobi 161

have made to the city’s business landscape. The refusal or failure to do so is

not a realistic option; the women, unlike the bureaucracy, are street smart
and resilient, and will always devise strategies to ensure their livelihoods. The
city and state administration must allow economic informality into their future
planning with an understanding that economic informality is a socioeco-
nomic order that is different from Western corporate capitalism. It uses a wide
range of social relations and social capital and is unlikely to give in to state
demands and elitist bureaucracies.
The collaboration among women discussed here represents a way of
distributing wealth and providing for the material well-being of families
that is different from the concentration of capital in the hands of one entre-
preneur who then hires workers. The kind of space-sharing arrangements
that the women traders engage in is an ubuntu route of redistributive justice
that does not involve destroying competitors or blocking their entry into
the same business space. It is this form of redistributive justice that planners
need to understand before they dismiss it as organized chaos, and it calls
for similarly novel planning strategies. What Miraftab (2009) calls “insurgent”
or “radical” planning calls for the shedding of inherited colonial models of
the city. Urban planners need to come up with innovative schemes and
projects that serve all of the citizens, including the city’s new occupants.

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge the assistance received from Josephat Juma, John

Kiragu, Perpetua Njeri, the women respondents, and three anonymous
reviewers. I also wish to thank Ella Kusnetz, the copy editor, for the laborious
editing of my paper.

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Notes

1. The paper is an abridged version of a forthcoming book, Gender and Economic

Informality in Nairobi: From the Margins to the Center (ZED Books).
2. Similarly, Barnes (1992) documents the way in which the colonial government,
in conjunction with male workers, controlled women’s mobility in Zimbabwe.
3. Kenya National Archives, 1973, Nairobi City Council Hawkers License File
RN/4/5/12.