August 24, 2009
After returning to Nairobi from western Kenya, I had one day to spend in the city before heading back home. I stayed with family friends in the city, and I was treated to an opportunity to experience another aspect of Kenya’s rich tribal diversity. My family friends were Kikuyus, hailing from the central region of Kenya. As such, they treated me to some delicious traditional Kikuyu dishes such as “Githeri” (beans, corn, vegetables, and potatoes mixed up into a delicious mash) and beef stew that was different from the Luhya way of preparing beef that I was used to. Of course there were some dishes I ate like chapati, cabbage, and sweet potatoes that I was quite familiar with. I also tried to learn some Kikuyu in the short time I was there – as opposed to Luhya which is characterized by the “kh” sound, Kikuyu is full of hard “th” sounds (as in “weather,” “this,” etc).
In addition to being introduced to Kikuyu culture, I also had time to see some of the work that VEF is doing in Nairobi’s slums. I traveled with Benard, the business mentor for Nairobi, to a slum called “Korogocho” (pictured above) on the outskirts of the city. Benard was a native of western Kenya (so I was able to speak Luhya with him), but he moved to Nairobi five or six years ago. He now works at an adoption center and orphanage called the Thomas Barnado House, where he works with children and families living both at the center and in the slums to get them off the streets and help them succeed in school.
Unfortunately I only had a few hours with Benard, so we went on somewhat of a whirlwind tour of some of the VEF businesses in Korogocho. The businesses that I saw, however, were both highly successful and very different from the businesses that I had been so used to working with in western Kenya. As Benard pointed out, working in an urban slum presents a whole host of issues that do not come up in the villages. For one, turnover and movement of group members is a huge issue. Most of the beneficiaries that Benard works with are young, and they are constantly moving around for a number of reasons including the constant search for stable housing and work. In the village, beneficiaries tend to be much more static (partly because there they tend to be older women as opposed to the younger men and women in Nairobi).
In spite of the rapid rate of turnover, the slum presents a whole host of profitable opportunities to businesses for a number of reasons. First, despite the fact that almost all the residents are quite poor, there is a lot of money circulating in the slums because of the population density and the fact that everyone has to find a salaried job in order to support themselves (subsistence farming is not an option there). Secondly, things are more expensive in the city, which, according to Benard, enables the businesses to realize higher profit margins. For example, a vegetable selling business in the village might buy an avocado for five shillings and sell it for seven, but in the city it could buy it for five and sell it for ten. Furthermore, if there were demand for 10 avocadoes in the village there would probably be demand for 20 in the city.
The issue in the slums is start-up capital. A few examples of how the VEF grant helped start businesses or took them to the a higher level: we visited a firewood selling business that was able to buy and transport wood from the countryside and bring it into the city to sell instead of buying and selling within the slum as the members had previously done. Firewood is a very common cooking fuel in the slums, but, as you might expect, there are no trees. Having the capital to buy wood cheaply outside the city and transport it in to sell enabled that group to realize dramatically higher profits. We also visited a water selling business that had used the grant to buy a water tank to supply that highly demanded but scarce commodity to the citizens of Korogocho. There is no piped water in Korogocho, and the current drought has forced the government to begin serious water rationing for almost all the citizens. Since the grant, the group had bought another tank and set up a public toilet, and also, according to their leader, expanded to include a network of 35 water sellers throughout the slum! We also visited a food stand manned by two young boys cooking a soup whose main ingredient was cow’s head! A Kenyan delicacy that has yet to come to the US. Taste aside, however, the story of that business was particularly heartening because the group of five youth were previously unemployed before receiving the grant and starting the business. Youth unemployment is a huge problem in Kenya, and it was one of the catalysts behind the post-election violence in early 2008. Their business was doing quite well, although I strongly encouraged them to start keeping written records so that they would have a better idea of daily expenses, sales, and profits.
Overall, it was an amazing afternoon. For anyone who thinks that slums are just one big mass of grime and rampant poverty, I would highly advise him or her to visit Korogocho or Kibera with Benard to get a sense of the amazing things that are going on in those places. There was clearly a whole summer’s worth of work I could have done with Benard in Nairobi, but I had to settle for just that one afternoon and the promise that I would return to spend more time with him there. What a way to end an amazing summer! A concluding post to follow…
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