Nairobi

The objective of this study was to establish the effects of dividend announcement to current market prices at the Nairobi Securities Exchange, with four specific objectives; to determine the information content of dividend announcements, to determine the extent to which prices converge to new values after dividend announcements on a sector by sector basis, to establish the market reaction to announced information and also to establish whether investors can secure excess returns by acting on announced information. A 66 days event timeline was employed from 2005 to 2015 on daily closing stock prices. A sample of 179 dividend announcements from 22 listed companies in 8 sectors were drawn and analysed using an OLS Market Model. Findings of the research conclude that; dividend announcements do have an impact on stock prices for the Agricultural, Banking, Commercial, Construction, Manufacturing and Telecomm Sectors and not for the Energy Sector, Insurance Sector and the Nairobi Securities...

What does it mean to make a life in an African city today? How do ordinary Africans, surrounded by collapsing urban infrastructures and amid fantastical promises of hypermodern, globalised futures, try to ensure a place for themselves in the city's future?

Nairobi, like many cities across the globe, is on the cusp of radical urban change. Yet as a city born of British colonialism, Nairobians also live amongst the dilapidated vestiges of imperial urban planning; spaces designed to regulate urban subjects. Focusing on life in a colonial-era public housing project now slated for demolition as part of state-led urban renewal, this book explores six intersecting challenges facing contemporary urban Africa: making a home amidst the remains of colonial urban planning; the management of urban decay and renewal; the politics of the past and the making of urban history; the generative relationship of the urban to the rural; terror and the construction of security; and how to belong to the future.

Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.

This chapter explores the history of Nubian citizenship struggles in Kenya. Today's Kenyan Nubians are a marginalized minority, discriminated against in access to national identity cards, unrecognized (at least until 2009, and then only ambiguously) as a tribe of Kenya, and landless. Their story is one of displacement and uneasy settlement, of shifting and divided loyalties, and of sometimes-conflicting strategies aimed at constructing themselves as citizens. Perhaps the only consistency in the Nubians' story is their status as in-between or outside the categories that dictate, in formal and informal terms, belonging in the communities in which they found themselves. The various and often paradoxical ways in which the Nubians have successfully or unsuccessfully negotiated their status—as askaris,  detribalized natives, and ultimately ethnic strangers—are emblematic of ways in which political membership has historically been negotiated in dialogue with, rather than purely determined by, colonial (and postcolonial) legal and political status. This case draws attention to the ways in which categories through which colonial authorities sought to govern the colonized were unable to absolutely capture the lived realities of identity, difference, mobility, settlement, rights claiming, and belonging. The chapter argues that Nubians actively contributed, albeit within significant constraints, to the construction of citizenship as a (limited) form of political membership and a license to make meaningful use of (some) rights and resources.

Land surveyor Wallis Frederick Hime was one of the founders of the Institution of Surveyors of Kenya and the land survey profession in Kenya. In this talk he delves into his experiences in land surveying before and after Kenya's independence, the challenges that the profession pf land surveying faces in Kenya and his encouragement for the young surveyors. Part of his story is the untold history of land surveying in Kenya, its influence on the development of Nairobi City and Kenya as a whole.

This 2008 paper looks at Nairobi's single storey, largely unserviced, wattle-and-daube slums, with their rental market, from the perspective of the city's multi-storey tenements. This allows it to ask particular questions about upgrading interventions.

Focusing on the efforts of Nairobi’s water utility to reduce leakage in the city’s expansion of water infrastructure, this study offers an organizational assemblage perspective on infrastructure. Drawing on the concept of assemblage and its uptake in science and technology studies and cultural anthropology, infrastructure is the material form of emergent systems through which the flow of nature, goods, ideas, people and finance is organized over space and time. Nairobi’s water infrastructure brings together a diverse set of features, including pipes, meters, GPS technologies, smartphones, engineering reports, Excel spreadsheets, landlords, plumbers, African chiefs, thieves, foreign experts, politicians, accountants, engineers, the everyday lives and ethnicities of the people of Nairobi, climate conditions, hydraulics, urban topographies and the fluids sludge and water.
Based on a thick performative description of three praxiographic studies, condensed from a four-year ethnographic case study that included eight months of onsite fieldwork in Nairobi, I describe the engagement of Nairobi’s water utility in three technoscientific practices of water leakage and loss management: measuring, tracking, and demarcating water flow and leakage. Through a creative non-fictional writing process, including ficto-critical storytelling, inspired by a postcolonial and feminist understanding in science and technology studies, I empirically and politically account for how a technoscientific intervention enacts the pacification, visibility, and formalization of infrastructure.
My practical ontology framework helps me to understand how the organizing of infrastructure enacts the recursive dynamic of ontological multiplicity and stabilizing, a key concern in assemblage thinking and actor-network-theory. This dynamic is not only experimental, but entangled in organizing practices of governing fluidity, managing invisibility, and operating messiness. I also give the uptake of the concept of assemblage thinking in the turn to infrastructure in social theory empirical depth. This study suggests an empirical and conceptual way forward for organizational research to deploy infrastructure thinking.

Since the launch of CCTV Africa in 2012, many academics from various disciplines have taken an interest in the role and impact of the Chinese state-run media outlet. Building on this scholarship, this paper develops a fresh approach to examining Chinese investment in Kenya’s communications sector. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the summer of 2016, the author examines how Kenyan, Chinese, and other international media professionals navigate the everyday production of media at CCTV Africa’s head offices in Nairobi, Kenya. This working paper provides (1) an overview of existing literature on the topic of CCTV Africa and (2) a portrait of the multifaceted experiences of CCTV Africa staff, including their narratives of joining CCTV, producing news content, navigating relationships with managerial staff, and planning for the future. Ultimately, the author finds that feedback from CCTV Africa’s staff are mixed. While CCTV Africa’s employees are, on average, satisfied with CCTV Africa’s work environment and conditions, problematic areas regarding safety, interpersonal relationships, and training deserve further consideration and investigation.

Tesi di dissertazione per il Master in Nuovi Orizzonti di Cooperazione e Diritto Internazionale FOCSIV della Pontificia Università Lateranense.

Un'ampia panoramica sulle problematiche principali che affliggono gli street children in tutto il mondo con dati sulla diffusione del fenomeno a livello locale del Kenya e a livello globale conduce ad un'analisi dei diritti riconosciuti ai minori dalla Convenzione ONU sui Diritti dell'infanzia del 1989, dalla African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child e dalla Costituzione del Kenya e, successivamente, alla presentazione di quattro interventi realizzati nelle baraccopoli di Nairobi (Kenya) da diverse ONG e congregazioni religiose per restituire ai ragazzi di strada i diritti che vengono loro negati.

The Mungiki

First, they came in the name of god,
and they got legitimacy,
Then they came in the name of politics,
and they money, riches,
Then they got greedy,
they maimed, shot, murdered, extorted and beheaded,
Then they were besieged,
arrested, killed, extrajudicial executions
Then they changed religion,
It did not work
Then they changed names,
It did not work,
Then they went back to politics,
Ethnic politics,
And it seems to be working,
they are becoming legitimate again!

This thesis explores the outcomes of entrepreneurial urban governance in Nairobi, Kenya, through the ethnographic purview of informal traders negotiating access to space. While
I demonstrate that the urban renewal process in Nairobi reflects the ongoing shift to entrepreneurialism and subsequent securitization occurring in many cities around the globe, I examine how features of the local context – in particular, the presence of powerful informal authorities and informal political structures – have complicated the implementation of its national development plan, Vision 2030. I argue that the outcomes of neoliberal urban renewal are at odds with the stated aims of creating a more secure and
democratic city. I proffer that these dynamics are both produced by and reproductive of differentiated forms of citizenship that have been enforced in Nairobi since the colonial
era, and have long contributed to urban stratification and, by extension, urban insecurity.

This chapter considers Nairobi's multi-storey tenements and the increasingly frequent incidents of building collapse. It locates the state's reaction to the public and media outcry of these events within the context of construction industry regulations and of planning, and makes recommendations on this basis.

The realization of the immense benefits of decentralization is by far undisputable concept to development, far more to observe in the Kenyan case of the economic decentralization (devolution) attained so far. " Nairobi " as a symbol for development and a concept for modernization in Kenya seems to hold the key to the final effects of devolution required countrywide. The experiential development that Kenya in its former traditional regions need which is attached to its identity groups (ethnic orientations) requires devolving Nairobi in order to effectualize what vision 2030 may be slow to achieve. This paper by using descriptive design employs a desktop study approach to; trace the growth of Nairobi as a modern symbol of modernization, secondly to highlight decentralization of city modernization and enhanced equitable development, and finally examining how the devolution of Nairobi can be a finality to equitable development in Kenya. The paper in its findings concludes that the wholesome centre – periphery model is what devolving Nairobi would help Kenya achieve in the long run.

This book explores the points of convergence between corporate capitalist and terrorist practice. Assessing an increase in the number of terrorist attacks directed at commercial entities in urban areas, with an emphasis on the shopping mall in general and Nairobi's Westgate Mall in particular, Suzi Mirgani offers a fascinating and disturbing perspective on the spaces where the most powerful forces of contemporary culture – the most mainstream and the most extreme – meet on common ground.

In Kenya, the Vision 2030 masterplan is radically reimagining Nairobi as a 'world class' city of the future. This has generated dramatic digital imagery of satellite cities, skyscrapers and shopping malls. For tenants in rundown public housing, these glossy yet speculative visions are enticing, but also provoke anxieties of exclusion. Yet so far, little has materially manifested. This article explores the effects these future vistas produce in the present, in the gap between the urban plan and its implementation. It argues that the spectacle of official planning has generated anticipatory actions, as Nairobians' engage with the future promised by such schemes. These actions are characterised by dissonant temporal experiences, in which local residents experience the future city as both near at hand and forever out of reach.

The purpose of this research was to examine empirically the international visitor experiences while in urban destinations
Nairobi County, Kenya.
Methodology: The research hypothesis was constructed based on previous theoretical and empirical studies. A survey was
conducted on 231 departing visitors to collect primary data from January to June 2017. Pearson product-moment correlation
coefficient was used to measure the linear correlation between international visitor experiences and urban destinations.
Main findings: The results found out that visitor experience levels have direct positive influence on visitors’ visitation to
Nairobi’s urban tourist attractions and thus directly influenced their return intention through their destination satisfaction
process.
Implications: Destination managers and tourism organizations particularly service organizations need to take into account of
the satisfaction levels and the level of experience of urban visitors to enhance their revisits.
Novelty: The findings of this research have provided to the understanding of valuable practical information about visitors
experiences while in urban destinations. This information could be used in promotional strategies, product development, and
urban planning frameworks should be geared to meet destination demand and sustainable urban tourism development.

Through a story that connects the rhizomatic trajectories of abandonment
in Mathare, Nairobi, I show how the continuities of an
imperial planning become territorialized in a water pump in this
“slum.” These events highlight the assembling of empire through
ideas and practices for politics, ecology, economics and society that
produce the city of Nairobi in the longue durée. Notwithstanding
the persistence of a “divide and rule” spatial management, I show
here how residents of poor spaces struggle for possibilities, however
tragic. In dwelling in their stories, this paper argues that
Nairobi's coloniality persists and principally in these ecologies of
exclusion. The most visible imperial novelty, however, is that the
police are used more frequently to enforce city divisions, becoming
de facto urban managers and infrastructure. Against the reinstantiations
of empire, I argue that the material and enunciatory struggles
of slum residents potentiates fugitive possibilities for Nairobi as
a whole.

This article is concerned with the memory of the Uganda Railway in Kenya. Built during the heyday of British imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century, the colonial railway has been a highly contested infrastructure. Drawing on museum exhibitions, public speeches, and publications, the article argues that the main narrative of the railway line as a tool of oppression began to change when the railway infrastructure gradually deteriorated in the mid-twentieth century. I show how three distinct groups (white expatriates, Kenyan-Asians, and Kenya's political elite) were involved in creating a new public memory that popularized the Uganda Railway as a cornerstone of the postcolonial nation. Their uncoordinated but simultaneous efforts toward a new reading of the past all aimed, albeit for different reasons, at reimagining the nation. The article thus shows mechanisms of coming to terms with the colonial past in a postcolonial nation.

Residential fragmentation undermines integration by physically excluding some urban dwellers through walling, fencing and use of barriers limiting interactions. Research has shown that many cities in the Global South are experiencing spatial fragmentation issues associated with increasing inequalities, social exclusion and proliferation of gated communities. This results in distinct residential fragments with limited interactions and unequal quality of life (QoL) conditions of the residents of the fragments. The aim of this paper is to describe the association between residential fragmentation and QoL based on three residential fragments in the city of Nairobi (Kenia). A mixed method approach was applied to understand fragmentation in the city and analyse integration and QoL satisfaction in the fragments. Household surveys and key informant interviews were main data collection methods. Data analysis methods used included descriptive statistics, spatial and content analysis. The resu...

This paper explores a significant gap in knowledge about the employment impacts of community-led, low-income housing production, and the complex intersections between rights to housing, rights to work, and international attempts to define these rights, such as the ILO’s ‘decent work’ agenda. We develop a four-way classification to understanding the livelihoods impact of housing interventions and how to measure it and, using evidence from construction workers and beneficiaries of the low-income housing developments supported by CLIFF (the Community Led Infrastructure Finance Facility) in Nairobi, this paper moves towards contextually-relevant definitions of ‘a job’. We argue that existing employment multipliers used by evaluation agencies underestimate livelihood needs, and that the ILO’s ‘decent work’ agenda should be contextually reviewed, particularly for informal economy workers with multiple livelihood streams, where sustainability may be more important than formalised work. We suggest that ‘rights to housing’ and ‘rights to work’ may conflict, particularly where in-situ upgrading is not feasible and developing housing in peri-urban locations is necessitated by the contextual realities of fast-growing cities.

In anthropology and related fields, " ruin " and " decay " are terms that are often used interchangeably. By paying close attention to the materiality and politics of dirt and decay in a colonial-era housing estate in Nairobi, Kenya, this article argues for their uncoupling. Instead of implying loss or oblivion, decay is explored as a process of accumulation: an excess that constitutes a material history. Remains, rubbish and dirt continue to be active in the present, effecting and constraining certain atmospheres, attitudes and politics. Drawing a distinction between " urban decay " as a policy category and as a material process, the article also considers what happens if these remains are wiped away in schemes of urban renewal. The loss usually associated with ruination may emanate not so much from decay as from its elimination.

Many cities in contemporary Africa are characterised by hybrid modes of security governance that are co-produced by a variety of state and non-state actors of violence. While the (il)legitimacy of informal non-state security providers on the local level has featured prominently in discussions on hybrid security governance, there is a paucity of empirical case studies of what actually contributes to their (de)legitimisation, notably in the urban context. In order to fill this gap in knowledge, this article investigates how the legitimacy of community-based armed groups – such as vigilantes, militias and gangs – that are operating in Kenyan cities is influenced by the shifting functions they fulfil on behalf of various stakeholders. Based on field research in the informal settlements of Nairobi and Mombasa, I found that their involvement in organised criminal activities often costs vigilantes the legitimacy they had gained by providing protection and crime control for their community. At the same time, their involvement in repeated cycles of post-election violence leads not only to increasing ethnic segregation of the slums in which they operate, but also to the bifurcation of their legitimacy along ethnic lines. Taken together, the article contributes to our understanding of urban violence and conflict in Eastern Africa by tracing the trajectory of the (de)legitimisation of hybrid security actors in the two main cities in Kenya.

Nairobi Metropolitan Region (NMR) includes four spatial units namely Core Nairobi, Northern Metro, Southern Metro, Eastern Metro. The major objective of the spatial development plan is integrated growth of NMR. Thus, spatial development plan for the NMR comes along with an integrated development plan that ensures employment for the majority. Different spatial unit has its own population growth. This confirms parallel development scenario suitable for each and every pocket. The development scenario of the region depends upon employment growth, occupational structure, land use pattern etc. in NMR. Here we have attempted to project the employment growth on the basis of population growth rate, occupational structure and land use pattern in bigger NMR up to 2030.

Postcolonial urban theory and subsequent critique find their origins in the recognition that, in order to come to terms with the dynamics of the postcolonial city in Africa and elsewhere, urban scholars are in need of an ‘urban theory beyond the west’ (2011). This can be understood as an understanding of the postcolonial city through the development of frameworks that go beyond, mirror and deconstruct Western theorizing, conceptualizing and ways of city building.
Simultaneously, postcolonial critique advocates for an understanding of the city constructed around the trajectories of its majority population, the urban poor. A population, so it claims, which has largely been overlooked in both colonial and postcolonial urban theory and policy, also in Nairobi. A population which inhabits a ghostly, invisible and imaginary city built from words and movement. An informal city characterized by the ‘rogue urbanisms’ of constant change, unruliness and unpredictability (Pieterse, 2011). The question is how postcolonial urban theory and critique can provide a more nuanced understanding of Nairobi, beyond dystopia and a more comprehensive and inclusive foundation for its future. I wish to discuss that the current context in Nairobi demonstrates the need to broaden our scope when it comes to the population under scrutiny so as to include the urban middle classes. I further maintain that we need to rethink the way postcolonial critique portrays current trends in city development thereby going beyond the notion of urban fantasies.

Based on an ethnography of Uber drivers in Nairobi, my article explores practices of contestation of the gig economy taking place both in the digital and physical space of the city. It argues that the labour struggle against the price policies and the control mechanisms of ride-hailing platforms such as Uber foregrounds the tension between a subjectification from above, in which the platforms construct the drivers as independent contractors and the shaping of subjectivities through the interaction of the drivers with the digital platforms and with one another. It also suggests that, through contestation, as the one catalysed by the call to ‘go Karura’, logging off from the app, the workers connect their struggle to a broader critique of processes of exploitation, dependency and subalternity involving the state and international capital. While contributing to the growing literature on the gig economy in low- and middle-income countries, my article brings the labour geography scholars...

In January 2011, a team of four students from the Masters of Public Affairs at Sciences Po (Paris) conducted an intense campaign of fieldwork for their collective research project on the Nairobi National Park. This work contributes to the research program of the Urban Protected Areas Network (PIRVE) and was supported by IFRA-Nairobi and the Kenya Wildlife Service. This present article describes their work and summarizes its results.

Comme en attestent les récents débats du Kwani? Litfest 2010 (festival littéraire à Nairobi), la littérature contemporaine au Kenya est marquée par l’idée, souvent contestée, de l’émergence d’une nouvelle génération littéraire. Formulée en opposition à la génération postindépendance,cette « génération Kwani » serait constituée de jeunes auteurs vivant et écrivant la ville, se détachant des questions ethniques et postcoloniales et s’inscrivant dans de nouveaux réseaux institutionnels. Cette proposition peut être éclairée par une géographie des pratiques littéraires de ces jeunes auteurs. En retraçant les itinéraires quotidiens et les performances d’une sélection représentative d’auteurs, nous souhaitons comprendre comment se construit la figure de l’écrivain contemporain kenyan. Dans la dernière décennie, l’agenda culturel de Nairobi s’est densifié,offrant une palette de lieux à travers lesquels les écrivains peuvent se définir. Il s’agit d’identifier et de saisir l’usage de deux types de lieux figurant dans leur espace vécu : les lieux de socialisation (bars, restaurants,clubs, loisirs) et les lieux de légitimation (associations, centres culturels,universités). Ces lieux, incarnés par des institutions et leurs évènements,peuvent servir de clé d’analyse du champ littéraire kenyan.

The objective of this study was to establish the effects of dividend announcement to current market prices at the Nairobi Securities Exchange, with four specific objectives; to determine the information content of dividend announcements, to determine the extent to which prices converge to new values after dividend announcements on a sector by sector basis, to establish the market reaction to announced information and also to establish whether investors can secure excess returns by acting on announced information. A 66 days event timeline was employed from 2005 to 2015 on daily closing stock prices. A sample of 179 dividend announcements from 22 listed companies in 8 sectors were drawn and analysed using an OLS Market Model. Findings of the research conclude that; dividend announcements do have an impact on stock prices for the Agricultural, Banking, Commercial, Construction, Manufacturing and Telecomm Sectors and not for the Energy Sector, Insurance Sector and the Nairobi Securities Exchange Market. It takes more than five days for prices to adjust to their correct values and this makes it possible for market players to profit from the inefficiency by earning abnormal returns. We conclude that the Nairobi Securities Exchange is not semi-strong form efficient.

Rapid population growth combined with poor planning, weak institutional, financial, and administrative conditions in many Third World cities has undermined many municipal governments’ urban management capacity, especially the provision of basic services such as potable water and sanitation. Most of the urban residents with inadequate access to basic public services live in slum and squatter settlements. Traditionally, these residents have relied on informal sector services, which while affordable to many low-income people, are actually costly to the very poor, who constitute a growing segment of the population in slum and squatter settlements. The failure of municipal governments and the informal and/or the private sector to meet poor people's service needs has compelled them to turn to a third alternative - the voluntary sector, i.e., non-governmental and community organizations (NGOs and COs) – collectively referred to as voluntary organizations (VOs).

Although the voluntary sector’s role in rural development in Africa is widely acknowledged, its work in the continent’s urban realm is scarcely understood, despite its increasing activity in this arena, and many scholars’ contention that the sector is best suited for the role of meeting poor people’s service needs and making urban planning policy more cognizant of their needs. Within the voluntary sector, there are many actors, including NGOs and COs. While the advocacy, intermediary, and community mobilizing role of NGOs is widely known, the role of COs is less appreciated because of the lack of sufficient information on their number, activities, and ability to contribute to development and poverty alleviation (Holmen and Jirstrom 1994). Using the case study of Nairobi City, Kenya, this research project (1) investigated the role of the voluntary sector (including COs) in urban service provision and planning - especially in the promotion of planning and building standards that are suitable to low-income areas); (2) sought to highlight the role of COs; and (3) analyzed several causes of VO effectiveness in these endeavors, including: funding and cost recovery, community composition and participation, service provision experience, use of technology, VO structure and leadership, organizational objectives, State support and cooperation with other VOs.

The study’s major findings are that the voluntary sector plays an important role in urban service provision and in the promotion of appropriate planning and building standards for low-income areas of Nairobi. Although voluntary organizations’ service efforts are overwhelmed by the existing need for services, their contributions do ameliorate service needs in low-income areas. Moreover, even though NGOs are more visible in the literature, this study found that COs are crucial voluntary sector actors and that NGOs and COs are actually complementary, rather than competing, organizational forms. Thus, the most successful service provision initiatives are NGO-CO partnerships that utilize the strengths of each organizational type.

This book examines the operating of cultural work in postcolonial Nairobi from the view that it drives modernity, survival and processes of empowerment. It depicts a city of global and spatial aspirations, divided by a past that transcends its present. It is a neo-colonial and acquisitive city; Western cultural institutions dominate the marketplace. An associative aspect is the gendered city space (streets, bars, pubs), which is overwhelmingly masculine. The book demonstrates how the marginalization of women impacts variously on the city’s texts, its fiction, theatre, and the iconography of the Matatu vehicle. The major theme of the book is the struggle for cultural recognition and authority. Strategies of social and political accommodation coalesce both creatively and antagonistically in this formulation of Kenyan self-identification.

“This bulldozer of a book clears a lot of new ground, permitting a remapping of the cultural contours of postcolonial Nairobi. Included in the survey are Western institutions, indigenous fiction and drama, and ideological, moral and demographic dimensions of the local transport industry. By ranging so widely, Granqvist guides us to a fuller understanding of the complex cross-cultural dynamics of a
modern African city.”
Bernth Lindfors, Professor Emeritus of English and African Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin

Informal rental housing remains a hidden – yet central – pillar of low-cost shelter markets across the global South. The large informal settlement of Mathare Valley illustrates Nairobi’s rapidly changing informal rental housing markets, with the ongoing rise of tenements alongside metal shacks. Informal single-room rental units (shacks and tenements) already house most Nairobi residents in low-quality but highly profitable shelter. This case study describes how multiple exclusions can shape access to rental housing and examines the politics of shelter delivery. We underscore the importance of private rental markets and offer recommendations for inclusive, multi-pronged interventions combining support for rental housing, land governance and infrastructure delivery. Through a better understanding of the myriad actors and dynamics of informal rental housing, it may be possible to develop strategies that serve low-income tenants for whom renting is often the only viable option.