Mary Njeri Kinyanjui’s volume on female informal garment traders of Nairobi is an important work for several reasons. First, it is a long awaited gender analysis of informality in urban Africa, which challenges the mainstream literature by focusing on female agency and exploring women's movement from the margins to the more visible and profitable locations in the centre. Second, while analysing the case study of women garment traders on Taveta Road of Nairobi's Central Business District, the work engages with important feminist debates such as what African feminism should be or how gender issues are related to and intersect with one's class or socio-economic background. It is refreshing to read an account which positions the subaltern not as a ‘problem’ to be solved, but as an active agent with her own plans and strategies.
The book approaches women in the informal trade from an urban planning perspective, and one of its strengths is a detailed account of Nairobi's colonial and post-colonial urban planning, with discussion of the consequences that it has had for Africans engaged in the informal economy (Chapters 2, 3 and 4). This part of the study relies on interesting and original archival material, and argues that it is partly due to the gender-blind urban planning processes that women historically were and still are excluded from the public spaces and opportunities in the informal sector. However, paradoxically, the study itself at points is not very strong in showing the importance of gender. For instance, it is not always clear what job opportunities in the informal sector were available to men and women in colonial and post-colonial Nairobi, how these differed and how trends have changed over time. It is also not clear if women were involved in the informal hawker organisations that engaged with the city council, or how women's informal organisations were affected by such engagement. More precision and clarity would have added value to the gender analysis of this book.
The analysis in this manuscript is interesting and important because of its rich empirical data, with over 300 female traders surveyed and more than 50 followed up with in-depth interviews. It certainly gives a good account of central Nairobi's female garment traders, but it is brave to generalise this data to the whole informal sector, or even to all women in the informal sector. I also would have liked to see more theoretical discussions on informality and a clearer contextualisation of the study, showing how the women of Taveta Road differ from women in other urban spaces of Nairobi and, especially, why they are more successful than others. One discussion that is curiously missing in this analysis is that of the role of ethnicity, which is an important category of inclusion and exclusion in Kenya. In several places the author hints that some women interviewed speak Gikuyu (pp. 40, 65, 72, etc.), but it is not clear if this ethnic group dominates among the study participants, how ethnic belonging intersects with gender inequalities, or even if ethnicity is an important factor among female traders.
Kinyanjui does a sterling job in showing the ways in which women organise themselves, support one another and help each other progress through informal organisations (Chapters 6 and 7). She discusses different forms of collective organisations (such as chama cha soko or chama, vyama in the plural – street or market associations, social groups) to show how such collective action contributes to women's moving from the margins to the centre and empowers them. While this part of analysis is one of the most original parts of this book, I found it overtly optimistic at points. For instance, while it is undeniable that cooperation helps women's trading activities, the inevitable competition for customers is not discussed here. Moreover, while female traders' informal organisation is undoubtedly important in easing women's presence in the central Nairobi, women's arrival to the Central Business District was probably more related to the opportune historical circumstances (Asian traders leaving) rather than to the strategic choices of organised women's groups.
Women and the informal economy in urban Africa might be an ambitious title for the analysis that focuses only on female garment traders of Nairobi, but it is an important pioneering work that opens the door to the gender analysis of Kenyan informal sector. It is an important reference to anyone interested in gender, political economy of the African city, women’s informal organisation or urban planning.