Microenterprise: Macroeconomic environment: Revisiting Kenya's informal ( jua kali) sector against the background of the formal globalising economy

Abstract

This short paper arises from revisiting Kenya from time to time over the period 1989–1995 in order to research how its informal sector had fared over the past 25 years (King, 1996). The concerns in that exercise were to revisit the informal sector we had researched back in the early 1970s, and to attempt to establish some of the changes over these two and a half decades. Naturally, the priorities in such a project were to re-analyse the sector within a Kenyan perspective. Accordingly, the kinds of questions we were addressing covered such matters as technological change, technological confidence, new products, new capital goods, assessments of income and of the human resource levels deployed in the sector. One of its principal interests was to try and judge what it meant to be successful as an operator in the informal sector. Did it mean graduation from the informal to the formal sector? Was it a question of graduating from the roadside, and from under the hot sun ( jua kali) which had given the Kenyan informal sector its now current name to a permanent stone-built workshop? Or was it to do with exporting some of one's production to neighbouring countries? In other words we were examining change and development of the informal sector within a particular historical, cultural and social context. While elaborating what was primarily a national account, bounded by policies developed in Kenya, and measured by yardsticks that were essentially local, we were aware of another global account of changes in the world economy, and from time to time sought to connect the local with the global. This threw up a more disturbing set of questions: Was it possible that what had looked like quite substantial change on a national and historical scale could prove really insignificant in terms of globalising criteria of incorporation into world markets? Although Kenya was one of the most educated nations in sub-Saharan Africa, did that profit her in terms of accessing the new global technologies? These and many other questions, including the seemingly appropriate technologies in the jua kali economy, but the virtually total absence of information and communication technologies amongst jua kali, began to make us wonder what are the implications of the globalisation account for the local jua kali development, and vice versa. Since education and employment are two very important dimensions of the global account, it may be useful to look for some guidance on these tensions between the global and local from two recent reports which take a global view. These are World Employment 1995: an ILO Report (ILO, 1995) and Priorities and strategies for education: a World Bank Review (World Bank, 1995). But the paper first sketches out what have been some of the most significant changes in the informal economy of Kenya since that local phenomenon was first brought to international attention through the much earlier ILO report, Employment, incomes and equality: a strategy for increasing productive employment in Kenya (ILO, 1972).