Abstract
For more than a decade scholars mostly from economy and development studies have described the rise of a newly emerging ‘middle class’ in the Global South including Africa. This has led to a ‘middle class narrative’ with the ‘middle class’ as the backbone of economic and democratic development. Especially with regard to the stability of the position of the people in the ‘middle’, empirical social science studies challenge the ‘middle class narrative’ and at their uncertainty and insecurity. This tension between upward mobility at the one hand uncertainty and instability at the other hand (the vulnerability-security nexus) and the options to cope with this challenge under the condition of limited provision of formal social security is the focus of this case study on Kenya. Instead of an analysis of inequality based on income, it is more helpful to start from the welfare mix and the role of social networks as main elements of provision of social security. Against this background, we identify different strategies of coping that go together with different sets of values and lifestyles, conceptualised as milieus, that are not determined by the socio-economic situation.
Highlights
For a long time, the ‘middle class’ represented the socio-economic backbone of the Western model of economy and society
The lower threshold is set between 2 and 10 US$ per capita and day calculated according to purchasing power parity (PPP)
I ask whether these findings apply to other African countries, and, in the light of the analysis, I compare the challenges facing the European middle-income group with the situation in Kenya, showing that there are some basic similarities and clear differences
Summary
Studies on the middle-income group that include OECD countries for the analysis use different thresholds, e.g. between 10 and 100 US $ (per head/day) (Kharas 2010, 12) This shows that with regard to Africa the AfDB uses much lower thresholds. The ‘Middle class on the rise’ sub-project was carried out by an anthropological research team comprising Erdmute Alber (project leader), Lena Kroeker and Maike Voigt, and a sociological team comprising Dieter Neubert (project leader) and Florian Stoll. Both teams conducted qualitative field research with long-term stays in the field based mainly on interviews, and participant observation. Our research provides evidence that the need for means to cope with risk and uncertainty is a main feature of the middle-income group in Kenya (Kroeker 2018; Neubert 2017)
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