Mobile Enterprises and Markets in Central Province, Kenya

Abstract

HIS paper focuses on patterns of mobile enterprise activity and rural markets Tin the Kikuyu heartland of Central Province, an agricultural region of the Kenya highlands (Fig. 1). The objectives of the study are first to describe patterns of mobile enterprise activity in order to highlight differences between East and West African examples; second, to show that theoretical models of trader mobility and periodic market structure, based mostly on West African and non-African empirical analyses, do not satisfactorily account for all spatial aspects of enterprise mobility in Central Province; and third, to offer an alternative economic explanation that fills gaps in the existing theories based on either central place concepts or industrial location principles. The alternative explanation is based on different assumptions of economic behavior of market participants. The data for this study were collected as part of a survey of rural, nonfarm activities in Central Province. The survey, conducted in June to August, 1977, involved detailed interviews with 852 owners or managers of nonfarm enterprises in fifty-two small, rural market centers (Fig. 2).1 Centers classified as urban by the Kenyan Ministry of Lands and Settlement were excluded. To qualify for inclusion in this study, an enterprise must have functioned for one month or longer in the year prior to the survey. Only enterprises that usually operated from rural market centers were considered, because the relationship of enterprise activities to market patterns is a primary focus of this study. A potentially large class of nonfarm enterprises that operate from dispersed farmsteads was thus excluded. Markets were selected as interview sites by use of an area-sampling method that took into account the density of rural population.2 Slightly fewer than half of the sampled market centers are periodic in the sense that there are scheduled special market days, while almost all markets have a nucleus of permanent stores or dukas that operate each workday. In the periodic centers, two special market days per week are common, and one or three special market days also occur. On these days there is an influx of part-time or mobile enterprises that set up temporary stalls or occupy open space. Most of the market centers were developed during the British colonial era, as appears to have been the