Risky Trade, Resilient Traders: Trust and Livestock Marketing in Northern Kenya

Abstract

This article examines innovations in livestock marketing that livestock traders in northern Kenya use to overcome a host of trading obstacles. Livestock trading in northern Kenya is one of the toughest and most risk-prone jobs in the region, yet livestock traders have been able not only to transform the ways in which trading is conducted through ‘home-made’ innovations, but also to mitigate trading risks. The article demonstrates how livestock traders have become resilient to risks and have been able to succeed in a trade that in the past many have had to abandon. Trust embedded in social networks and relations reinforces the adoption of risk-minimizing strategies. The article focuses on the broad field of pastoral risk management to illustrate how an innovative risk management strategy can be used to create a successful business entrepreneurship in a risk-prone environment. I draw on fieldwork conducted during 2001–2 among cattle traders in Moyale District of northern Kenya and Nairobi, and on recent work among Somali livestock traders-cum-ranchers in Garissa District of North Eastern and Coast provinces.