Becky Asch
Nakuru, Kenya
Kenya National Alliance of Street Vendors and Informal Traders
Post taken from: http://beckyasch.wordpress.com/
Informal traders in Kenya face a cobweb of interconnected challenges on a daily basis that impact their jobs, housing, income, health, safety, family and security. While it is impossible to isolate these issues, if I had to give an overview of the major ones that stem directly from their informal status, it would include mistreatment by authorities (harassment, bribery, arbitrary arrest and detention), insufficient access to credit on fair terms, exclusion from city and town planning (no designated/legal areas for trade), and a lack of service provisions such as toilet facilities and clean water in their places of work. KENASVIT’s role is to bring together informal traders throughout the country as a trade union (although it is not legally recognized as such) to strengthen their voice and address some of these issues. The Alliance has a revolving loan fund that was dispersed after the post-election violence in 2007-08 to its urban alliances, in which loans are given out at a very low interest rate (5%) with the goal of helping traders restock and rebuild their businesses after the violence. KENASVIT also holds negotiation trainings for their urban alliances, in which members are taught how to approach local authorities with concerns or complaints and come to an agreement (in donor/development terms, “Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR)”). Urban alliances use these skills to pressure local authorities to include informal traders in urban planning, which facilitates better conditions of work (toilet facilities, clean water), and a reduction in harassment and other violations as these areas for trade are legally recognized.
It is in this context that I have been working on designing a paralegal training program for KENASVIT’s urban alliance management. Last week I went to Nairobi to meet with Kituo cha Sheria (roughly translates to Station of Law). Kituo is a pro bono law firm/legal empowerment organization. The purpose of the meeting was to propose a partnership between KENASVIT and Kituo, in which Kituo would carry out the paralegal certification training and other related activities. I’ve met with similar organizations, such as the Legal Resources Fund, but they charge an extremely high rate for their services. After a lot of research and correspondence with such firms, I found Kituo to be the perfect match for our goal. The meeting went incredibly well. They were very interested in our program and of course its sustainability (I can never escape that word). A few days later I got an email from the woman I had been in correspondence with accepting the partnership, and informing me that Kituo would be covering the cost of the training!… This is really great news for the program and even though it won’t be implemented before I leave I feel proud and relieved that the groundwork is laid out.
Essentially, the program will look like this: a few members of KENASVIT’s urban alliances from each region will attend a three-week intensive paralegal training program in Nairobi run by Kituo cha Sheria that focuses specifically on issues pertaining to informal traders. This includes harassment, bribery, arbitrary arrest, licensing, confiscation of property, areas for trade, fair hearings, service provisions (access to water and toilets, garbage collection, etc.), and negotiations with relevant authorities. The training will draw from the new constitution, primarily from the Bill of Rights (Chapter 4). Once the training is complete, the paralegals will return to their respective regions and make their knowledge accessible to their members. For instance, the paralegals will hold office hours at their management offices to provide legal advice to those whose rights have been violated. These complaints will be documented and hopefully can be used in future lobbying and negotiation efforts.
Furthermore, the paralegals will hold workshops to sensitize their members on what they have learned. Kituo cha Sheria will then hold “refresher” trainings for the paralegals, and will be available if the paralegals should need advice on how to handle a case. Kituo also has volunteer advocates (pro bono lawyers) around the country, and should a case be particularly significant in terms of setting a precedent for other informal traders, the advocates will take on the cases for free.
Of course, this program is not the silver bullet. Paralegals are not able to represent defendants in court. Even if they could, the court fees alone and time away from work are unaffordable for many traders. The judges are not necessarily willing to rule against askaris (police) or other municipal authorities, and these violations are still rampant. Furthermore, while the new constitution stipulates that defendants are entitled to free legal representation, the government avoids carrying out this responsibility by adding in clever wording (something along the lines of): “if grave injustice is likely to occur”. While people who work in this sector would argue that grave injustices are occurring if only from the overwhelming scale of these violations and the impunity that follows, some who are not so sympathetic could make a case that, while bribery or harassment is wrong, the actual violations themselves are not so serious. The fact is that the regularity of these violations (which, by the way, are violations of international law as well as the new constitution) wears down on informal traders as a sector, leaving them in a perpetually vulnerable position. This is not to downplay their agency and creativity in responding to and combatting this oppression; surely, we have seen (see my previous post) how Migori has been quite successful in this respect, as have other urban alliances. Rather I am trying to say that these responses are constructed and carried out under severe constraints, particularly legal and financial ones. However impressive this resistance may be, it is not something to celebrate, as it emerges and survives from the existence of this very oppression.
The day after the meeting with Kituo, I met up with a man who had been the facilitator at an urban forum in Nakuru a few weeks before. I was very interested in his projects and decided to spend the day with him to find out more about what he does. He ended up taking me to a microfinance institution that he partners with called KENA ROSCAS in Kayole, an impoverished area in Nairobi with a blooming informal sector. KENA ROSCAS was founded by a woman named Nancy Wanjera, who grew up in a slum in Nairobi, was sponsored to go to secondary school graduating at the top of her class, and was then able to attend university. I’ve always been quite skeptical of microfinance as a concept, mainly for two reasons. First, many of them charge an absurdly high interest rate (around 20% or higher), which causes the loan recipients to struggle to pay them back, and contradicts the purported basis for microfinance in the first place. Second, they don’t seem to provide an actual solution to the gap in access to credit. The latter criticism comes from my belief that many efforts that don’t get at the root of the problem merely make the whole system a little more tolerable and therefore perpetuate it, or perhaps worse: they are used as window dressing to avoid genuinely addressing a problem.
In any case, the KENA ROSCAS model made me question my generalized skepticism. The institution seems to fairly, creatively and adequately address the credit and business needs of the people living in Kayole. Before anyone can access a loan or start saving with the institution, they go through training in small business, and receive a passbook to keep track of their savings and balances. Once a group of five has saved their money with KENA ROSCAS for 8 weeks (at 200 KSh per week), a longer-term revolving loan (6 months-1 year) is dispersed to the group. They are allowed to take out 2.5 times what they have saved, and these revolving loans are incremental (they can never take out more than they can afford to pay back). The other kind of loan is an emergency loan, for instance when a stall owner needs to pay for a shipment that morning and doesn’t have the capital at that time. Those are either 5,000 or 10,000 KSh, the interest (10%) is higher than the revolving loans, and they are paid back quicker. For collateral, members document certain assets that they have (possibly a television, refrigerator, etc.), and KENA ROSCAS staff go to their residences to confirm this. The institution requires its members to use their savings to get various kinds of insurance (health, business and life). Finally, they are also trying to invest some of their profit into purchasing land to sell to youth living in slums at affordable rates and terms so that they can have land titles, which can serve as collateral among other things to be able to access credit. I guess what I learned is that, while many microfinance models seem to take advantage of people in need of credit and don’t address the root of the problem, if done honestly, with a deep understanding of people’s needs and conditions, and with the intention of sustaining (there’s that word again) and expanding a business instead of just making a quick profit, they can be really important and beneficial.
By the end of the weekend I was completely fried and happy to get back to Nakuru. But the week ahead of me was just as busy, minus the traveling. KENASVIT hosted meetings all week – of the Management Committee, the National Executive Committee – this meant that representatives from all over the country came into Nakuru, and the office was hectic! It was great because I hadn’t gotten to meet many of them, and those that I had gotten to meet I had a chance to see again. The meetings lasted all day for 4 days. It was really nice to hear about all of the issues each region is dealing with and the progress they have made. I also got a chance to share what I’ve done since coming to KENASVIT, particularly updating the management on the new developments in the paralegal program (and drinking LOTS of tea).
On Wednesday (the 29th), I took a break from the management meetings to meet with the Kenya Association of Motorcycle Owners and Drivers. I had met one of their board members at the urban forum a few weeks back and he invited me to attend one of their weekly meetings and speak with them. They meet in a building on the side of the road made of corrugated iron, lined on the inside with planks of wood for seating. About 30 of them came, and invited me into the building. The first 20 minutes of the meeting was spent paying back their loans. Most of the boda drivers’ goal is to own a motorcycle (if they have to borrow one, they pay 300 KSh to the owner per day, and an average day for them is 700 KSh before paying to rent the bike). Faulu, a microfinance institution here in Nakuru, gives 50,000 KSh loans to the drivers at a 20% interest rate, which the drivers then use to put a down payment on a bike (the total cost is 96,000 KSh, but one of the bike companies, Haojue, allows them to put 50K down and pay the rest back within a year). But the members are really struggling to pay back the loans, and have very little money to spend on a daily basis, which of course becomes especially difficult when they have families to support. Still, the members all contribute 50 KSh per week to the association to build up its own type of revolving loan fund and/or contingency fund (if a driver has hospital fees to pay, for example). Ultimately, their goal as an association is to build up this fund enough that they can loan money to members independent of institutions like Faulu, and then to send one of their members to be trained to be an instructor, so that he (I have never seen a female boda driver) can then train other members to get their licenses at a lower rate. As individuals, they want to own a bike, pay off their loans, and then expand their business, either by buying a second bike to rent out or buying a matatu, ultimately with the goal of owning land (a few of their members do own two bikes and rent one out). I was really amazed, although maybe I shouldn’t be, at their organization and progress, especially considering the association is only two years old.
Next week KENASVIT is hosting a regional conference/workshop in Nairobi to develop a campaign plan for action for the next few years. I am really looking forward to hearing from the representatives from other African countries and comparing their experiences and efforts to those I have been observing and experiencing, particularly that of their relationship to the state and the law. I’ll talk more about that in my next post.