Parijat Chakrabarti

1, 2. In the first frame, a man reads a newspaper while others work on their laptops at an upscale café in Kilimani. These cafés largely cater to Nairobi’s upper class. At such eateries, a cappuccino can cost up to 450 Ksh (~$4) and a meal can easily cross 1000 Ksh. In the second frame, Fyat Crew, a gengetone (a genre of Kenyan rap) group takes a mixture of rice, beans, avocado, and kachumbari for breakfast. This meal costs roughly 70 Ksh, almost 15x less than a meal at an upmarket café. Retail and distribution platforms often intentionally target upmarket firms as their revenues are typically several orders of magnitude larger.

3, 4. In the first frame, young women run past an M-Pesa shop to get out of the rain. These shops serve as critical touchpoints in the mobile payments infrastructure. People can convert cash to mobile money and vice versa at these shops, and agents can also help people manage other services including buying airtime or navigating micro-loans and overdraft services available through Safaricom’s M-Pesa. In the second frame, a fundi wa simu, i.e. phone craftsman, peers out of his shop. Such fundis can repair or modify phones, sell chargers, adjust settings or download apps for people who may not know how to use their phones well, and/or do phone resets (e.g. if you’ve forgotten the password or, not uncommonly, if the phone was stolen and needs to be reset).

5. Mike, a delivery rider for Jumia, Africa’s first ‘unicorn’ and one of its largest e-commerce firms, looks at his phone. Riders’ work is algorithmically allocated and managed through their phone. Riders often work for multiple firms at the same time. Despite complaints of poor pay, Mike sees these tech firms as a major source of employment in Nairobi.

6. A giant billboard advertises for Kune, a cloud kitchen based in Nairobi. Robin Reecht, a young French man who had moved to Nairobi in late 2020, founded Kune in early 2021 after receiving $1 million in venture funding barely two months after arriving. He said that he was inspired to found Kune after having difficulty finding fresh, affordable, and ready-to-eat meals in Nairobi. This statement sparked immediate and derisive backlash on KOT (Kenyans on Twitter) and was picked up by mainstream media as an example of out-of-touch foreigners receiving vast sums of investment funding while local entrepreneurs struggled. Kune shut down in 2022 barely a year after it was founded. Reecht wrote in a post on LinkedIn, “Since the beginning of the year, we sold more than 55,000 meals and acquired more than 6,000 individual customers and 100 corporate customers. But at $3 per meal, it just wasn’t enough to sustain our growth… Coupled with rising food costs deteriorating our margins, we just couldn’t keep going….” As Robin observes, smaller-scale and lower-income market segments are often deemed insufficiently profitable; instead a number of platforms pivot to servicing upmarket firms and customers.

7. In the first frame, a customer buys a snack from a duka in Pipeline Estate. Such dukas often source some of their products from at least one of the many retail platforms that operate in the area. Standard commodities (such as the flour and cooking oil seen in the second frame) from large distributors like Unilever are top sellers for platforms.

8. A view along an inner road in Pipeline Estate. Pipeline is a densely populated neighborhood whose residents have some level of disposable income and who typically purchase from the hundreds of small shops that line the floor level of each apartment block. It also is some distance to the nearest wholesale market. These features make Pipeline an ideal market segment for retail platforms in Nairobi. This particular road has had problems with their sewer line, making the middle of the road largely impassable. This has posed problems for delivery to shops along this road.

9. Two men unload and pack maize flour at a warehouse near Kwa Njenga. The warehouse belongs to a major family-operated wholesaler in the area who prefer not to be named. One of the owners notes that retail platforms have taken away some of their customers, but he says that he is not worried. He says the only advantage the platforms have is that they let more customers purchase on credit. For his part, he says that he is careful with offering credit, allowing maybe 20% of his customers to purchase on credit. He says that once the platforms run out of investment capital, they will have to ease up on their credit terms. Once they do, he is confident that his family’s wholesale business will recapture the local market.

10. While retail platforms increasingly dominate the distribution network for consumer-packaged goods, they have struggled to break into the fresh produce market. Perishable produce, particularly leafy greens, defy the easy standardization so critical to centralized, algorithmic governance. The few platforms that have managed to break into the fresh produce market have had to invest heavily in warehouses, refrigeration, ripening facilities, and other infrastructure needed to standardize and centrally manage fresh produce. 

Moreover, the vast majority of Nairobi's fresh produce is grown by small-scale farmers with little standardization of practices or produce across farms and often not even within a given farm. This level of differentiation-- though a source of many headaches for platform managers-- is simultaneously a source of competitive advantage for small-scale traders such the mama mboga pictured. In cultivating relationships with brokers and farmers, an experienced trader is able to reliably source high-quality produce despite high levels of uncertainty and differentiation. Such craft earns experienced traders a reputation in the market and is a distinct source of pride.

11. As supply chain platforms reorganize exchange in Nairobi, communications platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook have also transformed the face of small business. Ragot sells printed t-shirts, hoodies, and jerseys. He makes the prints himself and takes pictures to post on social media. WhatsApp is his preferred means to advertise, reach, and sell to his customers. This is a popular new avenue for small-scale business and has created new online-only models. Mitumba sellers, for example, will sort through clothes and post them on their Instagram and can organize for delivery. Prospective buyers can see prices and negotiate through messaging if needed. Others try to leverage the networked nature of social media. For example, Steve, a part-time artist who sketches portraits for a fee, asks his “popular” friends to post his work on their WhatsApp stories. Given their large social network, this generates interest and some leads for Steve. In other cases, some traders, craftspersons, and/or domestic workers try to access Facebook groups known to have upmarket clients. These include “expat” housing groups among others that are typically closed and require moderator approval to access. If given approval however, these groups are seen to offer lucrative opportunities for work.

12. A little boy looks up at the movie posters displayed outside a cybercafé. Only a relatively small segment of Nairobi’s population has the internet capacity, hardware, and other resources necessary to access global entertainment platforms like Netflix. Cybercafés, among other vendors, rip popular films and TV shows and burn them onto DVDs or USB sticks. Each movie is sold for 30 bob (~25 cents). Cybercafes offer other digital services and some offer gaming stations. Many neighborhoods, for example, will have a FIFA station with plastic chairs, TVs, gaming consoles, and several available video games (often FIFA). Young people get together and play in the dim light, paying by the hour.