The Business and Politics of Shit

Business Fights Poverty

At the turn of the twenty-first century, there was a case made for large business entities to commercially engage small community-based businesses as new partners, new distributors, new consumers. The emergence of market-based development in the early 2000s was both a proposition and an experiment that reflected Gro Harlem Brundtland’s (1987) calls for “sustainable development,” which called on all sectors, including large business entities, to engage with environmental and social urgencies that had until then been considered business “externalities.” The case moved from (at first U.S.-based) business schools to multinational boardrooms and symposia, drawing together development practitioners increasingly critical of paternalistic and ineffective aid models and enlightened management scholars, some of whom had a penchant for both postdevelopment theories (such as Arturo Escobar’s [(1995) 2012] seminal critique of “Third Worlding” development) and participatory development approaches (citing Robert Chambers’s [1995] lifelong work on people-centered development). From these spaces of interdisciplinary knowledge production, a few corporate practitioners who had been invited into the room of these deliberations agreed to champion and even pilot projects where they already had a commercial presence but where they recognized that they were primarily serving the upper-middle-income segment of these “emerging markets.” The idea that they could combine experimental business and development innovation, “doing good while doing well,” was an attractive proposition and worth the try.

In 2004, I attended an event hosted by the SC Johnson College of Business on the Cornell University campus, mostly to support my now husband, who was helping organize the event. The event was themed around the role of the business sector, especially multinational corporations, in addressing contemporary development challenges and “fighting poverty.” I remember being simultaneously intrigued by the optimism and the call to engage formerly underserved markets and irritated by the presumption that the business sector could fix what the development sector and governments had “failed” to accomplish, and the naiveté with which the homogenized concept of “communities” was incorporated into the pitch.

At the time, a group of management scholars led by C. K. Prahalad (based at the University of Michigan) and Stuart Hart (based at Cornell University) had argued that there was an economic and ethical case for commercially engaging the world’s four billion poorest people rather than providing humanitarian aid alone (see Prahalad and Hart 2002). A growing number of business school students and business practitioners were listening, especially those who were excited that there might be a chance here to forge a pathway where their interest in the dynamism and innovative possibilities of the business sector could also connect to the urgent imperatives of more sustainable and just futures. These students would become the future business activist practitioners working at the nexus of business and “sustainability” over the following decades. At that time, in the development sector, the Millennial Development Goals (which would transform into the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015) were also actively calling upon the private sector as a new agent of development. This triggered animated debates concerning the merits and concerns of emerging market-based approaches to development, some celebrating the “optimistic view” about the potential collaborations between economically active poor and larger business organizations (Prahalad 2005), others calling out the unequal power relationships between companies and small-scale businesses, and skeptical about the “legitimizing claims” (Welker 2009) of these new “ethical regimes” (Dolan and Rajak 2016).

The construction of new knowledges forming at the nexus of the business and development sector seemed rife with pressing questions. I was simultaneously intrigued by the possibilities of interorganizational encounters between actors with different economic knowledges and logics, and skeptical of the business vernacular borrowing from participatory development using phrasing like “engage with the local community.” I realized on that day that I wanted to do more than be a critical anthropologist in the audience. I wanted to get involved somehow in these debates.

I would have a chance to go to Kenya that next summer, joining a team of six graduate students who had been tasked to test and refine a methodological framework developed by Stuart Hart and his graduate student at the time, Erik Simanis. The methodology was called the “Base of the Pyramid Protocol” (Simanis et al. 2008). The graduate students all had business or engineering backgrounds, and I was invited to join because, I was told, someone with an anthropology background would “complement” the team well given what we were trying to do, perhaps in part because the BoP Protocol had borrowed and adapted several methodological approaches developed by applied anthropologists, including appreciative inquiry, participatory rural appraisal, doing community homestays, and so on. It merits mentioning that at the time I was so eager to join the team and have the opportunity to go to Kenya that I did not argue when I was told it was “difficult to quantify my contribution” as someone who didn’t have business or engineering skills. All the other team members were paid five times what I was paid that summer. I mention this here simply to call attention to the differentiated ways in which certain skills and training are valued over others—and to question the amusing and troubling labeling of certain skills as “soft” versus “hard.” Mine were clearly considered soft.

In 2006, I had the chance to meet with Professor S. Parasuraman, director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. As I asked Prof. Parasuraman about his thoughts on the nexus between business and development in India, he asked the rhetorical question, “Why can’t business be social work and social work be business?” At the time, the claims to poverty alleviation made by various corporate-led Base of the Pyramid strategies failed to prove Parasuraman’s statement, both commercially and socially. Some of the more nuanced critiques of BoP approaches (see Cross and Street 2009; Dolan and Rajak 2011) have focused on the legitimizing discourses of BoP strategies that appended social missions and ethical claims to products including soap and other fast-moving consumer goods that had not necessarily been designed with development ends in mind. To quote Michael Edwards (2008) in his critique of what he called “philanthrocapitalism,” these products were being (re-) “packaged and sold” as consumer goods that could promote and advance poverty-alleviation goals. They moved from middle- and upper-income supermarkets and were repackaged into sachet form with a reduced price point so they could adapt to the inventory needs of small retail outlets of popular neighborhoods and could match local daily budgets where single-serve units were more affordable.

A few years later, other terms related to business-led development multiplied and moved away from associations with corporate philanthropy (e.g., Corporate Social Responsibility) or Base of the Pyramid (e.g., repackaging mainstream products to the poor) to social enterprise (where profits are reinvested into the business operating costs), Markets for the Poor (M4P), inclusive business, purpose-driven business, and no doubt others (McEwan et al. 2017; Thieme, Plumridge Bedi, and Vira 2015). Over the past decade in particular, much more purposeful research and development has gone into designing appropriate products and technologies to serve the needs of low-income and marginalized consumers, what Jamie Cross and other authors of a special issue on “little development devices” (2017) have called “humanitarian goods” (Collier et al. 2017). This second wave of business-for-development initiatives produced products that were much more deliberate in their humanitarian design, appeal, and mode of delivery. Today, an increasing number of social enterprise models exist; an even greater number have been attempted. The discourses have moved away from exploiting new “untapped markets” (Prahalad 2005) and toward “market creation,” “social innovation,” and “incubation”—merging a kind of appropriate design-thinking approach and new business development. Coinciding with the 2008 financial crisis and the imperative for all sectors to start tightening budgets, one of the approaches advocated was what some business scholars and practitioners called “reverse innovation.” Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, and Simone Ahuja’s (2012) book on jugaad innovation exemplified this argument, making the case that businesses had much to learn from the frugal practices of largely informal economies in countries like India and others in the Majority World.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, debates among corporations, NGOs, and business schools increasingly moved away from grandiose claims to poverty alleviation and became more specific about the practical challenges of delivery and distribution. The greatest challenge was not in the strategizing and planning but in the “last mile,” where the offering meets the end user and must be put into practice. The last mile included the complexity of cultural practices, social norms and behaviors, economic considerations, incentives, and personal circumstances, which all informed end users’ decision-making and interfaced with the orchestrated interventions seeking to “improve” lives, or as interlocutors in Kenya called it, “changing mindsets.”2 Today, there is a whole industry of practitioners using business to “fight poverty” or find ways to engage with formally excluded small-scale producers, entrepreneurs, retailers, vendors, and consumers.3 From the 2010s especially, sanitation became a key topic of collective deliberation and intervention.

Sanitation: Basic Need, Public Good, Human Right, Business Opportunity

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 2.6 billion people currently lack access to “adequate sanitation.”4 The sanitation problem is more often than not associated with rural poverty and is constantly set behind its more photogenic and appealing counterpart—“clean water.” During my interview with Joel Nkako from the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation in 2010, he encapsulated the complexity of the sanitation issue and the need to think beyond the toilet “hardware”:

When we say sanitation, we mean a lot of things. You have to see waste management. You have to see water. You have to see housing. You have to see the planning aspect of it. You have to see the coverage and access and usage of facilities like latrines. Sometimes we use a single word, like when we say we want to scale up latrine “coverage.” What we mean is we want many people to use toilets and maybe stop open defecation. But when we use the word coverage, it does not ensure usage or access, because if we walk around we’ll find places where toilets are locked. They are used by specific people and excluding others. And access also does not translate into proper usage. All these aspects have to be considered together. (Interview in Nairobi Central Business District, July 28, 2010)

While the surge of water-related conferences over the past few decades has been abundant, sanitation remained, until the 2010s, “always an afterthought, if considered at all” (George 2008, 76). The urban sanitation situation, however, is increasingly recognized as one of the greatest threats to global health. More than 50 percent of the world’s population now lives in cities, with more than 43 percent of city dwellers in the rapidly growing cities living in superdense neighborhoods with makeshift sanitary conditions, the consequence of poor infrastructure and uneven urban planning (McFarlane 2023; Pieterse 2008; Satterthwaite 2007; UN-Habitat 2008). In the popular neighborhoods of Nairobi, some of the largest in East Africa, toilets are shared across multiple households, sometimes up to an estimated 150 residents per toilet.

Everyday uncertainty underpins the seemingly most mundane bodily rhythms in neighborhoods like Mathare. When it comes to sanitation, a common phrase in English, “going to the toilet,” becomes laden with social and infrastructural contingencies for the majority residents in Nairobi: depending on the time of day or night, the season, and a person’s perception of safety near their home or place of work, uncertainties relate to the availability not only of a toilet structure but especially to its condition, its smell, its opening hours, its proximity to an available and affordable water point, and of course its cost structure and with whom one must negotiate the terms of payment. Spatial and temporal dimensions of toilets mean that most mundane bodily needs (colloquially referred to in Kenya as “short or long call”) are not just a matter of “relieving bodily functions” but rather involve constant calculations and stresses. This includes the risk of exposure to waterborne diseases associated with unsafe sanitation solutions.

In response to what has been increasingly regarded as an urban crisis, and given that Nairobi is the East African hub for development agencies and various social enterprise experiments and investments, a constellation of corporate-NGO-community arrangements have made Nairobi a sanitation learning lab. Over the past fifteen years, a mosaic of sanitation-related programs reveal the business and politics (as well as discourse) of shit at various levels: the local micro-politics and tensions between individual perceptions of cleanliness and collective maintenance of shared facilities; the embodied politics involved when highly private everyday hygiene practices, including modes of “forced improvisation” (e.g., “flying toilets,” open defecation), are rendered public (George 2008; McFarlane 2023); the infrastructural politics involved concerning the maintenance and management of the shared sanitation commons or “public good”—the community toilet. All these scales of sanitation politics raise complicated questions about who should own and govern public facilities, how funding maintenance of building costs should work, and who should do what kind of labor. These are questions that have underpinned citywide and cross-sectoral politics of waste and sanitation management in Nairobi, informing the spectrum of debates and discourses around what constitutes “adequate” versus “inadequate” sanitation, “latrine coverage,” and how best to implement “community-led” sanitation. All these considerations reveal diverse interest groups, with differing emphases on what commitments to prioritize: public health, basic human rights, ecological solutions, participatory development, or returns on infrastructural investment (Thieme and DeKoszmovszky 2012, 2021).

In the densely populated neighborhoods of Nairobi, the majority of residents rely on either public toilets, where they pay per use, or shared toilets near their homes.5 Across all cases, the conditions of maintenance, cleanliness, and infrastructure have often been deplorable. As water and sanitation field officer Mambo explained the first year of my fieldwork, “no one wants to deal with their own shit, let alone their neighbors’. And in the frequent absence of water . . . you can imagine.” Precisely because toilets represented potential public health harms and were shared resources, they became particularly politicized. Most of the dilapidated public toilets dated back to the 1970s when the city council reluctantly built 156 toilets for a tenth of the population that exists today in Mathare (30,000). The fact that toilet construction has not grown concomitantly with demographic growth in these neighborhoods is a reflection of both the “absentee landlord” (Huchzermeyer 2011) and the absentee state, whose ambivalence toward popular neighborhoods is intimately connected to the colonial and postcolonial legacies of uneven development and service provisioning across the city. It is unsurprising that in Kibera, one of the largest and oldest popular neighborhoods in Nairobi that has received concentrated attention from development organizations, “slum voluntourists,” and film crews looking for dramatized footage of urban poverty, there are more NGO offices than there are public toilets.6 Across popular neighborhoods, the structures that have been rehabilitated or constructed include sponsorships from the German Embassy, USAID, UNEP, Pamoja Trust, Maji Na Ufanisi, World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program, and Cooperazione Internazionale (COOPI). Despite the fancy plate on the outside wall featuring a date and name of sponsor, these sanitation prestige projects often ended up in a state of disrepair and were ill-maintained.

From Street to Boardroom, to Street Again: Business for Development with Hustle Economies

The “geographies of marketization” have positioned markets as increasingly dominant institutions of modernity and development, across the formal/informal sector divide (Boeckler and Bernt 2012). The corporation, one of the dominant protagonists of twentieth-century global capitalism and coproducers of mainstream business knowledge (Olds and Thrift 2005), has become an opportunistic agent of development (Cross and Street 2009) in the twenty-first century as market-based approaches to development have mainstreamed claims to “poverty alleviation,” “access” to basic needs, and “partnership” with the entrepreneurial poor. These claims and subsequent practices vary widely across industries and geographies, simultaneously demonized and venerated depending on the ideological and intellectual perspective.

One literature rooted in business and management scholarship celebrates the emancipatory potential of corporate-led development and “Base of the Pyramid” strategies, hailing them as the most efficient option for delivering on the promises of globalization, including the advancement of social and environmental causes (Hammond et al. 2007; Kandachar and Halme 2008; Prahalad and Hart 2002). In contrast, another literature (largely based in anthropology and geography) regards corporate interventions as void of moral agency (Korten 1995), questions the “legitimising discourses” (Welker 2009) of businesses making claims to social responsibility, and interrogates the implications of corporate-led development on vulnerable communities “repurposed” as self-driven entrepreneurs (Dolan and Rajak 2018). Amid these divergent perspectives, one other perspective stands out, articulated by Erik Simanis when he published a piece in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) in 2012, making a different argument altogether.

I met Erik Simanis in 2005, when he was a PhD researcher at Cornell University, and remember one of our first animated chats about our shared passion for Arturo Escobar’s writing on the “making and unmaking of the Third World.” I was impressed by his extensive knowledge of critical social theories that was not part of the typical business school syllabus. Simanis had spent much of his PhD conducting action research codeveloping methodologies and piloting corporate-led business ventures seeking to engage low-income markets. So it was all the more interesting when Simanis published this HBR piece in 2012, deliberately staying away from the moral and ethical debates. After almost a decade of working on business-led projects in various contexts seeking to improve access to sanitation, nutrition, and health in underserved markets, Simanis argued that appending development claims to social business ventures was both unrealistic and a questionable business strategy. Using various case examples to support his claims, he suggested that new business development was challenging enough in low-income markets with highly informal structures, and it was near impossible developing a business with such low margins and low price points. It would call for “impractically high” penetration of that given good or service into that local market. He suggested that businesses should stick to their fundamental competencies of growth through sustained increase of supply and demand rather than hope to address the multidimensionality of poverty through enterprise. He argued that the way to really build an impact (social as well as economic) was through three key steps: “bundling products” rather than trying to sell individual products, offering an “enabling service” that would help accelerate market penetration, and helping cultivate “customer peer groups” (Simanis 2012).

Whether or not one is bothered by the decentering of the moral and ethical case is not my key concern here. What is especially noteworthy is Simanis’s implicit recognition for the need to consider relational dimensions of business practice and consumer behavior in underresourced economies. But his analysis does not explicitly articulate how these proposed steps would work with (or against) existing social and economic logics. In Nairobi, for example, how might a business-led project engage with, displace, or push against the social and economic logics of hustling in the mtaa? How might it learn the perspectives of hustling “customers” and those of hustling “entrepreneurs” who would be facilitating so-called market penetration? The question that animates this chapter is: How do pro-business for development projects embed themselves into popular neighborhoods and local hustle economies, and with what claims?

Here it’s useful to briefly consider some of the scholarship across economic anthropology, microeconomics, and development that has since the early 1970s studied and sought to theorize the “economies of the poor.” Starting with Keith Hart’s seminal research in urban Ghana, research conceptualizing “informal economies” demonstrates the logic of diversifying income opportunities and the risk in conditions of rising unemployment and diminishing state welfare in postcolonial cities (Hart 1973; Potts 2008; Skinner 2008). Influencing the justifications for bottom-up approaches to development, scholars focused on development practice concerned with the multidimensionality of poverty and well-being through the lens of “livelihood strategies” (Chambers 1995; Chant 2009) to examine the ways in which people’s diverse activities, capabilities, and assets (stores, resources, claims, and access) were mobilized and pursued. Using economists’ frames of reference to articulate what the poor have, Caroline Moser (2006) suggested that an “asset vulnerability framework” (8) pointed to the “tangible and intangible assets” (5) of the poor, who were in effect “managers of complex asset portfolios” (36). Similarly, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (2011) have referred to the entrepreneurial poor as “barefoot hedge-fund managers” and emphasized the high degrees of risk involved in the everyday calculus of what they term “poor economics,” where 100 percent of the liability falls on these entrepreneurs, unlike their white-collar counterparts whose occupations are high risk but who enjoy limited liability. Finally, a detailed study of “how the world’s poor live on two dollars a day” (Collins et al. 2009) used financial diaries in villages and popular neighborhoods across Bangladesh, India, and South Africa to document the careful attention, financial literacy, and frugality that goes into everyday earning, spending, and saving patterns of poor households.

Read together, these studies point to the meaningful though often piecemeal aspects of everyday economic survival, demonstrating that being income poor does not equate lack of planning or financial literacy. Instead, calculations of risk and adaptations to uncertainty and everyday forms of breakdown and injustice shape diverse survival strategies and skills. Yet what is often less explicitly articulated in the literature expressing disaffection from the left in the face of seemingly unstoppable neoliberal capitalism and “privatization of everything” (Watts 1994) is that street-oriented economies themselves engage with capitalist relations, using market means to deliver products and services to customers in their own communities in contexts where state welfare, basic services, and public institutions might be systematically absent or unevenly distributed (Fontaine 2008; Neuwirth 2012). This absence has fostered entire popular economies focused on the provision from below of basic services, especially water, waste, and sanitation (Fredericks 2019; Gill 2010; McFarlane 2011; Moore 2009; Thieme 2021). The work of Vinay Gidwani in Capital, Interrupted (2008) is especially instructive for reflecting on the logics of popular economies. Gidwani studies the effects of a large surface irrigation scheme in Central Gujarat on agrarian development as a broader interrogation of established narratives of capitalism. He argues that Eurocentric and neoclassical theories of capitalist accumulation and labor relations do not adequately represent the realities of agrarian capitalism in his field site and points to other “cultural logics” and micro-politics of work to examine the contingent constructions and assemblages of economic relations. Similarly, there are “cultural logics” and micro-politics of work in the mtaa hustle economy that need to be considered when evaluating the effects of business-led development projects that are premised on commercially engaging local consumers and entrepreneurs.

In the absence of formal institutional support, chances of survival and success are predicated on “webs of exchange” between individuals in popular neighborhoods (Venkatesh 2006, 95, 103–4). Here an important economic logic transpires: everyday business dealings are anchored in social relations and often dependent on collective networks of mutuality and reciprocity (Kinyanjui 2019) that require constant realignment to fit the shifting demands and needs of local neighborhoods (Venkatesh 2006). These constant shifts and adjustments reflect the provisional structures of popular economies and are part of the “cultural logics of work” (Gidwani 2001, 2008) that involve continuous adaptation to daily emergencies (Millar 2018) but also developing the patience to endure long periods of nothing much going on. Youth therefore become skilled in their ability to appropriate and commercialize particular corners, goods, and services as and when they can, even if it means capturing the least desirable opportunities, such as dealing with garbage or shared toilets.

A key theme that connects chapter 3 and this chapter is how to reorient the critical evaluation of “privatized” basic services (privatized either because the state is not involved or because market-based approaches are enabling private provision) when a core feature of their operations relies on relational ties, group work, and localized service provision. This chapter has assembled these various, sometimes conflicting perspectives to foreground the ethnographic discussion that follows, which will bring to life the challenges, limitations, and possibilities of a business-led development project. The aim in connecting these seemingly disparate literatures together in conversation with the story that follows is to reflect with nuance on the vicissitudes and dynamics of what I metaphorically call street to boardroom to street again encounters, where the logics of the hustle economy interface with and rework capitalist business logics to coproduce hybrid social business practices that draw on, twist, and harness the knowledges and “cultural logics” of both the street and the corporate boardroom.

The next section tells the story of a corporation putting its “BoP strategy” into practice, engaging with groups of youth in Nairobi’s popular neighborhood involved in homegrown waste services. What happened when the company tried to create a new local market for its cleaning products while delivering “positive social outcomes” in these neighborhoods, including additional revenue streams for economically active youth and cleaner toilets for local residents?

A Sanitation Social Enterprise: Community Cleaning Services

Founded in the late nineteenth century, SC Johnson (SCJ) is an American family owned and run consumer-packaged-goods company. “Sustainability” has been a core part of the company’s ethos, reflected in its various efforts to reduce the environmental footprint of its operations even before regulations were imposed on industry and to invest in greening its manufacturing processes through renewable energy sources. Curious about the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) thesis put forward by C. K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart, in 2005 SCJ began to widen its commitment to sustainability by focusing on “poverty alleviation” through enterprise models and became one of the first corporate pioneers of BoP incubation.

In July 2010, I had the chance to interview two former SCJ Kenya employees who had worked with the company from 1992 to 2003. They provided an oral history of the company’s Kenyan business during that time and reflected on the significance of the company’s presence in the East African market. The company’s East African subsidiary was established in 1968, five years following Kenya’s independence. As a leading provider of insecticide products, SCJ had become the world’s largest buyer of Kenyan Pyrethrum, a natural insecticide grown in the fertile Kenyan highlands. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the company was best known to Kenyans for selling locally manufactured mosquito coils, special because they were sold individually for 2 KES (US0.023) and called Mwananchi (Common Man). In the late 1990s, the mosquito coil packaging started shifting its product image and name to a more global brand. In 2004, SCJ’s Kenyan factory in Nyeri was closed. By the early 2000s, SCJ products were available on the shelves of Kenyan supermarkets, but they had lost considerable market share to other corporate competitors. Furthermore, retailers in lower-income neighborhoods could not afford most of SCJ’s cleaning products, at best stocking a few of the aerosol insecticide products. Ironically, a few years after the “common man” mosquito coil and local production facility were strategically removed from the Kenyan market, SCJ would sponsor a BoP pilot study in Kenya to identify potential business innovation opportunities working with income-poor communities, where the majority of wananchi (the common people) resided.

In 2005, the company sponsored a Kenya-based test of a business development methodology called the Base of the Pyramid Protocol, developed to facilitate corporate engagements with low-income communities to “co-create businesses of mutual value” (Simanis et al. 2008). Sponsoring the BoP Protocol pilot marked the beginning of a long-term commitment to explore innovative ways to deliver the benefits of the company products—from insecticides to “home cleaning” products—to previously underserved markets. Densely populated urban neighborhoods were identified as a key opportunity market because insect-borne and waterborne diseases were one of the major public health concerns. The company felt its product offerings could address these public health and development concerns but recognized the need to rethink the business potential in communities formally considered causes for humanitarian aid. The venture started out as an action research project involving six graduate students, and though it included rural as well as urban field sites, it eventually focused on Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods as the opportune site for a business innovation initiative.

From the company’s point of view, operating in an environment with such different infrastructures and economic organization than those of middle-class, industrialized, formalized markets meant accepting to work with business partners whose economic knowledge and training takes place on the streets, not in business schools and boardrooms. Recollecting this challenge, the former vice president of SCJ’s developing markets division noted, “We were working with young people who had very little capital and knowledge about how to start new businesses. In many cases at the Base of the Pyramid people don’t even have a rule of law to be able to control their assets or their money or be able to own property.”7

For any company operating in the formal economy, the perceived risk here would be the difficulty of tracking, documenting, and monitoring operations. And yet the conscious decision to bypass formal institutional channels, including government, and engage directly with “these young people” afforded SCJ a certain license to start somewhere. What the business would ultimately become was unexpected.

In 2007, following months of what was referred to as a “test small, fail small and learn big” experimental phase resembling a more standard “Avon ladies” model of door-to-door home pesticide control service (see Dolan and Johnstone-Louis 2011), some of the youth engaged in this early stage of the pilot turned their attention away from door-to-door services and instead paid attention to the ill-maintained community-based public toilets. In Nairobi, due to the shortage of toilet coverage in most public spaces, toilets had become a business with “pay per use” systems of revenue generation for toilet blocks. Toilets were also a tool of political opportunism, often fueling the stigmas associated with popular neighborhoods, including inadequate sanitation (Chiuri 1978). Yet for a company seeking “BoP business innovation,” these poorly maintained and managed community resources fit “triple bottom line” values, overlapping commercial, environmental, and social objectives (Robbins 2006).

Toilets were at once the site of potential income for youth waste workers, a potential source of revenue and product placement for the company, and a potential preventive health-care offering through improved sanitation conditions. Moving away definitively from the first experiment with door-to-door sales using SCJ’s insecticide products, the focus of the BoP project turned to developing a shared-toilet cleaning business. The micro-franchise Community Cleaning Services (CCS) was thus cofounded by the company’s American sustainability manager (SM), hired in 2006 in part to lead “BoP innovation” in emerging markets, and the company’s former Kenyan distribution manager, who became the new manager of CCS. The idea of CCS was different from other corporate-based models, which had taken either a “sachet-model” or a door-to-door-sales approach, trying to “push” a project to a single customer or household, usually through individual entrepreneurship. In contrast, CCS provided a sanitation service model, using the product for the cleaning service, cleaning a shared resource, and doing so in a group.

While daily operations were handled by the local CCS Central team (headed by the CCS manager, the only person not from and living in the neighborhoods where these services were being offered), weekly phone updates and quarterly field visits were part of the company SM’s involvement. Additionally, there was a delicate balance between considering the challenges of new business development in volatile and unpredictable economies and considering the unyielding demands and parameters of a multinational company. Everyday operational decisions were made on-site by the CCS manager, while broader strategic decisions—including how to identify potential entrepreneurs, cost structures, team training procedures, and product delivery logistics—were made between the company’s SM and the CCS manager, who referred to each other as “my business partner.” While the SM was attuned to local economic realities, had considerable field experience (including basic Swahili skills), and knew most community-based CCS entrepreneurs by name, the nuances of everyday practices among local CCS teams were not perceptible from afar. And yet, as the next section describes, these nuances were inextricably linked to the reasons why CCS would ultimately have difficulty scaling its operations and why its impact was difficult to measure and quantify.

By 2008, CCS operated daily, selling and delivering cleaning services to shared residential toilets accessed by several families, schools, clinics, restaurants, and bars. One of the company’s research and development employees had identified the optimal existing formulas of the company’s cleaning products that would prove effective in Nairobi’s “slum toilets” infrastructures. These were imported to Kenya from the company’s Egypt facility in barrels, not cases of consumer packaging. Bulk importation was an important business adaptation for the CCS service model because it “closed the loop” on packaging waste within the CCS business, allowing reuse of all packaging—locally sourced repurposed twenty-liter jerry cans—reducing the environmental impact and service cost.

In 2009, CCS was working with more than twenty independent entrepreneurs and more than one hundred public toilets, establishing a presence in most of Nairobi’s low-income communities. Overall, the business development phase of CCS from 2007 to the end of 2009 aimed to provide a platform for iterative experimentation, or “business innovation,” and to test the feasibility of a business model in hopes of replicating it elsewhere. In practice, this phase put in sharp relief the differences between corporate and community economic logics, parameters, and expectations.

From Waste Workers to Sanitation Entrepreneurs

CCS had identified potential entrepreneurs in 2007 with the help of a local NGO that had connections to various youth groups in Nairobi neighborhoods. As explained in the previous chapter, these youth groups had formed out of childhood friendships, football team allegiances, and place-based attachments to the neighborhood “base,” and many were involved in community-based waste management, turning “trash into cash” (taka ni pato). These taka ni pato networks became logical partners for a social business venture focused on urban sanitation.

Though the youth groups provided entry points, a key contact person or “entrepreneur” within the group was identified and made responsible for selecting a team. At first, most of these teams were composed of six to twelve individuals. Initially the entire youth group seemed keen to be part of CCS. They saw uniforms, new cleaning equipment, and a “sponsor.” But eventually, many members lost interest because CCS involved hard physical work, constant negotiation with residents over payment, and modest earnings. Furthermore, a small initial customer base meant that there were not enough cleaning jobs to justify large teams. Once the novelty of working with an outside “sponsor” faded, the disinterested left. As one CCS member explained in October 2009, “they realized that there was more to this work than just getting a free uniform.”

For the cleaning teams, CCS work started with an early morning assembly of the cleaning crew at the youth group base, uniform and equipment in hand. From there, the team would conduct deliberate pedestrian marketing, walking through the streets at peak rush hour to the first toilet stall. This contrasted with garbage collection, which always happened before dawn, while the streets were empty and it was easier to navigate with a heavy mkokoteni (handcart) and get work done fast. For CCS, the work was done in full view, in part to render more visible an issue that was unpleasant and taboo for all to acknowledge—how dirty and ill-maintained the toilets were. During an interview in May 2010 with one of the few salaried CCS employees, Mambo, whose job title was “quality assurance professional,” he explained the sanitation situation from a perspective of lived experience and newfound expertise in the cleaning business. Mambo lived in Kawangware, a low-income residential neighborhood located in the western part of the city, about fifteen kilometers from the city center. He said,

Many of these toilets are not well connected to the sewer line, and because of the big number of people using them daily, we have that problem of clogging. It is common to find that there are ten plots [homes] using two toilets, with an average of five people in each plot, so you can imagine the mess they’re in. After we clean every part of the toilet, scrub the walls and the floors—every corner—we then use the product to disinfect. That is how we clean.

That would be considered “one job.” Because toilets were shared, so was the cost of the service, usually between 250 and 350 KES (US3–4), an average of 30 KES (US0.34) “per door” of households whose monthly rent ranged between 1,000 and 3,000 KES (US11–34). A CCS job usually involved two to four cleaners, and each “job” could take between twenty and forty minutes. Whatever the earnings were, the team split the amount equally, and if the lead entrepreneur wasn’t present, he or she would get a “finder’s fee” but the majority of the earnings went to those who actually cleaned. Completing four to six “jobs” was considered a good day.

Although it was deemed easier to deal with one “entrepreneur” per area, in practice the unit of the micro-franchisee was the “group” rather than a single individual. Initially it was hoped that individual entrepreneurs would themselves manage multiple teams and aspire to scale the micro-franchise. Informed by Western conceptions of entrepreneurship, the company had encouraged CCS to target individual entrepreneurs, who would be dually motivated by prospects of an additional business opportunity and by perceiving the social benefit of the cleaning service. In reality, individuals who would prove to be capable “self-interested entrepreneurs” (Dolan and Rajak 2011) were not necessarily “team players” nor considerate of community interests. For instance, one of the earlier CCS “entrepreneurs,” nick-named “Ben Clean,” was initially lauded for his ability to grow his customer base but was eventually asked to leave CCS in 2009 when it was rumored that he was using acid to “make the bowl as white looking as possible,” while not providing protective gloves for his cleaners.

In contrast to Ben Clean, most CCS “entrepreneurs” were accountable to and part of a youth group collective. In practice, the cleaning work, customer relations, operational decisions, and even cash management were all shared or rotational responsibilities among a smaller unit within the youth group. By late 2009, the nomenclature within SCJ and CCS Central shifted from “entrepreneurs” to “mobile cleaning teams” (MCTs), which had paradoxical effects. On the one hand, promoting a more egalitarian and less hierarchical structure meant that if the so-called CCS entrepreneur faulted for whatever reason, another team member could take the reins and keep operations going. On the other hand, managing teams meant having to manage group micro-politics. In practice, it was both vital and complicated to work with groups rather than seek out single individuals, something CCS management started to appreciate as time went on.

Most teams had specific days for CCS work. Mathare Number Ten Youth Group (MANYGRO), introduced in chapter 3, had a landlord for whom members cleaned daily, but most other CCS teams had weekly clients and a few monthly clients, including primary schools. The likelihood of accessing water was higher in the earliest part of the day, so jobs were often completed just after dawn, and during dry season when water was predicted to be scarce, the teams ensured to fill (and guard) enough twenty-liter jerry cans of water the night prior, and rented the CCS handcart to transport them around. The end of a CCS workday could be at 10 a.m., noon, or 2 p.m. But it was rarely the end of the workday. Before the team disbanded, if the group felt rich that day, they might buy a cup of chai (tea) and a chapati (flat bread) from one of the local street-food vendors. That was often the first meal of the day, and perhaps the last until suppertime.

CCS youth could spend hours after their day’s work hanging around their base in their CCS uniform, a simple dark-blue boiler suit commonly worn by mechanics and other laborers in the city but not often worn in the mtaa at that time, and certainly not branded on the back. Hanging around with the uniform half undone was a sort of de facto marketing statement that became part of a performance, particularly among youth who might otherwise be stigmatized for appearing idle much of the time or up to some trouble. In their CCS overall, these youth gave curious gossiping pedestrians corporeal proof of having been at work. And at the same time, they built up interest and curiosity in the service itself, in a way that displaying the SCJ products and the claims on the packaging could not have. SCJ’s mwananchi insecticide coils of yesteryears were sold in the local duka (kiosk). CCS was a community-oriented business for the wananchi by the vijana ya mtaa (youth of the hood). It wasn’t the product and its packaging that got people’s attention; it was the uniform worn by youth otherwise seen as underemployed and idle much of the time. In their professionalizing function, the uniforms not only afforded these cleaning groups the legitimacy to enter semiprivate compounds, schools, and elite spaces such as the local chief’s compound but also gave specific meaning to the moments of kuzurura (loitering) that provided a public signpost that implied, “I may be idling right now, but I was working today.” As they circulated the neighborhood to come in and out of semiprivate spaces to clean, they moved from one public space to another as branded pedestrian “sales people” as well as “cleaners.”

In one sense, they professionalized the hustle economy especially given that these youth were associated with sometimes morally ambiguous forms of income generation, depending on the base. But as most of these youth were also involved in waste work, the CCS uniform also reminded residents that the groups doing garbage collection during the nighttime hours were getting outside attention and respect—rendering the value of their labor more visible as they further diversified their portfolio of economic activities centered around waste, sanitation, and the environment. There was another reason why the uniform was worn after hours. The various meanings and moments of uniform display illustrated how the branding of CCS was locally appropriated by the subjectivities and performances of youth whose hustle involved moving in and out of modes of work, leisure, idleness, and ambiguous in-between states that might be one or the other. The uniform worn after working hours was both the embodied archive of work practice hours ago but also the subversive affirmation that a young person has a right to take up space on the streets during the hours of downtime.

Eventually, some mobile cleaning teams (MCTs) operating out of their youth groups created a separate CCS account to keep track of toilet-cleaning earnings, even if part of CCS revenues were reinvested in other youth group activities. Each team handled this process differently, but systematically most CCS MCTs ended up being a four- to six-person collective, anchored within a broader youth group of approximately twenty-five to thirty members. As a result of this internal circle within the circle, practices of kuzurura involved two contrasting though adjacent rhythms: youth who were working at a particular time and their other mates who were hanging out—those on the “job” adjacent to the “jobless corner.” The jobless corner provided a social entourage and served as a source of protection in the face of potential harassment from police, other youth gangs, or the disapproving remarks of overbearing wazee watiaji (elders on our backs).

The Mtaa Way: Economic Rationalities in the Hood

Since 2007, MANYGRO’s CCS team had identified the lack of community toilets in their community and targeted two kinds of customers. They marketed CCS to households that had access to a shared residential toilet (trained and encouraged by CCS Central to do so). They also negotiated with the landlord of a residential plot in a central area of their neighborhood to construct a “community toilet” in 2006. The agreement was that MANYGRO would oversee maintenance and management of the toilet at a pay-per-use cost of 2 KES or 150 KES (US1.68) per month per household. In exchange, MANYGRO paid the landlord 700 KES (US7.83) a month and agreed to take on any repairs or additional costs, including water. This toilet had significant local meaning, serving thousands of residents who otherwise lacked access to a shared facility. The CCS team cleaned it every morning and after a while, most neighboring shack dwellers, whose landlords had consistently refused to provide shared toilet facilities in the residential compound, accessed the MANYGRO toilet for a monthly fee. In 2011, MANYGRO added to the community toilet’s offering (and revenue potential) when it rerouted a water point so the toilet had nearby access to water, adding significant value and foot traffic to the MANYGRO baze.

Between August 2009 and April 2010, MANYGRO’s CCS sales—number of toilets cleaned and product used—remained relatively consistent but stagnant throughout the months. It had sought out customers within its existing garbage collection customer base—residents with whom it had developed trusted relationships over the years. But, as one team member explained, “it’s difficult to market CCS because so many people say they appreciate the end result but cannot afford to pay for it regularly.” And yet the challenge was not only the (un)willingness or (in)ability to pay. What SCJ and CCS management perceived, with some frustration, as a “lack of growth” was more complex than a simple question of scalability.

The challenge of scaling CCS was that even those who seemed most active in CCS (the core CCS mobile cleaning teams in each base) also had to maintain their other sources of income, which had come to form an expanding portfolio of mixed-income livelihoods, including garbage collection as the foundational and most reliable income source (i.e., you knew how many customers you had each month), plastics recycling (which was seasonal and depended on the type of plastic and availability of a nearby shredder or pelletizer), and urban farming (which had become for some an important way of asserting some local agency regarding food production). For MANYGRO, CCS provided the seed capital for its urban farming business, and it benefited from the access to business training and regular visits from CCS field officers. This afforded MANYGRO a certain status of recognition and influence in the community as a youth group capable of eliciting external sources of attention and support from the NGO and business sector. Maintaining the combination of activities was an important form of risk diversification and commitment to logics of solidarity and mutuality common within other Kenyan businesses in the informal economy (Kinyanjui 2019).

At the same time, working in connection to group entities also meant being potentially subject to peer pressure and sentiments of obligation. Both the territorial sensibilities of the groups who were economically bound to their base and the individual social cost of doing “too well” posed real psychological limits to individual economic gain, regularly manifest as strategic discretion concerning personal income and an implicit resistance to scaling up any one business. For this reason, each enterprise stayed strategically small in scale, and profits from one were used as seed or working capital to invest in another, allowing the diversified portfolio to expand laterally, always benefiting the group and even others around. Consciously hiding and subconsciously limiting one’s income was a protective mechanism against the risk of becoming a target for crime, being exploited by friends and family, and being subject to social exclusion.

MANYGRO CCS sales numbers indicated a tendency to maintain a limited number of regular customers and focus especially on the “daily clean” of the community toilet. The group was not trying to grow its CCS business and certainly did not venture out beyond its informally marked economic zone of existing residential garbage collection customers. This raised the following paradox. As explained during a focus group discussion in January 2010, “Unlike with garbage collection where you get paid once a month and the income doesn’t change since you have a set number of plots each month, with CCS you get paid each time you clean, and the income and customers have potential to continuously grow.” And yet, to MANYGRO the importance was retaining a set number of customers. While members participated in CCS quarterly general meetings where the “market potential” of tenement buildings in each CCS customer base was discussed at length among the mobile cleaning teams (MCTs), in practice MANYGRO was more committed to sustaining a constant, albeit small-scale, venture.

In contrast, Shei, or as he was affectionately called, Mzee Kijana (young elder), one of the CCS entrepreneurs, worked as a sole entrepreneur. He recognized that the “youth group” was an important entity but also posed challenges. Explaining his business approach, which depended on teamwork but was not operating out of a youth group structure, he noted, “Those youth groups, I use them, yes. I use them as a workforce when I need other workers. But otherwise I work alone.” He had little ability to retain “repeat” customers, instead focusing continuously on seeking out new customers beyond his immediate residential periphery. Mzee Kijana belonged only loosely to a youth group and was not involved in the garbage economy or its associated economic or relationally constituted territorial zoning. He was the only “non-youth” CCS member (in his late forties at that time) and preferred to work alone, hiring cleaners he trained personally on a case-by-case basis. MANYGRO and Mzee Kijana’s approaches and impact contrasted: a small sustained set of repeat customers versus the continuous expansion of a one-off customer base. As these two examples show, CCS members and their life histories challenged the deceptively homogenizing and individualized qualifier “micro-franchisee” or “entrepreneur.” Despite efforts to standardize operations, no two CCS teams would ever be the same, act the same, or work the same, nor would the value of CCS work acquire the same meaning to any two people for whom CCS was an additional hustle among several. The notion of kazi (a job) in the hustle economy was experienced in different forms from one “hustler” to the next.

Impatient Capital: Challenges of Turning Hustlers into Entrepreneurs

The incremental growth of the business, “one toilet a day,” was to many CCS members a source of pride in a context otherwise marked by expected and frequent setbacks. This contentment in incremental improvements, akin to the “politics of patience” (Appadurai 2019) of other community-led slum upgrading efforts, would inevitably clash with a corporation’s temporal expectation and vision of change. To SCJ, sponsoring CCS with “patient capital” and a commitment to the wider experiment of “corporate-community” business co-creation, “incremental change” was nevertheless associated with stagnant growth. Over time, when capital could no longer afford to be “patient,” what was at first seen as an investment in social innovation in low-income markets became seen as too much of a business loss. Conversely, CCS’s manager was a well-educated middle-class Kenyan who had never lived in the city’s popular neighborhoods but was very aware of the mtaa way and the modes of mutuality that transcended income class in Kenya. He understood (and relied upon) the reality that change and gaining communities’ trust took time. As Mzee Kijana said during a conversation in July 2010, “trust has to be earned and cannot be forced.”

To the company’s sustainability manager, patient capital and social investment had a rapidly approaching expiration date after six years of “incubating.” CCS’s manager was aware of this and received considerable pressure from his business partner to produce more data from the field to justify the investment, if only for “business innovation learning” purposes and to keep the SCJ leadership committed. The CCS manager, however, did not express the same sense of alarm when faced with the company’s “P&L” (profit and loss). These two men had grown to become good friends and honest partners with one another, but this tension between their very different approaches was reflected in the weekly CCS meetings between 2009 and 2010, which simultaneously offered moments of ephemeral celebration concerning positive field anecdotes, followed by deflated enthusiasm when the “numbers” of that month were disclosed. At best, sales per mobile cleaning team had plateaued throughout that year. From a corporate business perspective, these underwhelming P&L numbers meant CCS was unable to scale. But within the mtaa, the limit of growth had an explanation and rationale tied to the risks of doing “too well.”

To the youth doing garbage collection alongside other income activities connected to the value of waste, CCS had become an important part of their portfolio: it had helped create additional income opportunities for youth in a way that equated with two key values: “earning an honest living” and “building trust” with customers, two things that were not taken for granted or easily coupled in the mtaa. According to Mambo, one of the first CCS team leaders who had an active role as a youth mentor and football coach, opting for an “honest living” meant making a choice between potentially higher gains from criminal activity (despite high risk of gang in-fighting and conflict with the police) and working hard for a small wage. CCS faced the following paradox: It offered more lucrative work than casual labor in the industrial area, with a payment structure that remunerated all cleaners involved in the day, in-field training, and a strong social support system. However, in fostering self-employment around an unestablished service, each team was responsible for marketing, customer relations, and recruiting new members. This made it much more laborious than the alternative income-generating activities in the hood that had become well-established businesses (garbage collection, secondhand sales, recycling) and less lucrative than petty criminal activity or just relying on NGO projects engaging youth as foot soldiers, often jokingly referred to as “feeding programs.”

Trust was critical and yet difficult to secure in concrete terms. No CCS contracts existed and any attempt to draft official contractual agreements might have put off most of the youth whose various hustles always retained a degree of strategic discretion. The notion of trust was continuously evoked in relation to cash management, customer relations, inter-team dynamics, and between CCS “entrepreneurs” and CCS Central. The issue of cash management in particular reflected the tension between self-interested individualistic behavior and group interests.

Striving for an honest living and earning trust of customers and peers alike were ideals that could not be granted with permanency in a context where unforeseen circumstances and the pressures of everyday struggle could sometimes create lapses in group solidarity. While both “earning an honest living” and “building trust” were laudable and oft-expressed goals in normative rhetoric, in practice they were both entangled with the messier reality of the mtaa where everyday adversities sometimes blurred the line between licit and illicit work. Being discrete about how to tread that line was part of everyday mtaa life, because ultimately all local business was socially contingent—your customers were often your neighbors and friends.

CCS wasn’t meant as a temporary fix to urban poverty or to just target a phase of youthhood in a tokenistic fashion. Many individuals within CCS had grown with it since 2006, going from team cleaners to team leaders to hired staff or “mentors” of other teams. Both SCJ’s sustainability manager and the CCS manager agreed that all CCS personnel needed significant street credibility, knowledge of local street codes, and entrepreneurial experience in order to relate to, let alone manage, teams. The CCS manager explained in June 2010,

Often as businesses grow, they start needing people with bachelor’s or even master’s degrees, bringing people from outside. This is what makes us unique; as long as we’re able to say we create employment opportunities within these communities, the people working within CCS will be from these communities. The second you start having country manager or someone running things with a master’s, you begin to withdraw from these communities.

Over time, CCS had provided for some individuals either a stepping stone to other forms of work or education or a legitimizing channel toward attaining symbolic markers of adulthood. For example, for Mambo, the CCS quality assurance professional, CCS was the first job he had not wanted to quit after four months, as he once explained with laughter. For him, it became more than just overseeing cleaning teams and gathering sales data in the field. He described his work as a chance to mentor and motivate troubled youth. He was already a youth mentor as a football coach in his area, but he felt that his role within CCS expanded his opportunity to offer youth alternatives to crime. In December 2011, savings from years of CCS work helped him finally afford a proper dowry and wedding celebration to make official his union with his longtime partner and mother of his three children. These were meaningful but intangible effects, difficult to measure and communicate in “return on investment” terms, as the next section illustrates.

Contradictions of Assessing Impact

At the community level, by 2010 CCS was, to quote Eliza, who was working with CCS at the time, becoming a movement. She went on to say, “The name speaks for itself.” CCS clients and nonclients alike referred to the “professionalism” of CCS teams and the use of the company’s “world-class” products. Visual and olfactive references to the “sweet-smelling” product or “whiteness of the bowl,” driven by personal and social pride, stood out above any health benefits. Despite income and infrastructural poverty in Mathare, residents valued having a toilet facility that they, their families, and their guests could use without discomfort or shame. CCS was the only community-based business to provide and enforce the use of uniforms, protective gear, and cleaning techniques subject to “quality control” follow-ups. Rather than contradict the terms of the mtaa way, the uniform professionalized and validated youth-led eco-hustles, if anything else to signal that all kinds of waste work merits protective garb and being taken seriously.

A number of anthropological studies have provided key insights related to the retail distribution of products in low-income markets and the political economy of such products (Burke 1996; Cross and Street 2009; Dolan and Rajak 2011). CCS did not resemble most mainstream corporate approaches seeking explicitly or implicitly to shape and meet “commonsense” hygienic demands. In contrast to other “business for development” models, CCS did not distribute “sachets” of cleaning product to local small-scale retail outlets, to be sold to individual customers for private in-home use. Instead, it had trained youth already involved in one kind of waste work, taka ni pato, to operate as entrepreneurial channels of product sale through a service model, targeting the toilet commons, that infamous and vital “public good.” Targeting public toilets was precisely what had enabled the impetus of CCS at first, but what also entangled business practices were the contested attitudes toward the shared commons and toward the residential “end-user” perceptions of what was worth paying for. The issue was not convincing people that CCS offered a valuable service but instead convincing them that the service’s cost was worth the price, and this was not merely a matter of “better marketing” but rather of understanding the norms of the local economy in relation to sanitation.

Within the local waste economy, residents were end users of sanitation and waste services but exercised their agencies in different ways. In certain cases, the end user was a citizen recipient of the right to better sanitation. In other cases, the end user was an agent of improvement. In all cases, the end user became a consumer-client of a particular service. In merging the roles of citizen and client, community member and customer, sanitation was both subject to consensus building (when it came to maintenance, management, and payment), while remaining a private matter of consumer choice and personal hygiene. In this regard, CCS faced the following paradox.

In Mathare, the commercialization of public health and basic services (e.g., water vending, waste collection) had already happened, given the unreliable municipal service provisioning. Therefore, CCS was actually building on an existing grassroots portfolio of private service provision. In these hustle economies, you could not get anything done if you didn’t do it yourself or pay some enterprising person to do it for you. Mathare hustlers at community levels have long been private providers—albeit small scale—offering services in the absence of municipal provisions of proper waste and sanitation management. Yet, given that CCS’s model depended on private interest and capital engaging with the delivery and management of “public” services and goods, turning residents with very little disposable income into paying customers was not as obvious as anticipated.

CCS’s offering inevitably shaped new geographies of sanitation sensibility and consumption (Burke 1996) as certain residents became regular customers of the cleaning service, while others did not. Certain waste workers were refashioned into uniform-wearing “sanitation entrepreneurs” representing a “professionalized” company name, while other peer groups also involved in garbage collection and other waste work (e.g., plastic recycling) remained isolated from external support. These cleavages within popular neighborhoods where CCS had a presence reflected the inevitable geographies of exclusion that occur through monetized economies and fee-paying services, no matter how socially “responsible,” “innovative,” and “inclusive” the business model may be in theory.

The reality is, CCS became embedded in existing structures of difference and uneven access to a clean toilet. Most customers were residents living in semiprivate shanty compounds or in four- to eight-story tenement walk-ups. The “cleaning contract” had been informally established with the landlords, who had consistently neglected the state of these poorly managed shared toilets (in the poorest pockets of Mathare they even refused to build a toilet for their tenants). The other public toilets serviced by CCS had always been pay-per-use toilets accessible by surrounding households, local businesses, schools, and pedestrians. CCS had either been given a license to clean these ill-maintained “public goods” by local politicians or had sufficient social capital and “muscle” to rehabilitate the toilets themselves. Moreover, improvement schemes could not just create a “supply,” be it of upgraded housing with self-contained toilets, rehabilitated toilets, new toilet construction, or more “education” campaigns regarding health and hygiene. They could only create change if matched by grassroots efforts to build demand. Part of creating the demand was to normalize the monetization of cleaning shared facilities and human waste disposal through justifications attesting to environmental and public health claims. But these normative values were often rendered irrelevant in the face of adverse infrastructural conditions, to the extent that abstract notions of “social good” or “public health” were less convincing claims than economic value. If it cost more to be healthy and safe without some immediate benefit (e.g., mobile phones cost money but the value is clear and the return on investment immediate), behavior change was unlikely in neighborhoods where environmental harms were normalized.

According to triangulated interviews conducted with residents and local clinicians, the cost of treating a case of diarrhea was equivalent or higher than the average day’s wage of a resident living in Mathare or equivalent, and a third of one household’s monthly rent (approximately 600 KES). But while appending a social and health message to a commercial sale might seem like a logical and commendable social enterprise strategy, asking waste workers to serve both as marketers and community public health officers, showing the health value and potential health-care savings of a clean toilet, was quite another hurdle in practice. As a result, securing “repeat customers” was limited because the full value was difficult to transmit and perceive in neighborhoods unfamiliar with any kind of door-to-door service and with CCS teams who were not used to selling a “new” idea. How do you show a frugal and skeptical customer the value of disease prevention in the context and time frame of a door-to-door exchange? These practical challenges reflected the faulty assumptions around meeting public health ends through commercial means: the classic trap where a health “need” (as proven by science) does not necessarily transfer into market demand or consumer behavior (as proven in the market).

One poignant example: In March 2010, after noticing the dip in sales for his area reported at the CCS weekly meeting, I spoke with Mzee Kijana to ask him about “business last month.” He explained that in February the children were on holiday from school. During holidays, regular customers told him not to come because the children “will make the toilets dirty.” In other words, when the children were around, it was not worth paying for a cleaning service because too quickly the value of the cleaning job was undone. But the other pragmatic reason was the financial strain on all parents around February of each year, when school fees were due and household budgets were already “stretched” following the recent Christmas holiday travel expenses up-country to see relatives. This illustrated residents’ pragmatism concerning the cost of clean toilets, especially related to children. Children who did not have a nearby toilet option were rarely given a 5 KES coin to use the community public toilets, so they were forced to defecate out in the open spaces near the rubbish heaps or near the river. In schools, those who cleaned toilets were children who had “misbehaved,” so it was stigmatized as a degrading task associated with punishment and public shame. Plus, few schools provided water or soap for handwashing, and while handwashing before meals was part of Kenyan cultural norms across income levels, the cost of water and soap impeded many residents from doing so.

Given the challenges of building market demand in the face of survivalist pragmatism and the complacency with slow or even stagnant business growth, the overall CCS financial performance consistently lagged behind break-even targets. By 2012, the leadership at SC Johnson who had enthusiastically sponsored the BoP Protocol pilot study in 2005 and consistently invested in CCS in the years that followed felt it could no longer justify further business investment. Local CCS mobile cleaning teams were profitable with revenues from residential customers covering their operating costs, with earnings well above minimum wage for each team member and some profits for reinvestment or disbursement. However, the “central” costs—for training, follow-up, and quality assurance—were well above projections and greater than the SCJ revenues generated through sales of product to the mobile cleaning teams, impeding profitability for the company. The dilemma was that these processes, especially the in-field presence and visits of people like Mambo and Eliza, the two salaried quality control professionals, were a key driver of the “buzz” and crucial to relationship building with each CCS group. Their presence and regular “on-the-job” training was also what helped establish high quality standards, and the business could not grow without it. And yet creating more demand through sanitation marketing efforts and public health educational campaigns aiming to shift residential expectations of cleanliness and change individual hygienic habits would still not solve the structural business problem. The uncomfortable truth revealed only later was that more “demand” from the residential customers would mean more cost to the business. Despite dual positive impact on customers and cleaners, the business was not covering its operating costs and could not be considered a viable investment from SCJ’s point of view. Efficiencies were attempted and increased prices discussed but neither of these were able to make a viable business case for SCJ to continue. “Increased demand” could add new entrepreneurs, new teams, and new streams of income for youth in the mtaa economy, but when it came to the crude business numbers and the company’s investment in CCS, cost scaled with revenue.

In February 2012, seven years after its inception, CCS received its last installment of funding from SCJ. A year later, Eliza, one of the CCS staff members, sent me a message to say, “Today’s meeting was to close CCS officially.” One of the first CCS entrepreneurs followed soon after with the following text:

It is indeed true and sad, I still cannot believe it, six years of doing something you like and believe in, only to have it suddenly crumble, times are hard and what we have worked for so many years to build to fade so abruptly is hard to bear, anyway it’s still encouraging to see teams still working, this means at least we did something right to inspire them.

The exact details of what “closed down” CCS a year after the company’s funding ended have remained unclear ever since, and each have their side of the story. CCS Central funds ran out, and while the CCS governance structure fostered a unique support system for both the mobile cleaning teams and the staff, it had in parallel cultivated an opaque accounting arm. But in a way, the end of SC Johnson’s investment should not be regarded as the termination of CCS as a community-based business that took on a life of its own as time went on.

Since 2013, the original CCS teams in various pockets of Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods have continued to remain “active,” still cleaning shared toilets in their neighborhoods. To this day, there is still enough SC Johnson product in stock to last another few years at least. Some groups have decided to start their own cleaning businesses in their local area; some were inspired to manage communal toilets and turn these into sources of revenue. For example, Kevo Uduni, one of the founding members of Huruma Town Youth Group, explained in 2023 that they were “young boys” when CCS first arrived in their neighborhood more than ten years ago. Today, the group manages and cleans its own public toilet for nearby community-owned businesses to use. In Mathare Number 10, where MANYGRO has been managing the same public toilet for years, the older youth have tasked younger youth to manage, clean, and collect payment for the same. The CCS logo painted in 2008 has now faded, but people who have been around for that long remember what the logo was about. And Mzee Kijana and other former CCS members in Mathare, Huruma, and Dandora decided in 2020 to apply for funds to register a new company, under the name “Community CLARITY Services.” Mzee Kijana called this a “CCS revival,” and what was poignant about this was that the revival was completely community led. They knew they couldn’t keep using the name Community Cleaning Services for legal reasons, but they wanted to keep the well-known acronym, which still held clout in their mtaa communities. And with this new company, the groups started to clean more than toilets. I would regularly receive WhatsApp messages from my CCS friends, who proudly shared videos of their cleaning jobs in places across Nairobi and even beyond.

As of October 2023, Joseph Njenga, the CCS manager, gave all the remaining product to Kennedy, one of the most active CCS members, so he and the other groups could use it. The product, Kennedy claims, will serve them for “at least five years.” CCS is now, more than ever, a mtaani business. The product was the last affirmation of that corporate-community business alliance. In my text exchange with Njenga soon after this where I remarked that this was a very symbolic moment in the story of CCS, he replied that it was indeed “bitter sweet.” In a way, for Njenga to give the remaining product to the youth who were still running CCS operations was akin to the cash transfer logic (Ferguson 2015) but without actually being just cash. It was a “gift” of sorts that would provide the necessary resource to have that competitive edge in the cleaning business outside the mtaa, but here Eliza’s reaction was especially interesting. Eliza left me a voice message around that time, explaining that she was also very pleased and grateful that the remaining product was now in the mtaa. She felt it was especially important to keep servicing local toilets and residents, to keep it a mtaa thing as well as create cleaning jobs elsewhere. She had told Kennedy as much, and he agreed. On most Saturdays, as I witnessed on my most recent trip, several of the old CCS crew could be found near their base wearing their tattered but well-maintained CCS overalls, broom and bucket in hand, ready to clean one of the communal toilets. For Mzee Kijana, who was perhaps in the end the person who most depended on CCS as his main source of revenue, CCS was more than anything a really good business, offering a quality service. And that was always the point: provide improved sanitation locally and through locally owned businesses; create jobs and provide cleaner, safer toilets. Alongside the big jobs far away, which of course pay well, Kennedy, Eliza, and Shei agreed the business needed to stay close too. Having product on hand has reaffirmed that commitment to the “social business” side of things helped do just that. Social business the mtaa way. The CCS hustle goes on, in its own way, now without the “good company” or CCS Central.

The CCS story reflects the spectrum of market-led development claims and counterclaims, and there are several ways to read its story, to interpret what it was and what it became. In March 2012, I had the chance to speak about CCS as a case study to a group of business school students and professors at the Haute Études Commerciales (HEC) in Paris, for their Social Business / Entreprise et Pauvreté (Business and Poverty) Program. This was an audience sympathetic to (and in the case of students, hoping perhaps to become) corporate sustainability practitioners, who regarded CCS as an example of “good corporate citizenship,” harnessing business to promote job creation and improve hygiene. During the Q&A discussion, one of the business professors, learning of CCS’s spin-off into a nonprofit community-based social enterprise, said it was a “great shame” that CCS was a “business failure.” Despite the stable economic viability for CCS “entrepreneurs” and the value to regular customers, its inability to scale and meet corporate parameters of commercial viability equated failure.

Speaking to a very different audience on another occasion, at an academic seminar with mostly geographers and anthropologists, one audience member raised a different concern, skepticism about enterprise-led approaches to basic service provision more generally, arguing that this was becoming an all-too-familiar neoliberal trend: rendering what ought to be a public service a private consumer good. While this argument’s weakness is that it presumes public provision is always possible, it does make a valid point. Under this light, CCS exemplified the neoliberalizing postcolonial city in three ways: one, it was reaching into income-poor neighborhoods to compel residents already on a tight budget to become paying customers of a sanitation service; two, it risked diverting resources away from focusing on improving public sanitation infrastructure (the actual toilets) and toward building a cleaning business; three, it risks further encouraging a “scramble” for informal labor (Meagher 2016) and could be argued to perpetuate a form of disguised employment to carve out new distribution channels for corporate products in markets where purchases of single units were unaffordable.

This last point echoes the view expressed by Anil Karnani (2007) in his critique of the BoP thesis when he wrote a short piece about “the mirage at the Base of the Pyramid.” In it he argued that the pressing imperative should be increasing employment in order to address poverty, not finding ways to sell corporate products to low-income consumers. CCS’s focus on youth job creation could be commended, but the push of SCJ cleaning products through the marketing of a cleaning service could raise concerns, given that revenue depended on cash outflow from a low-income neighborhood. Ethnographic studies of other corporate interventions have criticized companies like Unilever for appending a public health message to their market offerings and micro-entrepreneurship schemes (Cross and Street 2009) and cautioned against legitimizing discourses of corporations claiming to be “socially responsible” (Welker 2009), while associating “cleanliness” with a “social good” (Burke 1996; Cross and Street 2009; 5). Catherine Dolan and Mary Johnstone-Louis (2011, 22) have raised critiques of schemes that purport to improve lives by “converting” local informal workers into “empowered entrepreneurial subjects,” with the promise of “poverty alleviation” while seeking new sources of revenue for the company.

Each of these critical assessments raise crucial points and offer important broader critiques of market-based development schemes that are now widespread. But my hope is that this chapter highlights complexities that do not always feature in either the celebratory accounts of business for development or the critiques of these. The chapter relays the intangible effects of a social enterprise that engaged with, rather than displaced, local hustlers, that avoided packaging waste and just selling more stuff, that tried to adapt to local economic and social customs by moving slowly and through existing social and economic organizations, and that ultimately worked with the “incomplete” (Guma 2020) sanitation infrastructures at hand rather than propose to “reinvent the toilet.”8 As a result, CCS received an unusual degree of patience from its corporate sponsor, capital and otherwise, but eventually could not be justified as “commercially viable” from the company’s point of view. And yet, over these nearly two decades, CCS has continued to circulate as a case study example of “business innovation,” an important though complicated experiment that provides notable learnings and reflection points for those who were part of it in any form and who are now pursuing other “social business” projects elsewhere.

As a corporate-led initiative, CCS could not survive as a flawed commercial proposition, unable to guarantee a return on investment or sustained growth. But CCS adapted to the local hustle economy, and what remained of it was a mtaa-based appropriation of the service, locally valued for the “sweet-smelling product” and the “professionalism” of the cleaners. While mainstream business and even development metrics of impact would deem CCS a failure, the lasting effects of this corporate-community, street-boardroom entanglement merits an alternative, more “modest” (Lawhon, Nsangi Nakyagaba, and Karpouzoglou 2023) reading.

During the years of its corporate-community encounter, CCS had elicited the interest of diverse actors, including different sanitation professionals, local politicians, NGOs focused on youth entrepreneurship, community-development activists, and youth groups alike. CCS had brought in particular assets familiar to “professional” businesses outside these popular neighborhoods (e.g., uniforms, equipment, product) but ended up acquiring a street credibility and abiding by local codes and sensibilities, which elicited the respect of its youth members, thereby sustaining enthusiasm and engagement beyond its corporate sponsorship. This was something other youth programs struggled with in a period where the economic imperative of addressing youth poverty through “putting youth to work” had become integral to discourses of peace building and social stability following the 2008 postelection violence. CCS was one of the only organizations that managed to motivate, train, and bring otherwise fragmented youth together for local economic and social development ends. Informal conversations with NGO directors in Nairobi revealed the difficulty of managing youth groups and the challenges of rapid turnover of youth participants in youth programs (Makau 2011). CCS harnessed the mixed-livelihood approach of urban youth, offering tangible access to “on-the-job” skills training that would benefit their other hustles as well as intangible benefits of increased self-esteem, mentorship, and collective identity. It is the reason why CCS continues in its own form today.

In sum, CCS was perceived as one or all of the following: a grassroots business focused on improved sanitation, a social network of youth groups, a youth-led organization, a mentorship model for youth teetering between crime and entrepreneurship, a training program, a corporate social responsibility project, a social movement, and a nonprofit social enterprise. It did more than provide a new source of product distribution in the untapped markets of popular neighborhoods. It tapped into the subjectivities of hustling youth and residential customers who had themselves identified that shared toilets were a problem. It embedded itself and added to the grassroots mtaa economy, folding itself into the logics of “self-shared provisioning” (Kinder 2016, 11) but with a hybridized market-based approach to that “provision.” It recognized the lack of formal state presence, but one of its first public-sector champions was the same person, Margaret Wanjiru, who has been regarded as the “Mother of Work” (Mama Kazi) for youth across Mathare. In the early CCS days, Wanjiru asked the CCS team to rehabilitate and brand the only decaying public toilet in Pangani, serving the nearby retail outlets, street vendors, and pedestrians walking by. CCS turned the public toilet into a business and helped make sanitation infrastructure a political issue. CCS encouraged youth groups to welcome rather than fear “healthy competition” between their bazes. To this day, if one of the CCS groups has a big cleaning job, they’ll call up youth from other areas to come along.

At the same time, the logics of solidarity and self-help have made it difficult for youth to detach themselves from a collective narrative of struggle, which means that “scaling out” a business is not an obvious aspiration or marker of “success.” But stagnation and sustained endurance merit consideration. By embedding itself in the “cultural logics” (Gidwani 2008) of the “mtaa way,” CCS took on a form of its own over the years, and it continues to illustrate the different parameters, aspirations, and expectations of the hustle economy versus those of a corporation bound by its bottom line. As Joseph Njenga recently told me when we met in April 2023, “At the end of the day, CCS was about one or two business ideas, but above everything else, it was about community work.” Retrospectively, the story of CCS takes me back to that office in Mumbai, in 2006, with Professor Parasuraman. Business can be social work and social work can be business. To evaluate the “success” of a social business against the metrics of “growth” and “scale-up/scale-out” alone is to miss its plural effects and the radical possibilities within a more “modest imaginary” that pays attention not to the end of CCS as Community Cleaning Services but to the endurance of CCS as Community Clarity Services. In the mtaa, there is a place for the kind of social business that draws on the resources of external support but then adapts to and ultimately is led by the hustle economy in the self-help city—a kind of situated social business that shape-shifts and remakes, that “keeps on keeping on” (to quote Curtis Mayfield), in its own modest way.9