Straight Outta Dumpsite

Youth: The Marginalized Majority

Youth in Nairobi contend with an unemployment crisis, continued disinvestment in basic services, and persistent marginalization. In many African cities, urbanization has happened without large-scale industrialization or comprehensive employment programs following independence (Davis 2006). But narrow labor categories that define work in binary terms (legal/illegal; employed/unemployed) have not helped advance our understanding of what is actually going on in everyday lived experiences among young people (Ferguson and Li 2018). Furthermore, across mainstream representations of popular neighborhoods (commonly referred to pejoratively as “slums”), the social and economic modes of organizing, exchanging, sharing, cohabiting, and learning are not only largely categorized, legally at least, as “informal” or “illicit”; they are usually defined by what they are not (Roitman 1990). In some cases, youth are portrayed as jobless, idle, violent, or displaced. In other cases, youth are hailed as entrepreneurial, digital natives, creative, and resilient.

The complicated and politicized category of “youth” in Kenya and beyond has generated polarized narratives that mirror the competing discourses of the “slum city” as an apocalyptic lawless ghetto on one extreme (Davis 2006) and a site of creative coping strategies and vibrant entrepreneurship (Neuwirth 2012) on the other. Youth can be perceived as a vulnerable social and political category, but their ambiguous limbo status can also shape generative spaces of opportunism, experimentation, and ingenuity. These move fluidly and sometimes inconspicuously between illicit and licit activities; one may even lead to the other. Youth find their own “ways and means,” which sometimes “involve the supply of hitherto unimagined ‘services,’ sometimes the recommissioning of the detritus of consumer society, sometimes the resale of purloined property of the state, sometimes the short-circuiting of existing networks of exchange” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2005, 23).

As a result, the lives of youth—the marginalized majority city dwellers—go underdocumented or reduced to essentialized narratives of deprivation, violence, or romanticized boot-strapping entrepreneurialism. And yet their “life styles” (Valentine 1978) and “habitus” (C. Richardson and Skott-Myhre 2012) are much more (and sometimes much less) than deprivation, violence, and entrepreneurship. The lifestyles and habitus of the mtaa (the popular neighborhood) consist of a multitude of livelihood strategies along with interludes of “hanging about” (G. Jones 2012) and different forms of community work, including peace building (McMullin 2022). This is especially the case with youth groups who share a particular form of “liminality” (Turner 1969). In popular neighborhoods, youth are left in limbo as school leavers with nowhere to go and nothing obvious to do, and are not yet ready (or wanting) to perform adult roles and adhere to normative expectations of adulthood. Their alternative interpretations of work are entangled with the shared prolonged transition to culturally contingent norms of adulthood (Hamilton and Hamilton 2009; Honwana 2012), perhaps even a shared “detachment” from these in some cases (Simone 2016)—a kind of protracted liminality.2

In the African urban context as in Nairobi, youth (particularly male) comprise the majority of the informal labor force (Yaqub 2009). While the informal sector has grown due to job losses incurred in the wake of neoliberal economic policies, an entire generation of young people does not even have “jobs” to be lost. In such a context, youth risk being a “potential category of exclusion and exploitation, a source of surplus value” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2005, 22). This reality has pushed scholars to focus on the experiences and subjectivities of African youth facing systems that seem rigged against them, to better understand how youth struggling with gendered expectations have struggled to imagine, let alone build, a future in the midst of persistent unemployment and adversity, alongside the quixotic promises of globalization.

There is a rich ethnographic literature focused on how youth navigate various forms of heightened catastrophic insecurity in the contemporary world. To mention a few notable examples within African youth studies that resonate with this book: Marc Sommers (2012) focuses on youth feeling “stuck” in Rwanda. Daniel Mains (2011) focuses on youth in Ethiopia trying to construct hope in the midst of uncertainty. Henrik Vigh (2006) examines the opportunistic ways in which youth socially navigate conflict-ridden social landscapes in Guinea-Bissau. Sasha Newell (2012) focuses on young men in Côte d’Ivoire who engage in conspicuous consumption as a collective performance (“modernity bluff”) to mask their daily struggle to make ends meet. Brad Weiss (2009) depicts the performative and lively space of the barbershop as the locus where socializing, business, and expressions of popular urban culture overlap in Tanzania. James Esson (2015, 2020) focuses on young men in Ghana whose football dreams are entangled with the false promises of international development, the global inequalities of capitalism, and the harms of “irregular” migration management. And Marco Di Nunzio (2019) focuses on young men whose precarious street lives in urban Ethiopia highlight the perverse contradictions between rapid urban development and persistent marginalization of youth. What comes through in the growing scholarship on African youth is the vast heterogeneity of “real economies” (MacGaffey, 1991) and “real social practices” that make up the “real city” (Pieterse 2011, 14) where the marginalized majority live, dream, play, work, and pass the time. Given this heterogeneity, still too little is known about how young people actually “get by,” how they navigate normative expectations and pressures, and how they analytically describe their relationship to everyday life, work, and their urban environment.

In the absence of employment opportunities and other official support systems, youth in popular neighborhoods are left to their own devices to create their own “ways of being in the city” (Simone 2010b, 58), operating on the periphery of legal and formal employment. They shape hustle economies that reject formal institutions of authority while maintaining connections to them and continuously negotiating political and economic arrangements. Their experience and position of liminality, marginality, and trouble can exacerbate youth vulnerabilities, but they can also generate spaces of unlikely opportunism and solidarity to make a living and get things done. In the context of protracted uncertainty and the absence of formal institutional support, chances of survival and success are predicated on “webs of exchange” with other peers and the capacity to “bring others along with them” (Venkatesh 2006, 95, 103–4). Notably, friendship- and place-based youth collectives have taken on waste work to strategically modulate between survivalism, livelihood strategy, and contestations of authority, striking a tenuous balance between feeding themselves and renegotiating their place within the city.

Rather than the endless pursuit of individualized economic profit, the everyday logics of the mtaa involve remaining embedded in familiar social and commercial relations (Dawson 2021), while constantly “realigning” hustles to fit the shifting demands of local and citywide economies (Di Nunzio 2019; Venkatesh 2006). These constant shifts and adjustments reflect the “incompleteness” (Guma 2020) of popular economic practices among youth. Here, hustling generates processes of street-oriented learning and shapes generative spaces of experimentation, popular education, and local knowledge for youth who have carved out their own diversified occupations (Di Nunzio 2019; K. Hart 2009; Kimari 2023; Moser 1998), appropriating and monetizing particular corners and services as and when they can. Notably, hustling in Nairobi’s mtaa involves collective enterprise, and so here it’s worth delving for a moment into the significance of the youth group as a hustling entity.

Youth Groups: Liminality and ()Communitas

Across popular neighborhoods in Nairobi, community-based organizations (CBOs) have long served as vital support networks for local residents, providing a grassroots mechanism for self-organizing all manner of collective efforts—from group saving schemes to event logistics, as well as communicating with development actors and local politicians (Hake 1977; Van Stapele et al. 2019).3 Some CBOs also engage in various forms of activism and associated “care work” (Kimari 2018) to fight against a range of intersectional issues concerning everyday forms of violence in the “ghetto”—from sanitation and water poverty to extrajudicial killings (Kimari 2018; Van Stapele 2019). In every neighborhood, some of these CBOs are known as “youth groups” whose CBO status is often associated with the name of their territorially marked home ground, a particular village within the wider ward, often known only to those who navigate these streets and take the matatu to or through these neighborhoods. And depending on the area (and whose point of view), these youth groups might be classified as CBOs, youth groups, or gangs (Van Stapele 2019).

Youth groups serve as vital support networks for school leavers who are caught in a state of limbo, unsure of what to do to find income opportunities and often unable to reach the normative milestones associated with adulthood that are often expected of them. The youth group becomes a form of what anthropologist Victor Turner (1969, 94–96) has called “liminality and communitas,” described as key “forms and attributes” of any “rite of passage.” In Turner’s writing on “rites of passage,” he explains that “transitions” shape temporal and social experience and outline three phases that occur during the period of “transition” that marks a rite of passage: “separation,” “limen” (from Latin, meaning the threshold that separates two spaces from one another), and “aggregation.” Separation marked a kind of “detachment” of the individual or group from an earlier social structure; the “limen” period was full of ambiguity because it was unknown and uncertain but importantly also experienced with other individuals going through this time together; and the phase of “aggregation” inferred a kind of resolution, when the rite of passage was “consummated.” In that middle period, the limen one, Turner suggests that there was a lack of stability—to be “between” and “betwixt” two worlds, neither in one nor in the other. This is what he calls “liminality.” And within this context of liminality, there was, he describes in relation to his own research on rites of passage, a kind of social bond that formed among those undergoing the rite of passage and “roughing it” together. This is what Turner calls “communitas,” drawing on the Latin meaning to describe a feeling of shared solidarity that forms during the “liminal” phases of a right to passage, and importantly this shared solidarity and liminal period was also one when individuals exercise a “transient humility” (Turner 1969, 97). Thus, ()communitas shapes a sense of collective endeavor but also one where new social roles and experimentation might take place. This is different from the notion of “community,” which describes a grouping of people living in the same place or having shared characteristics. ()Communitas describes the shared experience of being in transience together.

This conceptualization of liminality and ()communitas can be applied to the youth groups in Nairobi’s popular neighborhood and their own particular experience of “roughing it” and navigating this period together. Here I extend the concepts of liminality and ()communitas beyond just rites of passage that might be temporary ritualistic moments traversing from one state of childhood to another state of adulthood. In the contemporary context of youthhood in the mtaa, I argue that first, the state of liminality and ()communitas is prolonged and protracted, and second, that this state is also marked by an entanglement of diverse social, political, and economic experimentation. For these youth, hustling is the self-narration and practice that emerges out of this period of protracted liminality, the sense of communitas, and the forms of plural experimentation.

One of the entrées into the popular economy and forms of experimentation has been waste work, around which various kinds of resource recovery and repair have emerged. There was a pragmatic economic reason for this: waste collection and recycling hardly required any seed capital (though a handcart and eventual storage were advantageous). But in symbolic and material terms, the waste business also reflected a sense of liminality—the recovery of objects and materials that are caught in an in-between state, moving from one state (use value) to another (discarded). In that in-between state, this waste was full of possibility as well as transience and uncertainty. Its value was in question, and its potential transformation a possibility. These youth groups caught in liminality and ()communitas had gravitated toward an activity that could be seen as menial, dirty, and last resort by some—but it was also propositional insofar as it perceived the possibilities of recovering the value of that which is caught in a state of limbo. Discards epitomize liminality in all its uncertainties and possibilities.

It’s All about the Baze

The physical space where this liminality and ()communitas were experienced and cultivated was what youth called the baze (Sheng for “the base”). In each neighborhood, the baze served an important geographical and social function, what Saidiya Hartman (2021) describes as a kind of extension of living space akin to the staircases, fire escapes, stoops, and courtyards of popular neighborhoods in other cities. The baze also resonates in form and meaning with the “yard” in Jamaica, which Jovan Scott Lewis (2020, 2) describes as “a particular geography of shared fate, of communal striving” even when this “space of inclusion” runs against “tensions and suspicions.” Youth in Mathare tended to stay in dwellings with multiple family members that were too small to assemble in as a group, so the baze was a space where a group of friends could commune. In popular neighborhoods more generally, certain semipublic spaces become “domesticated” (Koch and Latham 2013) by groups of people for one activity or another. For youth group members, the baze is where a sense of place, belonging, and camaraderie is built. Thinking here with bell hooks (2009, 144–52), who describes her experience of the porch in her home state, Kentucky, there are spaces that epitomize a certain liminal zone between the home and the street. These are spaces where a group that might otherwise experience discrimination (along race, gender, class, age, or other lines of difference) does not just access but also makes a space for hanging out, for lingering, for bantering with peers. That space may be quite ordinary and visibly somewhat exposed, but it also becomes known as a space that is occupied by a certain affinity group, and it is through the daily and repeated acts of occupying this otherwise semipublic space that a sense of place and belonging might be claimed and affirmed, and over time it can even become a symbolic space of resistance. Through its liminal positioning, the baze situated between the home and the street was rendered visible to all around, comprising an informally marked territory in the neighborhood where youth groups assembled, greeted, lingered, bantered, and schemed. And it was also the gathering point for starting and ending any kind of “work.”

The baze was a meeting point where you could be found or where someone knew where to look (and ask) in case you were not around. During an informal group discussion one February afternoon in 2010, the baze was described as a place “where you belonged and where you were known.” It informed street credibility, and relationships to the baze had everything to do with one’s visibility—to be seen or keep an eye out for what was going on around. It afforded the space and time to make plans or simply to provide a point of collective assembly for various improvised, ad hoc, or routine hustles. The baze also serves as a basecamp for dealing with all sorts of mundane emergencies, a stage for recounting all manner of exploits, and a place to be bored, to wait, and to scheme together. And for those passing through or visiting, it was a point of reference and perhaps even arrival, as well as a node from where youth hanging out at the baze could let others know that there was company.

For instance, for Mathare Number Ten Youth Group (which goes by the acronym MANYGRO), based in the Mabatini ward of Mathare, its baze is situated at the bottom of the first hill one hundred meters from the matatu stage on Juja Road, which links Mathare Valley to the CBD. The MANYGRO baze is conveniently situated at the crossroads of several paths: that which provides a direct line of sight to Juja Road and the foot path coming down from it, that which descends down toward the river, and the line across that connects several street-oriented small businesses and the pedestrians going to or coming back from Juja Road. There is a public toilet a few meters away built and managed by MANYGRO since 2007. Over the years, a few MANYGRO members could always be found at any one time assembled together at the baze.

The exact positioning shifted over time—in the early 2010s, MANYGRO’s “office” consisted of a small wooden shed, with a couple of plastic chairs, a wobbly wooden table, and a few posters up on the wall. During my 2016 visit, the space of assembly had shifted, now a small kiosk with multiple offerings: an M-Pesa service for mobile banking, a fridge to serve cold drinks, and a water tap outside the kiosk. Walter, who manned the M-Pesa business of things, was able to assist someone trying to make an M-Pesa payment (or receive a temporary Safaricom loan), take payment for the water or the toilet, or give someone a soda, while a few of the other MANYGRO members sitting inside the kiosk with him provide some banter and company. If the guys were standing around the kiosk, they had multiple angles of visibility. They could see who was coming from the stage, what the wazee (elders) were doing on the other side of the footpath (often playing a local version of checkers and discussing local politics), the group’s urban farming corner nearby, and a good distance across Mathare Valley. When it came to garbage collection and servicing the plots of other tenants, youth group members asserted, “you don’t go beyond your baze.” This relationship between economic activity and territorial zoning related both conceptually and practically to codes of youth group culture, reflecting a key characteristic of the homegrown waste economy: the small and fragmented scale of these otherwise neighboring enterprises.

In group conversations, youth would openly discuss the different activities they were involved in, some of which included individualized tasks, while others involved collective effort. But they tended to be deliberately elusive about the specifics of their income streams.4 As if to explain why this was, youth remarked on the potential negative effects of doing “too well.” The strategic discretion about “how much” one earned for this or that hustle was best expressed by a group of friends up the road from Mathare 10, at the Kibichoi baze in Huruma ward. During an informal discussion in April 2010, one of the guys explained, “Most youth don’t want to admit how much they earn—even to each other. When you seem like you make more than your neighbor, you can get into trouble.” I remember reflecting on what they might mean by “trouble” and asking my friend Rosie about it later. She laughed and then put it in allegorical terms: “Eh, T. If you do well and everyone knows it, then you’ll find you have lots of friends coming over to your place right before lunchtime!” These comments reflected the habitus of the hustle among youth in the mtaa, who had to constantly balance the logics (and benefits) of redistributive solidarity, exercised through group work and symbols of transparent collective gain such as the “group account,” and their own private moments of desired independence from the group.

Certain individuals took the lead on elements of each business or took responsibility for running one of the businesses, like Walter did with the MANYGRO M-Pesa kiosk. And only a few individuals were signatories of the group bank account. But ultimately, the businesses themselves were operationalized through the entity of the youth group, and there were always group members hanging around those who were “at work,” such that any job involved an entourage of friends who could serve as extra muscle, in every sense—whether that involved an extra push with a heavy load or keeping an eye on things. Any business task was often a group effort and somewhat publicly performed. As such, gains were expected to benefit all members.

Contradictory to conceptions of entrepreneurship informed by neoclassical economic theories (Ochonu 2018), maximizing growth for individual businesses was not a key motivation for youth groups. Most youth groups ran several small business ventures, and similar to the logic of a social enterprise, the key was covering running costs and reinvesting profits either as start-up or running capital for the next business. Pursuing a profit-maximizing model for individualistic gain was not part of the narrative or practice of youth groups. They did not speak about being individual “entrepreneurs” or having individual “jobs.” They spoke of their hustles as plural and most often expressed the practice of hustling in the “we,” conjugated as tunahustle (we hustle).

Youth-led economic activities that teetered between the licit and the illicit included work that could be done in groups—(alcohol) brewing (see Van Stapele 2021), water vending, sporadic petty street crime like “nighttime bag snatching,” garbage collection, and recycling. Each of these hustles circumvented the law in some way or came up against local authorities: rerouting water connections during shortages; facing frequent crackdowns on the brewing economy; finding out which individual with some decision-making power could help manage unresponsive municipal lorries for garbage collection. Youth-led waste work has become a foundational hustle in the popular neighborhoods, one of the ways in which youth have navigated the tenuous terrains of infrastructural poverty, un(der)employment, and stigma and through which they have found ways to exercise modes of survival, some semblance of secure group work with short- and long-term gains, and resistance against an unresponsive local authority. Waste in the mtaa has been a dramatic problem for residents as well as a “generative space” of resource recovery, an income opportunity with distributive outcomes, and a source of eco-activism (Kimari 2022a).

Waste (H)as Value

Across cultures, once humans dispose of something we have used up or metabolized, whether this is a banana peel or our own shit, there are a set of situated (and learned) practices that determine when it is appropriate and urgent to separate our bodies from the remains of our own consumption, the stuff we regard as no longer usable, safe, valuable. The anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) has been instrumental to many writing about discards to highlight the cultural constructions that discursively (and spatially) classify materials as “waste” once they are perceived to have lost their use or exchange value and are deemed threatening in some way if they hang around. Notably, references to waste conjure up images of things being thrown away, which raises the questions: what is being thrown away, where and by whom, and which bodies are most exposed to the potential toxic residues of waste? Over the past two decades, scholars from across disciplines have contributed a rich repertoire of research and writing that highlights the material, discursive, relational, spatial, temporal, and political registers of waste as it becomes increasingly clear that there is simply no “away.”

Waste management has become an increasingly politicized issue across many rapidly growing cities across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, where many densely populated low-income neighborhoods are often left underserved by municipal or private-sector forms of collection, removal, and disposal that are either unable or unwilling to cover the whole city (in the case of municipalities) or whose customer base (in the case of privatized services) usually comprises middle- and high-income residents. Across cities globally, waste labor and the multiple stages of value involved in waste collection, recycling, and recovery are of growing interest across academic and policy circles, a topic that may disturb sensibilities but that is vital to the sustainable metabolic flows of cities and their futures (McFarlane 2023). Since the early 2000s, there has been a growing literature on the discourses, production, and reproduction of waste in the Majority World.5 Each provides a rereading of waste, offering accounts relaying the complexity of waste as a reflection of environmental and public health hazards, while providing a source of economic and political opportunity for urban residents whose lives and places of dwelling in the city may be pushed to the peripheries but whose labors and contestations are central to the environmental justice of cities—and a reminder that the shear density of cities renders waste a central by-product of urban life. Read together, these works show how different forms and stages of waste, as materially and relationally constituted, become a critical locus for contestations of development, consumption, social and economic inequities, and power within rapidly urbanizing cities.

Discourses of waste in relation to cities have also long been entangled with various forms of violence, displacement, and stigma. Marisa Solomon (2019) writes about the labor of “pan-handling and scavenging” that takes place in Brooklyn’s neighborhoods undergoing rapid gentrification. Here trash has a poignant double significance: to the panhandlers and scavengers who feel from these Brooklyn neighborhoods, recovering remains from demolition sites is a way of contending with the racial capitalism and violence of urban renewal (recall James Baldwin noting in 1963 that urban renewal comes with “Negro removal”6). The collection of “trash” is in this context a way of holding on to the material culture of a neighborhood, of preserving fragments of history that are being slowly erased and appropriated. She gives the example of the old Brownstone doors that are now a form of decoration for new residents, symbolically closing off former residents of color from their homes and streets. At the same time, the calls for “cleanups” that have been integral to urban renewal projects in the United States have consistently narrated racialized discourses equating spaces of urban poverty with filth and decay, or in need of what former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani (1989–2001) called the “civic cleanup,” rather than acknowledging gradual and systemic disinvestment and discriminatory housing, education, and public health policies. For Solomon, the “ghetto is a goldmine” insofar as it reflects a form of violence, removal, appropriation, and racial capitalism, and the labor of panhandlers and scavengers becomes a vital practice that “name[s] the power relations that circumscribe changes that turn objects, people, histories, and labor into waste.” She explains that “gentrification makes trash a discursive and material index of degeneration, mobilizing projects to ‘clean’ and ‘better’ neighborhoods and people” (2019, 91).

In Nairobi, popular neighborhoods are underserved and at risk in a different way: they’re not (at least yet) sites of potential urban renewal and forced displacement but rather ignored and left to their own devices, so communities face the converse challenge: themselves calling out the lack of external support for trash collection and self-organizing “cleanups.” In these neighborhoods, the significance of “trash” takes on a different meaning altogether. First, the assigning of use and exchange value to objects and things that might have been discarded, broken, or left behind becomes part of everyday practices of potential collection, sorting, repurposing, fixing, and reselling. In other words, what might be classified as waste in one context and to one person may be regarded as “gold” in/to another. Second, the fact that a municipality may be ill-equipped and under-resourced (or turns a blind eye) to adequately cover the waste collection needs of the urban majority residents living in densely populated neighborhoods has made garbage one of the most political matters but also a potential business opportunity. In this age of eco-alarm and calls for regenerative and circular solutions at city levels across the globe, there is a growing recognition that what might have once been regarded as menial “dirty” work—scrap collecting and junkyard scavenging (Solomon 2019; Strasser 1999)—is actually one of the most vital labors, with environmental, economic, and political effects. In Brooklyn, the calls for “cleanups” can be a form of violence leading to rapid or slow displacement, removal, and erasure. In Nairobi, when the “cleanups” are done by community-owned businesses, they reflect a subversive form of resistance, insofar as a livelihood opportunity is built in the absence of state-led services—such that waste work becomes a “fuck you” to the state. With growing interests in and declarations of commitment to “circular economies,” with a whole industry of take-back programs and recycling businesses, dumpsites are indeed gold mines. The key question that Solomon reminds us of is: for whom.

Here the practices of “calling out” and “self-help” raise questions about the balance between leaving the absentee state off the hook through forms of self-help urbanism or the extent to which self-help serves to shame the state but also assert independence from it, shaping semiautonomous zones of basic service provision that tap into municipal services when they are available but also plan for their systematic disruptions (e.g., blackouts, water shortages, garbage trucks that don’t come for weeks). This resonates with Kimberley Kinder’s (2016) writing on Detroit, which she describes as a “city without services” where residents from underserved neighborhoods have formed practices of “self-shared provisioning” in this city marked by decades of deindustrialization, racialized inequality, de-investment in public infrastructure, and declining service provision. In another context, Millar’s (2018) work on waste pickers of Rio, Brazil, redescribes peripheralized neighborhoods as spaces of productive labor and productivity, not just poverty traps or repositories of low-skilled laborers seeking meager wages in service jobs in the mainstream city and cheap precarious housing in the favelas. Rosalind Fredericks’s (2019) work in Dakar, Senegal, and Sarah Moore’s (2009) work in Oaxaca, Mexico, also show how histories of oft invisible and precarious waste labor are also punctuated by key moments of protest and mobilization that can be transformative. And Jacob Doherty’s (2022) writing on the “waste worlds” of Kampala reconceptualizes waste and its presumed forms of exclusion and wider metaphor for disposability: he shows that waste not only is discarded material but also enables productive infrastructures of inclusion and possibility for urban dwellers who are often themselves “cast off” to the margins.

In Nairobi, youth who engage in waste work are more than waste pickers per se, though in many ways waste work is their starting point for further pursuits and their entry point into paid work of some kind. Though this book certainly engages with (and has been inspired by) the recent scholarship focusing on urban waste and sanitation workers, the focus on the “dumpsite” and waste work is only part of the story—indeed the narrative arc goes beyond the story of garbage to show that while waste work is central to youth livelihoods in the underserved neighborhoods of Nairobi, it is only a part of their livelihood portfolio, a crucial but partial stepping stone for their wider efforts to assert their claims to the city. So the significance of that tagline, “straight outta dumpsite,” is multiple: it points to many activities and opportunities that have come outta the dumpsite, such that in Nairobi, garbage in the popular neighborhood is a kind of currency for the hustle economy and one that connects to myriad other forms of unlikely sources of opportunity and possibility. I draw on Steven Jackson’s (2014, 222) conceptual frame “broken world thinking” to evoke the “subtle acts of care” that are integral to everyday forms of maintenance and repair that underpin mtaa life, in their repetitive, provisional, fragile but always persistent forms. As the next sections illustrate, Nairobi youth make work, as collectives, with waste as a way to provide for themselves and their surrounds. Crucially, through this ecological and care work they engage in diverse acts of material, social, and political repair (Corwin and Gidwani 2021; Kimari 2018) and become versed in the art of adaptation to constant breakdown.

Trash Is Cash

In Nairobi, much like in other postcolonial cities (see G. Myers 2005), postconsumer non-biodegradable waste, especially polyethene plastic, is woven into the tapestry of unpaved dirt paths and roads, skipped over by agile pedestrians, washed away by rain, and sometimes dumped in the river. When it is left to sit and accumulate in “transit sites” in and around neighborhoods before it can be collected and removed, it inevitably attracts flies and emits putrid smells during dry season or when left uncollected for too long. While affluent parts of the city such as Karen, Westlands, and Muthaiga are serviced by private garbage collection providers in the absence of comprehensive government waste management services, these popular neighborhoods have been left to their own devices, creating their own forms of privatization. According to Professor Peter Ngau from the Department of Urban Planning at the University of Nairobi, only 12 percent of the city’s waste was formally collected and brought to the official dumping site in Dandora, while the other 88 percent was discarded, collected, and managed through informal channels.7 And this echoes wider trends across the Majority World, where it is estimated that informal waste pickers collect between 50 and 100 percent of the solid waste in cities.8

While waste can be one of the most tangible and visible manifestations of urban poverty and ignored urban spaces by the state—an environmental and health “bad” (Beck 1992)—it has also become an opportune resource for diverse forms of contestation, livelihood, and community-based management.9 Myriad economies of circulation reflect the multiple lives of what might in some contexts be deemed unusable detritus and in others become repurposed materials to style homes; fix roofs; mend clothes and shoes; collect, transport, and store water; and fertilize urban gardens. Waste, thus, is at once a problem and threat to public health and a resource for creative and improvised circular economies.

Following colonial independence, waste in popular neighborhoods became an increasingly unmanaged, undesirable, and “dirty” relic of household consumption and epitomized the absence of basic services in low-income neighborhoods. There was a combination of residential density and changes in the composition of postconsumer waste itself—with plastic as the most notable form of nonbiodegradable waste. At the same time, in response to escalating unemployment rates along with Moi’s government policies encouraging jua kali (hot sun) informal-sector workers to form associations (King 1996), many youth started registering their community-based organizations or “youth groups” to find alternative ways to make a living.

In the 1990s, two friends, Salim and Josiah, living and working in one of the other large informal settlements of Nairobi (Kibera), decided to take a trip to Egypt. They had heard that in Cairo, garbage had for decades been collected, sorted, and recycled by members of the Coptic community known as the Zabbaleen, who went door to door in both affluent and poor neighborhoods to collect trash and recycle up to 80 percent of what they collected.10 Noting that uncollected garbage was becoming a growing problem in densely populated settlements in particular, Salim and Josiah thought they could bring back what they learned from the Zabbaleen and start a community-based waste collection scheme in Nairobi, which would help the garbage problem but also address the other growing issue: youth unemployment. From the 1990s onward, solid waste in low-income residential areas was positioned as both a problem and an opportunity. By the early 2000s, each popular neighborhood had its own youth-led garbage collection system and everyone claimed to be a founder of the idea, or at least part of the first groups who kick-started the trend. Whom was actually the first wasn’t the point. It was the sentiment of pride and ensemble work (in Swahili what people call “being together”: tuko Pamoja) that mattered, the sense of collective ownership and collective effort in cleaning up mtaa yetu (our hood) and making money at the same time.

In addition to being an underutilized resource, managing waste also required no upfront start-up capital and little overhead cost. And importantly, it was not a one-person job, so operating within a collective became a key feature of this labor. By the early 2000s, youth groups were the primary organizational entity of most community-based waste management services. Their services relied on traditional, low-tech infrastructure. Lacking motorized means for transporting waste outside the residential areas, youth resorted to using large, heavy mikokoteni (handcarts), which allowed them to navigate the narrow pathways and uneven terrain of Mathare’s labyrinthine configuration. But it also meant that they had to find “transit” sites for dumping the garbage while they figured out a way to transport the garbage out and take it to the municipal dumpsite in Dandora.

Here the complex moral economy of hustling in the mtaa through the lens of the waste economy becomes apparent, as does how it differs from other conceptions of “hard work” and more individualized narratives of hustling. Getting customers to pay for the service was an issue, as many youth admitted with a combination of mischievous pride and embarrassment that in the “early days,” part of getting the business of garbage started included scare tactics to force community residents to pay for the service. But because the long-term sustainability of any business in the mtaa had to be premised on trust, the garbage business underwent processes of negotiation between residents and the young men (often sons of women to whom youth groups would become service providers) until its operations and transactions became normalized into the local economy. In the early days of my fieldwork (November 2009), Rosie, a youth activist and community worker, explained,

First it was a way of earning income. You know, they would see, there’s all this garbage here, can we collect it and get some money? But then it became an opportunity to do something about garbage too. In some areas where the groups would come saying they wanted to collect garbage from each household, people said, “First remove all the heaps of garbage in the streets and in the community. Then we’ll start giving you money for collection.” So for the youth, most of it was an entry point for income generation. That was the main agenda in most of the areas.

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, youth-led community-based waste management practices were a widely recognized phenomenon across Nairobi, in part thanks to the initiative and subsequent idiom known as taka ni pato (trash is cash), which gave heightened visibility and some training support to these youth-led popular economies and collectives. Yet youth engaged in garbage collection were nevertheless often stigmatized for their “lack of discipline” and “uncontrolled and indiscriminate dumping” (Muniafu and Otiato 2010, 346), highlighting only the punctual desperate acts of disposing collected refuse in the river or main roads. These discourses failed to understand the logistical constraints under which these youth operated and how vital these private service providers had become within their communities.

Combining time on their hands, an imagination, and inspiration from other Majority World cities like Cairo, where waste pickers had developed a vital homegrown waste collection economy, underemployed but entrepreneurial youth in Nairobi managed to capture the underutilized resource of household garbage in their highly dense neighborhoods, where postconsumer waste was both a problem no one was prepared to deal with and a perfect opportunity for youth who had nothing to lose by turning trash into cash. The waste hustle thus became widespread and a key part of “makeshift urbanism” (Vasudevan 2015), where materials and resources were reworked to shape alternative possibilities. It continues to this day to remain small-scale and fragmented; its social and economic organization is bound to territorially marked subneighborhoods, where each group knows which buildings and plots they can service and where the mutually agreed boundaries are drawn, such that groups know not to “go beyond your baze.”11

Residential garbage collection became the foundation of youth groups in Mathare and across Nairobi’s other popular neighborhoods. Youth groups tended to average forty members, with some becoming veteran shareholders over the years, while room was made to accommodate new younger members once they had “proven themselves.” Each group collected residential garbage from up to four hundred households for a monthly fixed fee. Vertical blocks, four- to eight-story walk-ups, each averaging twelve apartments per floor, were each managed by a member. Everyone knew which block was managed by whom, and a careful allocation of waste collectors then got paid each month once payment had been collected from each household. The manager of that building then got their cut. On average, a member of the Mathare Environmental Conservation Youth Group (MECYG) could get up to 15,000 KES (US150) a month. In the early 2000s, youth groups across Mathare started to think about ways they could add value to their waste collection business. Rather than simply charging households for collection, they realized that the materials found in the rubbish had value. Sorting became a crucial part of the postcollection activity, specifically finding what could be resold. In order to insert exchange value into this solid “waste,” groups sorted through the collected garbage composite materials to measure what was worth shredding (such as plastics), reusing (such as metal), fixing (such as electronics), and reselling to the industrial area or to a broker with connections.

When plastics became a hot commodity, some youth groups were in a good position because they either had space to store the plastic (which allowed them to wait for the right moment to rent a lorry to take it to the industrial area for resale) or they were well connected to NGOs and other external sources of support that could provide the means to upgrade their business. The homegrown waste economy elicited attention from a number of actors across the city who were either interested in the “waste problem” or the “youth problem,” and some were interested in the intersection of the two. In 2007, the MECYG received a plastic shredder as a “gift” from Pamoja Trust, a social justice organization tied to the Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) alliance. The shredder gave the group an important distinction: adding value to each kilogram of plastic. With the shredder, the group was easily identifiable as “organized,” which drew the attention of the local area MP, Margaret Wanjiru, who needed to court youth votes during her election campaigns. In exchange, she would help MECYG upgrade its hall and provide a water tank on the roof. Over time, the space also allowed the group to organize events, opening up the social hall for a modest fee to the community.

Taka ni pato also became appended to the local culture of youth football because the youth groups involved in trash collection had formed through their childhood friendship networks that had grown up around each other, where one of the main forms of play in the hood was kicking a ball around in the streets and, if you were lucky, finding a space to play a proper match with neighborhood teams. The 1990s were a time when an NGO known as Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA) developed youth programs using sports (especially football) as a tool for building peace, cooperation, self-esteem, and leadership in disadvantaged communities. The majority of the youth I met over the years recounted their time playing football through MYSA and their aspirations to become a professional footballer.12 Most young kids having a kick about in their streets had a makeshift football made of reclaimed polythene plastic bags wrapped together with a few pieces of string. Even the footballs were made of reclaimed waste, and the “recreational” spaces that youth found to play were sometimes literally on or adjacent to garbage heaps.

“Work for Youth, Money for the Elders”

Nairobi youth from under-resourced neighborhoods have over the years been lured into various government youth employment schemes. When I first started my research in Nairobi, one such program was Kazi kwa Vijana (KKV, Work for Youth), following the infamous postelection violence of 2008. Later, there was also the National Youth Service schemes set up by the Kenyatta administration from 2013 onward. Although many of the youth I spoke with in Mathare admitted to trying out their luck with these youth employment programs, they were consistently drawn back to neighborhood-based livelihoods. The nepotism, short-term contracts, and delays in pay were consistently mentioned as sources of disappointment.

Following postelection violence in early 2008, the KKV acknowledged the detrimental correlation between political violence and high youth unemployment. At least in principle, the program aimed to respond to postelection violence by seeking to “put youth to work.” Although many intended beneficiaries of KKV admitted that the idea was laudable, most youth who had firsthand experience with the program were disheartened by the corruption, the lack of accountability, and especially the practical problems such as late pay, low-wage manual labor, and lack of prospects for skills development. Within months of the program’s implementation, it was popularly recoined Kazi kwa Vijana—Pesa kwa Wazee (Work for Youth—Money for the Elders) among disaffected youth.

On December 10, 2009, the Kasarani Youth Congress (2009, 9) launched a social audit report on Kazi kwa Vijana as part of an effort to ensure that public-service programs targeting youth were “effective, responsive and accountable.”13 The report argued that the KKV government initiative was “patchy and superficial” and laudable in its conception but flawed in its implementation. It highlighted the need to address youth unemployment through more empowering grassroots efforts rather than a constant cycle of one-off wage labor opportunities that pay poorly and provide no skills training.

This event and the program criticized by the report reflected the wide-ranging concern for the role of youth in Kenya and the complex politics of work, particularly following the postelection violence in 2007 and the volatile sociopolitical climate. According to the report, 76 percent of working-age youth are formally unemployed and the majority live in poverty. These statistics, however, do not communicate the diverse forms of social and economic activity that lie outside the official definitions of work, including the portfolios of youth-led enterprise and associational life that operate through the structure of the youth group.

For many youth discouraged by the government’s ability to speak on their behalf, let alone provide meaningful programs addressing youth concerns, KKV represented the false promises of youth work programs and further entrenched their conviction that they had to find alternative sources of income and support mechanisms and were better off hustling on their own terms. As the program manager of the Youth Congress pointed out to me when we met in April 2010, “The idea is good, the concept is flawed, and the implementation is poor! The concept of KKV is to deal with drought and idleness, not right to food and unemployment! So it only seeks to get youth occupied. . . . It is like a behavior change program. This is not sustainable!”

During these conversations, “hustling” had to do with the struggle of “getting by” but also with teetering between accepting and refusing government handouts or poorly paid short-term contracts. Many key interlocutors admitted that it was customary for local politicians to bribe youth living in popular neighborhoods during election campaigns in exchange for votes. In October 2009, I met a young man from Korogocho, another popular neighborhood northeast of the city center. He explained the pressure youth were under and implicitly admitted that it could just be too hard to resist the temptation of accepting these bribes: “If youth have economic power, then they will not be tempted to take the money, but the problem is that when people are desperate, then they will be bought. I hope that next time I am in the position to say no to these bribes.” In many ways, it wasn’t saying “no” to the false promises of government or “no” to the mediocre conditions of employment that determined whether a young person was hustling. It had more to do with carefully assessing the risks and odds of any income-generating prospect. Whether it was considered licit or illicit was not the point. To hustle defined a way of life that had less to do with asserting rights than it did with the daily calculations involved in carving out opportunities against the backdrop of constant hurdles. These calculations sometimes prioritized short-term gains for immediate economic pressures, including taking a KKV contract for two days if it was on offer or in some cases engaging in opportunistic petty crime. Many admitted that they had done one or the other, often both, in their time. And those who spoke about crime as a thing of the past in their own biographies told stories of youth who either got killed for being caught or who would probably not make it to their thirtieth birthday.

“I Don’t Want to Be Someone Else’s Donkey”

Amid this fluid moral economy, garbage collection represented one of the first forms of legitimate income opportunity for school leavers and created a working environment that was premised on relations of care, in terms of both peer-to-peer training/support and service provision for fellow residents. In this way, hustling through waste work afforded what Millar (2018, 90) terms “relational autonomy.” In Millar’s ethnography Reclaiming the Discarded (2018), she explains why the catadores (waste pickers) keep returning to the dump, despite having occasional opportunities to get salaried work in environments less exposed to toxic harms and physical arduous labor. Millar’s interlocutors express the value of (and indeed even a reverence for) autonomous work, being able to come and go from work as they please, such that they can tend to the web of social obligations and ordinary emergencies that inevitably occur among under-resourced communities who create their own forms of welfare and service provision, which often depend on the flexibility of everyone’s work. This is something one cannot necessarily get in a salaried job, where institutional hierarchies, unequal markers of social and economic class, and rigid working hours do not accommodate family and community care obligations. Thus, autonomy is deeply relational. It was similar for youth in Mathare, and this relational autonomy manifested in different ways.

In some areas, youth were known to “snatch,” and the role models were the ones with guns. In other areas, garbage collection and other composite businesses (like recycling and urban farming) were narrated as a way of maintaining what the MANYGRO members proudly described in April 2023 as a “crime-free zone.” Either way, the hustle was a daily struggle that included the constant calculation of multiple options, sometimes traversing the spectrum of licit activities and illicit activities, hard work, and leisure time. But across this terrain, there was a kind of “detachment” (Millar 2018, 91; Simone 2016) from certain normative assumptions about how youth should work and what work youth should do. Detachment from such norms (reflected in programs like Kazi kwa Vijana, along with other presumptions about what counts as proper work) also meant finding “other attachments” (Millar 2018, 92–93), which involved working with fellow youth to find ways and means to make a living on their terms and by returning to the baze where one’s social relationships were intimately entangled with livelihood projects.

It was also around the baze that detachment was exercised in relation to local figures of authority—the elders. A group of youth in Mlango Kubwa one day explained to me that elders in their communities were sometimes considered watu watiagi (people on our backs). It is of course a well-known phenomenon across cultures for young people to complain that their elders are “on their backs” and for elders to worry about “today’s youth.” But it is worth dwelling for a moment on how the generational rift between youth and elders manifested itself in relation to the cultures of work and leisure in the mtaa. This tension was reflected in the discourse of “hustling,” which evoked the sense of detachment from restrictive modalities of employment and from the restrictive obligations to adhere to elders’ imaginaries of proper work. In January 2010, during a group discussion with members from MECYG in Mlango Kubwa, Jackson explained,

We looked at our parents, who toiled their backs doing daily employment for all their lives, and there was no change. When we were growing up, we had no role models. None of our parents who were employed were role models because they had no resources, no power. . . . To make change you need resources. The only guys who had power were thieves, or gangsters, or land grabbers. . . . So we believe that we deserve to be self-employed, because at least if we have our own business, then we are free.

These expressions of agency, the choice of working in the mtaa and being “free” versus working in the industrial area, reflected the perceived benefits of working independently but as a collective and the refusal to be “someone else’s donkey.” This expression had a double meaning: it was a critique of the modes of colonial subservience that they perceived in their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, who had labored either for the white British settlers or the Wahindi (Kenyans of South Asian descent), and a perception of the exploitation they would experience (or know their peers to experience) working in the industrial area for little pay and with no guarantee of long-term work. While many in the informal settlement Kibera walked each morning to the industrial area along the railway tracks to test their luck, residents in Mathare had to take public transport to get there, which was too much of a cost to bear for little assurance of returns. It would also be something they would have to do alone, and for many, their decision to work in the mtaa was influenced by the support system they had cultivated within their youth groups and the sense of belonging they found at the baze.

These youth worked in collectives and knew how to “hustle hard” but also then spent time just “idling” or what elders called kuzurura (just roaming around). “Hustling hard” might include collecting garbage from households at 4 a.m., cleaning a community toilet at 8 a.m., sorting through plastics at 3 p.m., managing a water point before dusk and a car wash between 9 p.m. and 2 a.m., and collecting payments from serviced households on the first Sunday evening of every month. Most waste management work took place at punctual moments of the day or night, and often during “off hours.” Youth might seem idle at noon, but they had often already put in five hours of work that morning. To be in a mode of kuzurura was part of the strategizing persona of the hustler. The state of kuzurura at the baze was shared to face the hurdles of stigma and uncertainty of “what next” as a collective. The public performances of kuzurura happened between the plan, the gig, and being on the move. For each person coming back to the baze to hang out, these moments of kuzurura served as respite between jobs, camouflaging the extent of the work done and the income generated.

Its performativity was part of the implicit resistance to other more mainstream forms of work in the city. As one member of MECYG explained,

In Kenya, we never acquired a national character or identity as a people. We were either tribes or part of a social and economic class. There is no “we” in Kenya; it is only “I.” . . . But in the mtaa, people look at our group as a model. Youth come here, instead of going to look for construction work, because they know that they will find a common identity. And [laughter] we don’t always work! A lot of the time we watch TV!

While “watching TV” might involve staring at the screen, with the volume on quite high, it did not stop the ongoing banter of ideas, often related to details like costing and other “business issues.” Kuzurura was at times a facade for scheming and reflected a double meaning: it performed moments of joblessness inherent in the hustler’s habitus (they needed to show a constant steady state of struggle and ambiguous reference to how getting by would happen that day), and it made openings for new social and business dealings with other peers, all caught in a state of being in between things. To be in this mode of kuzurura at the baze involved precious ongoing forms of support and care (Kimari 2018) as much as a means to secure the next source of income. Eventually, even the TV became a money-making resource, as youth groups who had managed to get their hands on a TV and who had access to a bit of shared public space started to host football match viewings, charging a modest fee for “entry,” and there you had another hustle for the group. Football nights became especially popular (and lucrative).

Business Is Social

Although it was commonplace for youth groups in the mtaa to offer residential garbage collection as one of their services, the manner of “doing business” in waste management took on diverse forms and has evolved over time. When I started my research in Nairobi, for some youth living in popular neighborhoods, garbage collection was one of the only work options without a completed education, and it was local, so you could get work from the older youth (some might even be your friends’ older brothers). At the entry or lowest level, waste pickers earned an average of 700 KES a month (US10). For those at the bottom of the waste economy ladder, garbage collection was casual labor and a last resort. But it was also potentially lifesaving for some.

It was common to see street children involved in the ad hoc waste-picking work. Street kids were usually homeless orphans who navigated the streets, dealing with constant stigma and the gaze of all Nairobians who could immediately spot them—their oversized dirty clothes, eyes glazed over from sniffing glue, sometimes barefoot or wearing oversized shoes, and roaming the streets as human cast-offs of the city, often begging in different parts of the city. The street-kid hustle in Nairobi was one of the harshest to bear. But because they often lived near dumpsites, waste picking was one of the obvious ways to make a little money, and it was something you could do while high on glue (and being high on glue helped you deal with the difficult smells emanating from the rotting trash). Despite numerous charities operating in Nairobi and in other parts of Kenya to “rescue” and “rehabilitate” street children, youth groups in the mtaa were an important, often underacknowledged and informal, source of care for these street kids. Some of the organized youth groups would hire street youth as waste pickers and made sure they would get fed on those days, knowing full well that these youth only had the clothes on their backs and minimal access to food or shelter. Mlango Kubwa was an area where one of the local youth groups, MECYG, had access to a slightly bigger common space than the other youth groups, and they were known to organize regular feeding programs for street families. A day’s wage as a waste picker could come with some other kind of care, including kindness that extended beyond just giving these street families a plate of githeri (beans and maize, a common dish that was nourishing but also jokingly called the “poor man’s” dish). Youth in the mtaa spoke to the street kids with respect and playfulness, treating them like little brothers and sisters that sometimes needed a bit of tough love but also showing them mostly love, humor, and no judgment—and a big bowl of githeri and a place to sit down without being told to move along.

The “organized” youth groups were registered with the government, had group bank accounts and some kind of office space, and elected administrative and operational roles within the organizational structure. For some, garbage collection was part of a wider portfolio of income-generating activities, with some youth continuously thinking about how to keep diversifying their mixed livelihood opportunities. Some groups managed to blend individual specialized skill sets (where different individuals took on the leadership role of key businesses) with collective effort and decision-making, along with group saving schemes and collective financial investments. One such group was MANYGRO, mentioned earlier.

The area of “Mathare Number 10” (M10) was infrastructurally and economically one of the poorest areas of Mathare. Amid some vertical tenement housing, most households in M10 lived in horizontal, semipermanent housing, makeshift combinations of mud and corrugated-metal single-room structures.14 These residents did not have access to a shared residential toilet facility. Despite the deficient state of infrastructure, epitomized by open sewers spilling to the river down the valley, the lack of medical clinics, and the frequency of water shortages, a particular village within M10 known as Kuamburu had a well-known youth group, MANYGRO, whose activities combined community service, street theater, and several youth-led community businesses. MANYGRO had a diverse portfolio of waste management businesses, including garbage collection, plastic recycling, and urban farming. Over the years its membership shifted slightly, but it always had between twenty-five and thirty members, all between the ages of twenty and late thirties, who engaged on a rotational basis in different income-generating activities. Both the portfolio and rotation schemes served to mitigate risk, against the backdrop of unforeseen circumstances that so often pulled any young entrepreneur from relative prosperity back down to “zero income” poverty, as the cultural expectations of youth toward their families added consistent personal pressures on their economic advancement.

When you come down from the “number 10” matatu stage, watching your steps along the narrow path precariously perched over an open sewer, you arrive at the MANYGRO baze. MANYGRO was one of the groups courted by a social justice organization fighting for land and tenure rights, Pamoja Trust. In the early 2000s, it seemed clear that youth needed to be included in slum upgrading schemes, but they weren’t preoccupied with land and housing tenure as much as the right to a space in their neighborhood from which to assemble and operate their various community-based businesses. MANYGRO became members of the taka ni pato network during those years and has over the past two decades established a diversified constellation of environmentally oriented businesses that benefit from and serve local community interests. When I first came in 2009, its businesses included garbage collection, plastic recycling, a sanitation service (more on this in chapter 4), and the beginnings of a small urban farming project. Each time I returned, MANYGRO seemed to expand its portfolio—always community-based, and managed from within the group, with shared returns but specific allocations of leadership depending on individuals’ passions and skills.

By 2016, the group had planted a tree near the base, where members had that optimal view of the three intersecting foot paths. The tree provided shade for three chairs, where a few youth group members would sit to manage the public toilet at a distance, keeping whomever was running the small M-Pesa kiosk company, witnessing the hourly mobile banking operations taking place, while taking payment for the water point that was fixed to the outward-facing wall of the kiosk. I remember being stunned the year the group added the cold fridge in the kiosk, which took up most of the space but provided a vital additional source of income and respite from the heat, selling a variety of “cold drinks” (soda). By 2017, the small corner of urban farming had expanded and the group had managed to secure several small patches of green space for vertical farming between the baze and Juja Road. In 2019, one of the MANYGRO members was showing me the expansion of their urban farming allotment, which now included kale and spinach for local consumption and resale. Wally, who managed both the M-Pesa kiosk and the greenhouse, smiled and said they were thinking of “food security.” At a time when food prices started skyrocketing, these youth-led community-based experiments with urban farming provided valuable complements to their livelihood portfolio and further solidified their discourse at the nexus of enterprise and ecology. As Wally pointed to the chicken coop next the greenhouse where food scraps from garbage collection were taken, he evoked the homegrown circular economy at play and said, “Everything can be reused.”

The vicissitudes of the homegrown waste economy were constantly affected by customers’ ability and willingness to pay for services, the demand and price of recyclable yet “dirty” plastic contingent on seasonality and quality, and the frequency of Nairobi City Council truck stops in these often ignored neighborhoods. On numerous occasions during fieldwork, unforeseen disasters (fires, illness, deaths in the family) forced youth who were doing “well” to contribute their entire savings (or go into debt) to pay for funeral, hospital, or rebuilding costs. These incidents and setbacks were nevertheless mentioned with relative acceptance and resolve, if not pride. Ni kawaida—hii ni maisha was the response: “It is usual—this is life.” It was almost inevitably the case that hustling could shift from a mode of survival to one of diversified livelihood strategy, not as a linear progression of economic improvement but rather as a kind of pendulum, and this was part of what Guma (2020) calls “incompleteness.” Here the incompleteness refers to the unknown but expected imponderables of life in the hood, where all manner of crises are the norm, ni kawaida. The cyclical nature of the hustle encompassed all efforts from “doing whatever you can to feed your stomach that day” to “being free to grow one business and invest in another.”15 The hustle was both the freedom to thrive and the risk to fall. It was always incomplete, and this meant being able to adapt to the breakdowns, the blackouts, and the losses and being ready to repair, replace, and reuse. As Wangui Kimari (2018) has argued in her writing on activists and care work, the forms of affective repair and care that youth groups take on in all kinds of mundane ways is part of what builds the fabric of what Mathare youth call “ghetto life.”

The refrain tunajaribu (we are trying) is integral to the self-narrations of what it takes to get through days and years in the mtaa. It is as if to say that regardless of the outcome, it was crucial to “try.” The struggle against the hardships of everyday life “in the ghetto” assumed two possible paths: “trying” and “giving up.” Hustling was the attempt, the “trying” to defy the odds and traps and tropes of poverty, and arguably it had a time limit. Elders did not refer to their work or their state of being as “hustling.” One MANYGRO member once jokingly remarked, “You see Mzee George over there, he is hustling to sell his onions, but he will never use that word. He calls himself a businessman or says ‘ninafanya kazi’ [I am doing work].” Youth saw their elders as hustling too, struggling to navigate the uncertainties of a day’s prospects and using the resources at hand. But the narrative was different, and many elders had not, especially in the early 2010s, appropriated that language to describe their work and their own daily struggles. It wasn’t their vocabulary.

Unlike the strategic moments of idling described earlier, the other kind of idling most lamented yet common among youth living in urban poverty (especially the street kids) was addiction to drugs or alcohol. In 2010, a young man who had become a key interlocutor and friend went from being a well-respected youth group member who was always keeping busy to an embittered drunk spending what he earned playing pool in a local bar. Speaking to his close friends, I was told that he could no longer really claim to be “hustling” anymore, at least not in the way he had formerly described. Hustling involved being economically active, “out there,” trying to make a living and a life that was more than self-serving. While there was much accommodation (or at least a refrain from judgment) for different kinds of hustles, including occupations that were deemed illicit, “drinking your money away” in an enclosed bar away from the baze and the sunlight was much less accepted. That contradicted the terms of the collective mtaa hustle (the collective tunahustle) because it meant you stopped “trying.” It’s not that his friends judged, but to them, falling into substance abuse was considered giving up. At the same time, the door was never closed. In early 2023, I got a WhatsApp text from Kennedy, the very person who had told me years ago that he was so disappointed to see his closest friend slip into drinking. He wrote to say that his friend (whose name I won’t mention here) was in Huruma and “wants to say hello!” When I saw Kennedy a few months later in April 2023, we spoke about his friend’s visit. “He is okay now. He is living up-country, has a family.” There was no judgment in Kennedy’s voice, just joy that his friend was doing better and living again. Trying again. The fact that he had left the mtaa was something we didn’t talk about. I am left with questions about what leaving meant for this young man, one of my first friends in Mathare, and whether he would say he was just hustling up-country now, in the “land economy,” as Demon Copperhead would say (Kingsolver 2022).

Amid the youth group members with whom I spent time in Mathare and Huruma, there was a special character whose work and social world overlapped with youth and the waste economy, though he was not really a youth group member. Shei was an older man, though his exact age always remained a mystery to everyone. He was nicknamed Mzee Kijana (young elder) because he had so much energy, seemed to work all the time, and did not hesitate to get involved in waste-related work (see chapter 5). One day in February 2011, Shei joked that he was “running out of time” and explained,

You see these young boys; they think they have all the time in the world to do something. So that’s why you see so many of them just there. . . . It’s not only that they are jobless; they are wasting their youth! And a big part of the danger can be the temptation to get into drinking or drugs. Me, I am running out of time. I can’t just sit there. I have to do something, so that’s why you see me work every day, and take every (cleaning) job.

Mzee Kijana’s remarks about “wasting youth” were echoed by youth who disapprovingly described the peers who veered into drugs or alcohol abuse as “no longer trying.” Petty crime and “thuggery,” a topic that came up candidly during group discussions, were deemed an illicit but more acceptable branch of the “hustle” than “wasting your youth” with substance abuses that evaded reality and the tangibility of daily struggle. Yet the liminality of youthhood accorded those who might come out of drug and alcohol abuse a second chance to make a living and once more reengage in the hustle. But the temporality of youth afforded a degree of experimentation and chances that were no longer common or as socially acceptable among elders. Mzee Kijana was a kind of exception. It was because he was seen to still hustle, always looking for the next cleaning job, that youth around him affectionately referred to him as the young elder. He took advantage of this ambiguous status, joking in 2023 that he was not embarrassed about applying for “youth funds” to get cleaning contracts—he didn’t feel guilty about this because ultimately he would then hire youth, “including ladies!” (he would proudly say), for these jobs.

Strategic Illegal Dumping

All forms of self-employment in the mtaa were politicized and crosscut with contested notions of legality and legitimacy. Aspects of these entrepreneurial activities evaded or responded critically to the state, while other aspects engaged directly with local authorities. Given the micro-enterprise model of garbage collection and its unpredictable ties to the municipality, the key challenge was how to transport refuse from the point of residential collection to the city’s main dumpsite in Dandora, approximately ten kilometers from Mathare.

In the early 2000s, a compromise was reached between registered youth groups and the Nairobi City Council to provide lorries for garbage pickup in exchange for a monthly fee of KES 1,000 (US11.75) per youth group. I had the chance to meet with the Nairobi City Council Solid Waste Department deputy director in May 2010 and was curious to hear his side of the story. In theory, the NCC was meant to send lorries twice a week to each ward in Mathare during the early hours of the morning. He described this as “meeting the garbage collection groups halfway.” I tried to triangulate this with what I observed over the course of several months. The trucks (when they came) were usually parked a few meters off the main road and would wait for about thirty minutes for all the garbage collection groups to throw the bags of household waste onto the truck. However, these trucks were always already full, caricatures of distended dilapidation, and it always seemed like an anemic effort on the part of local authorities to “meet the groups halfway.”

The trucks became the symbolic locus of negotiation between the NCC and the youth groups involved in garbage collection within their neighborhoods. They were also the material manifestation of the skewed relationship between these garbage collectors and the municipal authority. When the trucks failed to come to Mathare starting in late December 2009, they became the catalytic issue prompting “illegal dumping” on Juja Road in April 2010. The conflict that took place in the days following this act of defiance emphasized the tenuous relationship between youth, waste, and work in the mtaa.

On April 9, a youth group member based in Huruma expressed his views on national TV regarding the garbage collection crisis in Huruma.16 He complained that since December 21, the NCC had not sent its contracted lorries into Mathare, forcing garbage collectors from these neighborhoods to finally bring the garbage to the main road. He claimed the councilor of Huruma told the groups to bring garbage there to make NCC collection easier. The councilor later denied this claim.

A few days later, four youth were arrested for “illegal dumping,” including the vocal young man who had expressed his discontent days prior. Among the four, there were also two youth wearing overalls with the name “Community Cleaning Services” on the back. At the time of their arrest, these two youth were in the middle of a cleaning job, in uniform, equipment in hand. Eliza, a young woman who was working for Community Cleaning Services (CCS) as a trainer of cleaning teams at the time, went to city hall in their defense. As a young woman who lived in Huruma, she knew that being “from the ghetto” meant having little voice to contest an arrest. But as she explained to me a few days later, she knew that an affiliation with an established organization could help get anyone out of trouble—so she argued that these two young men represented a “professional organization called Community Cleaning Services, partnering with a big American company called SC Johnson.” Within minutes, the two CCS workers were released.

The other two youth, I later learned, were seen as just “youth from the slums who do garbage collection,” making trouble. They remained locked up, charged with three months of jail time and a fine of 10,000 KES (US117.50) each. The youth with the CCS uniforms were released because of their affiliation to a “company.” The story of CCS will be discussed in the next chapter, but for now the point is that seeming “professional and organized” carried considerable weight to local authorities, who tended to habitually disenfranchise youth by systematically underplaying their efforts to provide neighborhood services and judged their homegrown economies as illegitimate or illicit. On April 23, another eleven youths were arrested on the same charge, “illegal dumping.” The first six were arrested at 1 a.m. while they were collecting garbage. The other five were arrested the following morning when they came to the Jonsaga Police station in Huruma to bring breakfast to their arrested comrades. The charges, in addition to illegal dumping, included “resisting arrest.”

This ethnographic vignette exemplifies the contradictions of the homegrown waste economy, the municipal authority’s misconceptions of garbage collectors, and the challenges of legitimizing youth’s role in solid waste management in the city. According to NCC interlocutors, the stagnant budget imposed on the NCC by central government in an otherwise rapidly growing city was to blame for the shortage of municipal services across Nairobi’s low-income neighborhoods. But following such disclaimers, as a senior community development officer flippantly argued, “these youth groups should come together and hire trucks. We don’t have enough trucks to handle the whole city, and these groups are making money.” Contradicting herself, she then emphasized, “There needs to be a central point of coordination. The only place equipped to do it is the NCC because they can go down there. But we need to improve capacity, certainly.” While she admitted that the NCC could not assume the cost or the logistical headache of servicing low-income neighborhoods, she stressed that the NCC ought to remain the coordinating body.

Despite the presence and daily operations of the informal waste economy being noted by the NCC, youth “garbage collectors” operating within the mtaa had limited bargaining power. From different interest camps, the NCC and local activists counseling youth argued that youth groups involved in the informal waste economy ought to coalesce their resources and organize to rent or even purchase a truck that could accommodate the micro-enterprises across a number of neighboring low-income wards. But this required complex logistics and intergroup cooperation that had not, to date, been possible.

At that time, youth had little faith in official political engagement as a platform for addressing their group’s issues, let alone to accommodate youth across Nairobi’s taka ni pato economy. Their claim making, therefore, pertained to the narrow license to operate their small businesses and evade harassment or dependency on the NCC, and their ambitions pertained to being recognized as legitimate place-based service providers rather than affirming grandiose projects of citywide expansion and coalition. The challenge was that every youth group, from the least to the most organized, along with NGOs engaging with youth, preferred to pursue their own projects rather than widen their agenda for the sake of creating a broader network and effort. The result was an uncoordinated mosaic of small-scale youth enterprises, most involved in garbage collection, many involved in some form of recycling, some with links to external institutional support, while others remained self-made “reluctant entrepreneurs” (Banerjee and Duflo 2011), unable to access capital, skills training, or any form of mentorship outside their familiar “repositories of social capital” (Saunders 2010, 21).

In this context of small-scale and territorially bound operations, while the spirit of youth hustle spread across the city, hustling did not involve seeking wider coalition building for practical and operational purposes beyond the immediate solidarity of the local base and “group.” “Legitimizing” had inherent risks that contradicted key aspects of the hustle economy. Following the April arrests, Mathare residents and outside institutional actors in Nairobi reanimated the debate about whether creating a more formal waste management system would protect these youth and their waste economy, perhaps by flagging the opportunity to outside private contractors with more political leverage and resources. Staying disparate and informal had protected youth’s income by operating “under the radar” but also put them at risk of unjust NCC demands and treatment. As one put it, “we need to strengthen the garbage collection network to have a bigger voice.” But there were sixteen garbage collection groups in Huruma ward alone, and although many know each other through contexts such as football or other amicable means, it wasn’t easy for them all to meet, let alone mobilize.17

“Green” and “Circular”: Trash Is Now Trendy

Though often referred to as “informal,” “unregulated,” or “fragmented,” this citywide youth-led waste economy has elicited attention from a number of actors over the past two decades, each proposing their solution to the solid waste “problem.” In the early 2000s, there were some efforts (or at least claims) to rehabilitate Dandora’s municipal dumpsite, discursively framing the dumpsite as a public health hazard. This included the ambitious but ultimately unrealizable plan devised by the UNDP, the University of Nairobi’s Department of Urban Planning, and the NCC. In the 2010s, there were various steps taken to “green” the city, including the 2017 plastic ban in Nairobi, following the steps that had been taken in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. Nevertheless, the neighborhoods where more than 60 percent of Nairobians live are still largely underserved by the municipality, which has consistently been under-resourced; and lorries still refrain from entering the “no-go zones” with any regularity to take away the garbage that has been otherwise collected by countless youth groups and left in transit spaces. As far as waste management is concerned, there have been growing declarations of greening and talk of new tech-driven innovations to treat waste, but ultimately self-help urbanism persists in this city with uneven (public) services (Kinder 2016), though in constantly changing ways.

Since my first years doing fieldwork in Nairobi, there had been rumors that solid waste management had to undergo serious rehabilitation, formalization, and investment, which alarmed many of my interlocutors in the mtaa who felt threatened by top-down improvement schemes. As the chairman of one of Huruma’s youth groups put it in May 2011, “If they don’t include us, and take garbage collection away from us after we’ve spent years building up the business, then there will be a revolution.” And yet, following the April 2010 arrests, despite pressure from community activists and a few outspoken residents, the youth decided the benefits of hustling outweighed the risks and costs of getting too overtly political. Their mothers echoed the sentiment but from a different perspective. They “didn’t want trouble,” knowing too well that fighting for “rights” could lead to more external harassment in a context where slum dwellers’ place in the city was insecure. They raised money to post bail and wanted the whole debacle to end. Thus, while the mtaa waste economy displayed a form of consistent resistance against joblessness and the absence of basic services, it ultimately evaded official political channels and kept to the “mtaa ways.” Here the hustle exposes a form of resistance and auto-gestion (Lefebvre 2009) that does not directly oppose the state or loudly “occupy” central public space in the city but instead finds other quieter ways to “encroach” (Bayat 2013) on authority and work around breakdown and injustice.18

This started to change over the years, as some programs funded by a coalition of actors started to include side events focused around community-based waste management. These events and various initiatives now going on in Nairobi highlight, more than ever, that there has not been an effort to eradicate or formalize the existing waste economy. Instead, there are clear efforts to connect the homegrown to wider recycling and circular economy initiatives. In April 2023, I attended an event hosted by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the NCC, which included a group forum focused on “waste management training.” In that meeting, several spokespeople from various youth groups doing garbage collection across Nairobi attended to share and discuss their respective operational challenges in waste management. Several had started branding their waste work, as though aiming to reach more than community audiences. For example, a youth group in Dandora, where the municipal dumpsite is located, calls itself Dandora Green Recyclers. Later in 2023, one of the group leaders sent me their “2023–2024 business plan,” which included the following statement: “Dandora Green Recyclers is a green social enterprise born out of the Dandora dumpsite with the core aim of creating economic value and sustainable livelihoods for the communities in and around the Dandora dumpsite through recycling of plastic waste.” With access to countless online resources and a growing effort to network among themselves across the city, these groups are now using idioms like “circular economy” and “sustainable solutions” to market their services, aware that their core customers may still be their fellow residents in the mtaa, but their audience, peer-to-peer network, and potential investors can be much more global now. By adopting the very language that is legible to both development and business practitioners focused on disrupting linear economic models, the Dandora Green Recyclers have cleverly presented themselves not only as grassroots environmental stewards providing a basic service for their communities; they are also pitching themselves as a potential supplier.

Just as youth groups have been finding ways to give their businesses more visibility and legitimacy, other bigger waste-related initiatives have come onto the scene, recognizing that they have no other choice but to work with these groups, not against them. Since 2018, a company called Mr. Green Africa started operating out of Nairobi’s industrial area, with a business model that takes as its strategic starting point the alarming problem and opportunity that “Africa generates 22 million tons of urban plastic waste every year.” Its mission is to “change the perception of waste” by buying collected postconsumer plastic from 2,500 waste collectors across strategic outposts across Nairobi low-income communities. It then processes this plastic in an industrial-sized waste management plant, where the plastic waste is sorted by color and type before it is recycled. The team there emphasizes the fair income they pay to waste collectors and the local circular solutions they are helping create. As the founder of Mr. Green Africa explained in a conversation we had in 2019, Nairobi may not have been known for its large-scale manufacturing sector, but it could become known for its waste-processing and recycling sector, connecting the grassroots waste pickers to an industrial-scale processing plant. What is especially notable about their model is the emphasis on the importance of small-scale waste pickers and collectors for industrial-scale recycling to work. Dandora Green Recyclers has become one of their most important and well-organized suppliers.

It’s a Mtaa Thing, but It Matters Citywide

Living in marginalized areas of the city with little prospects for formal employment, minimal financial capital, and limited political representation or interest in participating in more conventional housing-rights struggles, youth in popular neighborhoods have used the least desirable resources—waste—to make their own claims on the city. They mobilized their street credibility and gall to capture an “opportunity space” (Mwaura 2017) by turning “trash into cash,” forming a city-wide, neighborhood-based, youth-led waste management service throughout the urban centers of Kenya. This waste economy formed in response to economic liberalization policies in Kenya that simultaneously reduced prospects of finding formal work and public service provisions. Youth groups in the mtaa exploited this absence of public provision to create a market for garbage collection. Over the past two decades, taka ni pato (trash is cash) became for some youth groups a viable way of making a living and making a mark in the self-help city, especially when it served as a foundation for other investments and experiments. Whether youth hustled at the bottom of the waste economy as “scavengers” or were sonkos (bosses) in charge of managing plots around the baze, waste became a key currency for the eco-hustle, a way of turning nothing (or that which has lost value) into something (that which is recognized as having value once more).

The values and effects of waste services shaped by youth-led practices of self-management and self-help were multiple: these included individual survivalism, collective accumulation, and community activism that involved moments of resistance, detachment, and refusal; but these also included hanging out with peers and taking it easy. Eco-hustlers faced moments of stigma and reproach (when activities were perceived to be illicit) and yet were also subject to applause, appropriation, and incorporation (when activities were perceived to advance community development and ecological transitions). As Raphael Obonyo once put it, “No young person dreams of becoming a cleaner . . . but that can be a means to getting to levels they want to get to.”19 For some youth, waste work would be remembered as their first stepping stone into economic activity and a form of collective labor integral to their formative “liminal” years. For others, it would endure as an integral part of their hustle and mtaa lives.

In the early 2000s, the multiplying small-scale youth enterprises were important for youth job creation and a creative mode of self-reliance and resourcefulness, but the waste economy was somewhat fragmented and uncoordinated, which presented a weak defense against the harassment by government authorities or in the face of new big players in the waste business who never spoke about partnering with local garbage collectors. Part of the hustle in those early days was asserting one’s turf and getting jobless youth involved in local residential provision.

During that first decade of the 2000s, development organizations seeking to engage with “entrepreneurial” youth in popular neighborhoods increasingly saw youth groups as desirable entry points for various development projects. Urban programs mandated to support “entrepreneurial youth” included the Ford Foundation’s grant that helped MECYG acquire a shredder for its plastic recycling business. The British NGO Comic Relief supported a youth group in another Mathare ward called Ngei, neighboring Huruma, which was known for being the only youth group with a truck to transport its garbage—the ultimate asset for the homegrown waste management business because it meant avoiding dependence on the Nairobi City Council. The work of NGOs focused on youth and gender empowerment tended to support youth initiatives through peace-building activities oriented around group events such as sporting (namely soccer) tournaments, community cleanups, and skills training through community workshops. For the development sector, engaging with youth groups was seen as a way of reaching a critical mass.

Later, in the 2020s, the growing pressure and interest across sectors to think about ecological transitions and circular economies rendered these youth-led waste management services vital across the city. Forward-thinking youth within these groups, those with leadership skills and often the ones comfortable speaking in public, became increasingly aware that there was power in numbers and a benefit to showing a collective front. Together, these groups were handling 88 percent of Nairobi waste, and more people were paying attention. At a neighborhood level, the connection between garbage collection and the baze was still crucial. But there was a slight shift in the hustle logic. The relationship between economic activity and territorial zoning reflected the codes of youth group hustles in the mtaa: the recognition that these businesses needed to remain small and territorialized in scale in order to sustain the trust of local residents and provide a first-rung step on the livelihood ladder for young school leavers. But over time, these youth groups also recognized that they had formed a citywide popular economy with neighborhood nodes, based on a logic of collective work and auto-gestion (self-management), a mode of provisioning that was led by local youth to serve local customers but that could also contribute to wider legacies of people-led environmental and livelihood efforts in the face of social, environmental, and economic injustice. The memory of a national hero—Kenyan social, environmental, and political activist Wangari Maathai—looms large in these neighborhoods. Not only is she hailed for her work with the environmental NGO Green Belt Movement involving tree planting and environmental conservation, but she is also celebrated for grassroots mobilization and the hopeful narrative that if ordinary people organize at local scales to improve their environment, there can be a wider impact.

As this chapter has shown, youth in Nairobi’s popular neighborhoods have created their own social worlds and shaped homegrown economies that operate at times independently from formal institutions and authorities, while also finding creative ways to hook into certain economic and political networks when such arrangements can help amplify their work and causes. The next chapter builds on the story of youth-led, decentralized basic service provision but turns away from the relationship between youth “eco-hustlers” and the (absentee) state or NGOs and instead focuses on a particular collaboration between these youth and an unlikely “partner” based in the private sector. Here the focus is on the interface between eco-hustles and “social entrepreneurship,” a concept that has become increasingly en vogue among companies committed to “social innovation” and seeking to “do good while doing well.” This “partnership” reveals a series of interesting conundrums. For the business to work, it had to embed itself in local youth-led socioeconomic structures. And at the same time, engaging with youth groups had its own challenges because doing business with a group perhaps calls for another kind of logic: detachment from the expectations of “efficiency and speed of a more typical command and control structure.”20 This is the story of an international business seeking to co-develop a community-based sanitation social enterprise with “local entrepreneurs” in residential areas marked by “sanitation poverty”—“local entrepreneurs” being the young eco-hustlers of Mathare.