“Keep our markets open”: Remaking Urban Marketplaces and Everyday Financial Practices in Nairobi in the Time of COVID-19

Abstract

This research engages with geographical scholarship to better understand the role of crisis and its narratives in shaping socioeconomic and financial development. Previous research on crisis narratives has focused on the power dynamics and policies that underpin crisis formation, and the influence of these narratives on global governance strategies. Critical literature has drawn attention to the ways in which political actors utilise crisis and its narratives to advance global policy agendas that fail to consider local contexts, calling attention to the need for more empirical studies of crisis that are grounded in local policy needs. In response, this research is driven by three questions: how did state policies enacted in the name of the COVID-19 pandemic (re)shape social mobilities and financial practices? How were these policies experienced by market vendors and traders in Nairobi? And to what extent did they remake urban markets as social, economic and technological spaces? The thesis is based upon 14 months of fieldwork in Nairobi between February 2020 and August 2021. Using a mixed methods approach, qualitative interviews were conducted with urban traders and vendors in the Gikomba and Kamukunji markets and key institutional and private sector actors. Further evidence was drawn from an extensive analysis of policy documents, media reportage, and archival research. This thesis demonstrates that the Kenyan government's COVID-19 pandemic governance strategies allowed for the suspension of democratic control rules, exposing the systemic inequalities and exclusionary tendencies of crisis policies and financial inclusion infrastructures that have endured since the colonial era. With the unequal breakdown of economic and financial practices, urban market traders relied on digital and mobile financial products, trapping them in a cycle of debt, extracting future revenue over current livelihood needs. With limited social mobility, urban market traders adapted and modified their economic practices by engaging their social networks to shift their selling practices to social media platforms. On these social media platforms such as; WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook, urban traders combined the physical marketplace with digital platforms integrating them into the everyday practice of the market trading business. In summary, this thesis contributes a theoretical and empirical understanding of crisis narratives and their role in re making economic financial practices and social mobilities in popular marketplaces.