Black-Market Electronics Keep a City’s Unemployed Youth Flush With Cash

Nairobi’s stolen-electronics dealers work in the back alleys of slums, but some of their merchandise makes its way into the city’s shopping districts. Photo credit: Stefan Magdalinski via Flickr

James makes his living selling electronics in Nairobi. He works eight hours a day, plus weekends if he has customers, to support his wife and their young child. He has suppliers from the across the city who specialize in laptops, mobiles, or smart phones, and a list of clients he can call on a moment’s notice when he gets a new shipment in.

But James, 26, who’s been working here for two years, doesn’t run a typical electronics shop. His office is a wooden stool underneath an umbrella in a back alley in the slum of Mathare. He shares the narrow lane with drug addicts huddled on dirty mattresses. He won’t do business in the open, and only spoke to me behind a wooden wall by a nearby restaurant.

That’s because everything James sells is stolen.  Read more…

Kenya’s Sometimes-Clashing Tribes Find Common Ground at Slum Restaurants

A bowl of matumbo at Thomson Falls Hotel. Photo credit: Jason Patinkin

The best meal I’ve had in Nairobi’s informal settlements was at an unmarked restaurant behind a hole in a sheet-metal fence in Kibera.

“It’s a bit hidden,” said Godwin, a university student who took me on a culinary tour through Nairobi’s slums. “So it’s only for people that know that place who go there.” Those that know will find a Nubian grandma named Mama Ntilie sitting on a wooden stool in the middle of her kitchen, flipping chapatis, ordering her staff around and serving up a mean beef pilau. Read more…

Through Illegal Pipes and Shady Cartels, Water Flows Into a Slum

A water hauler with his cart. Photo credit: Jason PatinkinMike Techara wakes up at five o’clock every morning to haul a cart loaded with bright yellow jerrycans of water to dozens of families living on the edge of Kibera. He makes this trip up to five times a day, dragging a heavy load of twenty full twenty-liter jerrycans as far as a kilometer along bumpy roads to his clients. During the low-demand wet season, when people can collect rainwater for washing, he charges ten or fifteen shillings (about nine cents USD) for one can, but in the higher demand dry season, the price shoots up to twenty or thirty shillings, the highest in all of Nairobi. Read more…

Battle over the Serengeti pits Maasai against Dubai

Morkelekei Gume (r.) is a Maasai woman who lost a child during the 2009 clashes between herders and OBC security. Photo by Jason Patinkin

Loliondo region, Tanzania – The Maasai of northern Tanzania continue to scramble to stop a government plan to turn 600 square miles of their traditional grazing pasture into a private hunting reserve for foreign tourists.  Read more…

Rainy Season in Kibera

A man walks along a swollen river in Kibera. The annual “long rains,” which run from March through April, can make life in the slum exceedingly difficult. Photo credit: Jason Patinkin

Paul Kivitu sells umbrellas from a wooden shack near Kibera, and with the height of the rainy season pummeling the sprawling slum, business is booming.

“I sell fifteen a day for 250 shillings ($3 USD) each,” he told me as we cowered under his big blue-and-white umbrella, rain thundering onto the pavement around us. In total, he brings in roughly $45 USD a day. Not bad for a neighborhood where it takes the average resident a full day to earn enough to buy a single umbrella.

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Tanzania’s Maasai battle game hunters for grazing land

In a remote corner of northern Tanzania, Boeing 747 planes land on a private airstrip, trucks with United Arab Emirates (UAE) number plates drive across the plains, and anyone with a cell phone receives an unlikely text message:

“Dear guest, welcome to UAE.”

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Maasai face eviction from ancestral lands to make way for Dubai hunting firm

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Maasai herd their cattle across a tarmac road near the Rift Valley town of Suswa, about 43 miles west of the capital Nairobi, in March. Karel Prinsloo/Reuters

Loliondo district, Tanzania.  Tanzania announced last week it plans to evict 30,000 Maasai herders from a hefty swath of their ancestral lands in order to create a game reserve offering exclusive access for a Dubai-based hunting company.  Read more…