Plastic bag Ban WTF?

CircularDesignNrb
Aug 23, 2017 · 3 min read

The Kenyan plastic bag ban conversation keeps getting more aggressive and expressive. From the recently concluded election we had a picture of a person eating Githeri from a plastic bag doing rounds on social media. Most of the folks from enterprise voiced acceptance for the phenomena . From a need perspective, people in low income communities have fewer conditioned alternatives to getting groceries or carrying belongings around.

informal food in Nairobi

Thomas Sowell, in Basic Economics dives into the efficiency of bringing down production costs as an integral part of creating wealth. He goes further to case Rockefeller and the oil business from extraction to filling stations. Well, it is a mind set that is largely subscribed to for good reasons. In a market economy you can only claim to be a market leader for so long. Competition with a more innovative way of producing the alternatives rises as a market leader if you slack. The role of the consumer is at play in situations such as these. Switching to alternative goods offer more convenience in terms of price and satisfaction.

Back to my plastics conversation, the rise of the African consumer brought to light the need for corporations to reach for the billionth market and now to capture global markets. Way even before Polak came up with his in depth paradigm; Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, the industrial age was already steeping the curve and plastics brought to life new efficient ways to lower marginal costs while at the same time offering more product functions and fulfilling unexpected consumer needs.

Martin Kamotho Njenga, woke up extremely early on the morning of August 8th to go vote, he felt hungry while waiting in line for his chance to cast his ballot, an entrepreneur who had anticipated this need got him a plate of githeri at a cost probably of 30 shillings, a photo of him was taken and circulated on social media at a moment of crisis . Imagine the needs of Githeriman! Street food vendors exploit the existing demand for food. With possibilities created by new cost efficient methods to communicate with the market through prices, access to food becomes a point of contact. A space occupied by fast food in more conventional understood markets is now enabling a tier 4 trader to turn in his margins. Imagining the point of sale for this space, what is our targeted approach for behavior change? What are the systemic effect in context of imposing a ban on plastics? Prices will be communicated through a different medium. The Informal food sector in Kenya accounts for a sizable proportion of the food market. With the drought and Maize shortage Githeri and Ugali perhaps were “really hard to come by” . 3 million people up north Kenya are recovering from a drought and food prices are adjusting from the heated up cost of inflation.

courtesy of OpenIDEO

With the looming ban on plastic bags communities must be by now bursting up with thoughts on alternatives to deliver products to the billion people market. In-fact this is the only way they might be getting by! How do we get products to people without generating plastic Waste? Plastic as a finite resource is extremely valuable. How this value is communicated is not as deliberate as in a Middle income economy were scarcity in a resource x is met by a saturated market of people constantly making improvements to products to capture maximum value. Our abundance of resource might be our biggest undoing.

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