Mama Mbogas feeding Nairobi
A gendered perspective on urban food security
Women selling fruits and vegetables are a common sight along Nairobi’s streets. While their contributions to urban economies and to sustaining households in informal settlements are usually disregarded, these mama mbogas, meaning ‘vegetable women’, are key to the city’s food security and nutrition.
Women are the majority of street food vendors in Nairobi, offering a diversity of affordable and accessible fresh and cooked foods, an important mainstay for low-income households struggling with rising food and fuel prices. Food vending generally is a vital livelihood strategy in African cities, especially for female traders who may have few other income-generating options.
Joyce, and her sister Dorcas, own a little kiosk in Kangemi, one of Nairobi’s crowded informal settlements. They sell staple foods like cabbage, arrowroot, bananas, tomatoes, and leafy greens like Managu, Sukuma, Kanzisa, and Saga used in traditional meals.
Most of the greens they source from urban farmers like Rispa Kerubo, who cultivates on a 1/4 acre plot adjacent to Kangemi ( → the story of Rispa and the role of urban farming in Nairobi will be the topic of the next blog in this series, Perspectives on Urban Food Security).
Kenya’s capital, like many other African cities, is growing at a fast pace (about 4 percent since 2000) coupled to an increase in slums, poverty, and a high prevalence of food insecurity. Nairobi has the highest number of food-insecure households in the country. 60 percent of Nairobi’s inhabitants live in informal settlements like Kangemi, where food insecurity affects 70–95 percent of the people.
For the food-insecure households in Nairobi, street food vendors, such as the mama mbogas, meet most of their food demands. Berger at al. conducted a study in the Kibera slum in 2018 and found that the most important reasons for food-insecure habitants to buy food at kiosks are: proximity to where they live (avoids transport costs), low prices, offer of small packaging size (important without access to refrigeration) and the possibility to buy food on credit. Whereas supermarkets are financially and geographically often inaccessible to people living in informal settlements.
Although food vendors encompass women and men, female traders are more likely to sell fresh produce or certain cooked foods such as githeri (beans and maize stew).
Joyce and her sister’s kiosk is just in front of the shed where they live together with Joyce’s four children and husband. For Joyce, the profit she makes from selling vegetables and fruits is enough to sustain her family and send her four children to school. “Some days are better than others, but generally it is a good business,” she says. To sell food on the streets, close to their homes, allows women, especially mothers, to effectively combine their multiple roles in the household. And it may be the only income-generating activity for women who lack access to formal employment due to limited education and training or sociocultural factors that limit their freedom and mobility.
Despite their crucial role in securing Nairobi’s food supply and security, street vendors, especially in informal settlements, face many risks due to bad access to infrastructure, insecurity, and environmental hazards like floods. Moreover, harassment of street vendors by city officials is facilitated by legislation. The Hawkers bylaws passed in 2007 restrict unlicensed hawking and hawking in non-designated areas. City inspectors can invoke the General Nuisance bylaw to evict hawkers and street vendors who have not paid their daily operation license. Joyce confirms, “I pay 50 Kenyan Shillings (around 0.5 USD) every day to the official, who would otherwise close my business.”
Although many developing countries still have a predominantly informal food retail sector, few countries have a pro-traditional or pro-small retail policy. Kenya even has policies and bylaws in place to hamper, or at least steer, informal food retailing. While the formal retail sector (e.g. supermarkets) has been identified as a priority sector with a high potential of spurring the country’s economic growth and development.
Given the important role street food vendors play in enhancing the access to affordable and fresh food to the urban poor, the current policy framework is not favourable to Nairobi’s food security, on the contrary.
Policies are needed that integrate the informal retail sector into food security policies instead of limiting or excluding it. An example of such an integral food security policy in Africa is the “Nourish to Flourish” policy by the Western Cape Province of South Africa.
Further, it is crucial to ensure a gender-sensitive analysis of the informal retail sector before issuing such policies or strategies. Men and women street vendors face different challenges and have distinct needs, and thus gender-disaggregated data has to inform any action that otherwise risks leaving unaddressed key local and structural issues and processes that shape gender inequities and hinder food supply.
Having such a proactive policy on informal food retailing in place would not only help Joyce and her fellow mama mbogas, it would also be an important step to reduce gender inequality and achieve food and nutrition security in Nairobi.
Written by Louisa Nelle and edited by Wangu Mwangi.
Further reading
APHRC (2014). Population and Health Dynamics in Nairobi’s Informal Settlements: Report of the Nairobi Cross-Sectional Slums Survey (NCSS) 2012. Nairobi: African Population and Health Research Centre.
Berger, M., & van Helvoirt, B. (2018). Ensuring food secure cities — Retail modernization and policy implications in Nairobi, Kenya. Food Policy, 79, 12–22.
Hovorka, A., Zeeuw, H. D., & Njenga, M. (2009). Women feeding cities: Mainstreaming gender in urban agriculture and food security. Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation.
Sohel A. et. al. (2015). Cooking up a storm: Community-led mapping and advocacy with food vendors in Nairobi’s informal settlements. IIED Working Paper. IIED, London.
Tefft, J., Jonasova, M., Adjao, R., & Morgan, A. (2017). Food Systems for an Urbanizing World.
Van Veenhuizen, R. (2006). Cities farming for the future. Urban Agriculture for green and productive cities. RUAF Foundation, IDRC and IIRP, ETC-Urban agriculture, Leusden, The Netherlands.
