Public Transportation in Kenya provides an in-depth examination of the significant challenges faced by Kenya’s public transportation system, using a phenomenological approach to highlight the real-world experiences of commuters and stakeholders. The book addresses two primary goals: to explain the severe impact of transportation issues on millions of Kenyans, including loss of livelihoods, disabilities, and fatalities, and to propose solutions aimed at reducing road traffic accidents and improving overall transportation safety. The chapters begin with a review of Kenya's transport studies and current state, followed by an analysis of road traffic accident data and contributing factors. Subsequent sections explore the inadequacies in infrastructure, traffic law and enforcement, and the challenges posed by incomplete data collection. The book also details an innovative study using data mining and natural language processing (NLP) on over one million traffic-related tweets to uncover commuter trends and driver behaviors. The final set of chapters presents comprehensive recommendations for improving road safety, enhancing infrastructure, and reforming policing practices to better manage traffic and transportation issues. Key features of this book include the use of both structured and unstructured data for a robust analysis, practical solutions for policymakers, and an innovative methodological approach utilizing NLP and data mining to analyze the issues presented. References and summaries are also provided in each chapter to make information accessible. These elements make the book a valuable resource for researchers, academics, policymakers, transportation professionals, and anyone interested in the socio-economic impacts of public transportation in Kenya and other African countries. Public Transportation in Kenya is essential reading for those looking to understand and address the critical transportation challenges that affect millions daily, providing insights and solutions that can lead to safer and more efficient transport systems.

The promotion of social protection in Sub-Saharan Africa happens in a context where informal labour markets constitute the norm, and where most workers live uncertain livelihoods with very limited access to official social protection. The dominant social protection agenda and the associated literature come with an almost exclusive focus on donor and state programmes even if their coverage is limited to small parts of the populations – and in no way stands measure to the needs. In these circumstances, people depend on other means of protection and cushioning against risks and vulnerabilities including different forms of collective self-organizing providing alternative forms of social protection. These informal, bottom-up forms of social protection are at a nascent stage of social protection discussions and little is known about the extent or models of these informal mechanisms. This book seeks to fill this gap by focusing on three important sectors of informal work, namely: transport, construction, and micro-trade in Kenya and Tanzania. It explores how the global social protection agenda interacts with informal contexts and how it fits with the actual realities of the informal workers. Consequently, the authors examine and compare the social protection models conceptualized and implemented ‘from above’ by the public authorities in Tanzania and Kenya with social protection mechanisms ‘from below’ by the informal workers own collective associations. The book will be of interest to academics in International Development Studies, Political Economy, and African Studies, as well as development practitioners and policy communities.

This book critically explores the relationship between mobility patterns, transport provision and urban development in East African cities. Bringing together contributions on the futures of mobility in urban East Africa, the chapters examine transport provision, mobility patterns, location-specific modes of transport and transformative factors for transport and mobility in the rapidly urbanising region. The book outlines different mobility needs to be addressed in transport planning to serve and shape the respective cities and examines the decision-making process in transport planning and the level of accountability to the public. The contributors show the dialectic between innovation in transport/mobility and urban development under rapid urbanisation and discusses how to practically integrate mobility and transport provision into urban development. This book will be of interest to scholars in urban planning, transport planning, transport geography, social sciences and African studies.

Transport discourse often concentrates on what is missing from transport policy and practice in developing countries vis-à-vis high-income countries rather than articulating local creativity in responding to transport needs as revealed in informal public transport modes such as matatu, motorcycle, bicycle and animal transport. This book helps to correct some of the tendency of inadequate contextualization of knowledge, technology and practice learning and transfer from one setting to another in transport and other development programmes. While countries such as Kenya have ambitions to develop their transport systems to fit into the globalized transport system, they also need to plan transport for ordinary life in both urban and rural areas. The matatu service, provided by privately-owned transport carriers, can be seen as a mirror of the life of Kenya, revealing how indigenous African entrepreneurship and capitalism straddles various economic, political and social systems. This book offers a phenomenological and situated analysis of the matatu entrepreneurship in the political economy of Kenya and its embeddedness in society. By adopting a social science approach, this book highlights a number of political, social and practical issues to demonstrate the matatu is not a decontextualized, disembodied and lifeless piece of moving metal carrying people and goods but rather part of a self-organizing industry, with its own logic of practice. This book is dedicated to Ajanga Khayesi.

This framework presents ten interrelated principles/elements to guide Sustainable Agricultural Mechanization in Africa (SAMA). Further, it presents the technical issues to be considered under SAMA and the options to be analysed at the country and sub regional levels. The ten key elements required in a framework for SAMA are as follows: The analysis in the framework calls for a specific approach, involving learning from other parts of the world where significant transformation of the agricultural mechanization sector has already occurred within a three-to-four decade time frame, and developing policies and programmes to realize Africa’s aspirations of Zero Hunger by 2025. This approach entails the identification and prioritization of relevant and interrelated elements to help countries develop strategies and practical development plans that create synergies in line with their agricultural transformation plans. Given the unique characteristics of each country and the diverse needs of Africa due to the ecological heterogeneity and the wide range of farm sizes, the framework avoids being prescriptive.