Photo by Photos By Beks on Unsplash
Food is social and as a result, where people get the food they eat plays an important role in how people live. Before the food houses that serve prepared meals, food markets are the nodes of economic and social exchange that spur the existence and growth of towns and urbanity.
These cities are dynamic human creations that have taken a life of their own. Given sufficient time after they are created by chance or design, any city can develop a personality and begin to influence its creators. At a social level, how cities and towns are designed is often the closest humans come to shaping group destiny — in varying degrees. Both the town and the markets which serve as human interchange points influence and are influenced by each other, helping to establish the city’s sense of self and the markets’ sense of place.
This relationship is not vague. There are conscious and subtle behavioural outcomes that arise from the geographic span and social interactions between city residents, governance and the city’s markets.
In Africa, those markets are more informal than formal. Because of their cultural embedding and apparent chaos but despite their open and public nature, these markets are either unseen in policy or threatened by uninformed development practices. But they represent a wealth of information about the city, the people and labour and social exchanges therein. Importantly, for the growing number of initiatives seeking to digitize aspects of the daily lives of Africans, the public market is (or is supposed to be) a natural starting point for learning.
As a research lab devoted to the cause of entrepreneurial learning, we are undertaking a first draft study to understand:
By using a basket of selected staple foods, this learning project will discover the formal and informal market structures and mobility options that support the flow of food through Nairobi, Kenya.
Needless to say, we are excited to get the learning train started! Because of our focus on digitizing X, we are excited to look under the hood of informal market structures. trendsAf considers the unformalized structure and layers of socially distributed knowledge as an opportunity to move away from the measured gait of formal food channels like malls and supermarkets. And follow the “chaos” in the informal supplier-retail/consumer supply chain.
trendsAf is happy to share this learning journey with any interested organization. Ultimately, new knowledge gathered or reinforced will be published as the first of a series of reports and data stories focusing on digitization in the East African region.
We are happy to take on partners for our journey to learn from the market and build a digital repository of data that enables clearer business thinking, effective and positive public policy and consumer-obsessed product building. If you’re building digital products for consumers and informal businesses, creating policy or investment research and interested in co-learning please email: [email protected]