#utu-ubuntu

[cognitivejustice]

Building Biodiversity Business - Ecosystem Marketplace

Markets haven't been kind to biodiversity - largely because its value lies outside our economic system. The Ecosystem Marketplace exists to

Biodiversity business is defined in this report as:

‘commercial enterprise that generates profits via activities which conserve biodiversity, use biological resources sustainably, and share the benefits arising from this use equitably’.

Solarpunk business is inclusive of all living things.

[cognitivejustice]

Introducing the solidarity entrepreneurs of the informal economy

Kenyan urban geographer and feminist development scholar Dr. Mary Njeri Kinyanjui's work introduced me to the phrase "solidarity entrepreneurs" to describe what I had been observing among rural and urban entrepreneurs in Asia and Africa ever since I first began visual ethnography and exploratory user research in 2008.

The above photograph I took from a moving car at the borderlands of Uganda and Kenya in January 2016 captures the concept of solidarity among entrepreneurs operating in economic informality in one momentary snapshot. I did not meet these women specifically but I'll stand by my story as I draw upon 15 years of observations and immersion in this world. Until lately, it was all I ever thought about.

The lady in the purple skirt fries some sort of snack for a living and has this well chosen spot by the side of the road just before the borderpost. Traffic will slow down here, and if you're lucky, it'll back up. People might step out to buy a snack.

The lady in black is a mama mboga - the colloquial name for a jua kali vegetable vendor, mboga means vegetable in Swahili. I'll be starting a parallel series this week on the mama mbogas in Nairobi who embraced radical technologies and collaborative innovation practices during the pandemic going all solarpunk to thrive and grow their trade.

Now, interpreting the photograph based on experiential knowledge and years of observation and analysis - what a visual design ethnographer does, in fact - one moves on to the third lady - extreme right who has clearly purchased some vegetable from mama mboga and is waiting expectantly with her hand out for her change.

Mama Mboga does not happen to have the correct change on her so she asked her neighbour - Mama Fried Snack (I made that up) for some shillings to help her out. She may or may not have handed money over immediately - they work together, these are not random spots that change daily. Believe it or not these ladies pay the city council officers of Busia town, Kenya a daily fee for operating on the side the of the road.

If you're familiar with Kenya, there's one more sweetspot in this photograph - the backdrop to the outstretched hands sharing money and cooperating so that one entrepreneur can better serve their customer is the green wall painting on the shack behind which is the advertisement for MPesa - the world's most famous mobile money transfer app - an innovation that's transformed wide swathes of the Kenyan economy.

But, the mamas doing business still prefer cash - they operate at the micropayment level and the transaction fees involved may often be greater than the price of the tomato or onion being sold.

This may not be evidence enough of cooperation and collaboration and a humane cultural ethos that underpins entrepreneurship in economic informality (Kinyanjui, 2019) so next I'll begin to illustrate each of the social logics and humane values that Kinyanjui describes to make her case in Kenya.

I, myself, first observed cooperative economic activities in my first non-commercial project that looked at household financial management in rural Philippines, India, and Malawi in 2008-2009. But that is a story for another day. This was an introduction.

Some eye candy follows with captions to balance the screed.

They call them informal and criminalize them (entrepreneurs outside the formal economic system aka the modern sector aka capitalism) but they tax them through daily fees for sitting on the side of the road. And give receipts. Is this not taxation by the city council? Why are they not recognized as tax payers just because they don't have a fancy retail outlet?

Taxation without recognition, forget representation. Shops like these pay council fees on a daily basis but what citizen services do they get in return? This is free money to let you sit under a tree without being harassed. On the other hand, location and predictability matter since being able to be found under the same tree helps you build a customer base.