Inside Informality: The Links Between Poverty, Microenterprises, and Living Conditions in Nairobi’s Slums

By Sumila Gulyani, Debabrata Talukdar. 2010

121 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Using households rather than enterprises as the analytical unit, this study of 1,755 households in Nairobi's slums reveals that informal household microenterprises are indeed helping offset poverty. Microenterprises are helping households that are, a priori, more likely to be poor. Better microenterprise performance is associated with certain "business-related" factors, such as sales area, time in, and sector of operation. But "living conditions"--residential tenure and infrastructure access--also strongly influence both creation and success of microenterprises. Interventions that improve infrastructure and reduce tenure insecurity and rent-induced pressures to move may be crucial for incubating microenterprises and reinforcing their contribution to poverty alleviation in Nairobi's slums.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d9922df910f330da3c2daef6d8f813b191183d15

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Citations in the corpus

Social Entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa (2015, background): “…the implications of the prevalence of informality in a venture’s environment are not so easy to assess given the link between informality and poverty, which is well established by development economists at the macro and micro levels (De Soto, 2000; Gulyani & Talukdar, 2010; Günther & Launov, 2012).”
Understanding poverty and promoting poverty alleviation through transformative consumer research (2013, background): “Large numbers of urban poor live within informal economies on the fringe of cities (Gulyani & Talukdar, 2009, 2010).”
Research on entrepreneurship in the informal economy: Framing a research agenda (2013, background): “Examining informal microentrepreneurs in Nairobi, Gulyani and Talukdar (2010) highlight the importance of being able to leverage home-based resources for the business.”