Cannabis and urban livelihoods: Illicit opportunities in Kenya's towns and cities

While the drug livelihoods literature in Africa and the Global South focuses primarily on rural livelihoods, understanding how drugs fit into urban economies is important in urbanising contexts where formal / licit opportunities are scarce. This article contributes to the drug livelihoods literature through a study of this urban dimension in Africa. It uses conceptual lenses of precarity, informality and everyday corruption, themes prominent in the urban Africa literature.

This article draws on anthropological research consisting of individual and focus group interviews with 34 research participants (including 21 urban traders), and participant observation in various towns and cities.

Traders find cannabis trade accessible and profitable. Some invest earnings in other activities and for paying school fees and other necessities. Traders highlight how dealing with police is their key challenge. However, the trade operates relatively openly as traders form relationships with police and mitigate risks through bribes.

Cannabis is a relatively reliable commodity in urban Kenya. Its trade is accessible for those lacking alternatives and depends on informal regulation through relations built on trust, a key conceptual focus of the informal economy literature. Its value is supported by illegality, making it profitable compared to other informal economic activity. Its risks are real but can be managed in a country where law is often a terrain of negotiation and corruption an everyday phenomenon.

As an important commodity in Kenya's towns and cities, cannabis' urban livelihoods should be considered alongside rural ones in discussions of cannabis policy futures.