Making Do A Living Organism
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traders collect materials from a variety of sources. The bulk of it comes from factories in the formal sector, which ship their scrap off to Gikomba. For example, bottling companies print sheets of metal caps, but sometimes printing errors occur and the sheets are offset. These bottle cap sheets are a common material for jua kali chests and other wares. Upon entering Gikomba, visitors are greeted by massive piles of oil drums to be split open and driven over repeatedly with trucks to flatten them into usable sheets of steel. Scrap yards collect these materials, as well as any others from local businesses and scrap pickers, for sale to manufacturers who travel to Gikomba from all over Nairobi. Goods traders are critical connectors in cluster ecosystem. Producers in lighter clusters like Kawangware might sell directly to customers and retailers in the area, but dense clusters like Gikomba produce at high volumes, affording them access to traders, brokers, and wholesalers. These brokers use their distribution networks to deliver goods throughout not only Nairobi, but the entire country. It is not uncommon to see the same goods produced in Gikomba sitting in the rural markets of Siaya. In fact, almost all sofas produced domestically contain a Gikomba-made frame. The sofa makers of Gikomba churn out hundreds of frames per week.53 Some traders are geared more towards export. For these traders, the social capital contained in transnational relationships with buyers in Europe or the United States can be enormous. However, there is also pressure on these traders to provide consistent quality and quantity of product. The Kisumu Innovation Centre – Kenya (KICK) has developed some ingenious mechanisms to incentivize quality and quantity among artisans (See “The Innovation Center�). Because of its network, KICK has leverage over the artisans it works with to improve the quality and consistency of production.
INFORMAL
Jua kali flatten them into sheets...
...for use in various products.
Any unsold sheets are recycled.