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Infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony in urban Africa: vignettes

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Infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony

in urban Africa: vignettes from Buru Buru, Nairobi

Prince K. Guma & Mwangi Mwaura

To cite this article: Prince K. Guma & Mwangi Mwaura (2021): Infrastructural configurations of
mobile telephony in urban Africa: vignettes from Buru Buru, Nairobi, Journal of Eastern African
Studies, DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2021.1989138

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JOURNAL OF EASTERN AFRICAN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2021.1989138

Infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony in urban

Africa: vignettes from Buru Buru, Nairobi
Prince K. Guma and Mwangi Mwaura
British Institute in Eastern Africa, Nairobi, Kenya

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Since its inception in the 1990s, mobile telephony in Africa has Received 11 February 2020
evolved, reflecting varied advances in technology. These Accepted 24 September
advances have become particularly reminiscent of the role of 2021
mobile technologies in everyday facets of life. In this paper, we
KEYWORDS
examine infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony in an Infrastructure; technology;
urban African context. We demonstrate how urban Africa is being mobile telephony; area
instrumented through the incoming of mobile telephony, but studies; urban Africa; Buru
also how the convergence of the digital and the physical is Buru; Kenya
materializing through the everyday use and appropriation of
mobile phone-based technologies. We make this contribution
through illustrations and vignettes – including Mkokoteni
handcart operations, electricity “token” meter connections, and
mobile phone kiosk processes – from Buru Buru, an estate in
Nairobi. Thus, we place our analysis within recent area studies
scholarship, drawing perspectives from science, technology and
society studies, infrastructure studies and urban studies. We
contend that the variegated infrastructural configurations of
mobile telephony challenge ingrained accounts of technological
determinism, not least within conventional area studies.

Take a walk in any East African city and it becomes apparent the variegated develop-
ments and initiatives that revolve around the use and appropriation of mobile telephony.
These range from manifestations of standby and enthusiastic mobile telecoms vendors
and authorized agents, to placements of different counters and compartments that
offer essential prepaid products like airtime, cable subscriptions and electricity tokens,
and off-the-counter services like SIM card1 subscription and registration, facilitation
of mobile payments through encrypted SMS2 and USSD3 platforms, and phone repair
and critical device activation. Across many East African cities, these articulations
propel a certain feeling of presence within a space of unceasing and insurmountable
mobile connection and encounter. In urban Kenya for instance, mobile money has
become an everyday payment instrument, with M-Pesa standing out as the most
popular of mobile money platforms. One is most likely to use such platforms for a
range of services such as topping-up (purchasing airtime), cashing in (depositing
funds), cashing out (withdrawing of funds), transferring funds (money transfer),
making monetary payments (mobile payment), saving (i.e. through platforms like

CONTACT Prince K Guma [email protected]

© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 P. K. GUMA AND M. MWAURA

MKesho4 and on Mshwari5), acquiring micro-loans (i.e. through platforms like Fuliza M-
Pesa6), and querying. These and similar services have become emblematic of the ease, the
speed and the liberating momentum that stems from use of mobile phone-based technol-
ogies. As these technologies have become integrated for infrastructural operations in
Kenya, they have posed remarkable effects, so much so that Kenya has not only
become a leading site for technological developments, it has also become a sentinel for
mobile infrastructure developments in other locations within and beyond Eastern Africa.
This article examines the turn to mobile phone-based infrastructures in Buru Buru, a
middle-class estate in Nairobi city, Kenya. We examine infrastructural configurations of
mobile telephony in Buru Buru, drawing examples and vignettes from the deployment of
the token meter, the mobile phone kiosk, and the Mkokoteni handcart in everyday life.
While token meters and mobile phone kiosks have spiraled on the heels of deep pen-
etration of mobile money platforms that coincide with increased mobile network cover-
age and mobile phone access, Mkokoteni handcart7 operations vehemently incorporate
new mobile phone-based platforms for their own billing and transaction processes.
We demonstrate how by employing these infrastructures to navigate everyday urbanity,
residents challenge conventional and codified notions of the urban, giving birth to new
kinds of conceptualizations of urbanity in the age of mobile telephony. We highlight the
different facets of infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony, demonstrating how
the “old” (i.e. kiosks and Mkokoteni handcarts) and the “new” (i.e. mobile telephony
gadgets and applications) shape hybrid configurations through everyday use and appro-
priation. As such, we offer portrayals of the vagaries and peculiarities of the new and old
and how these get together in different places, where the new do not necessarily supplant
the old, but both old and new fuse in rather interesting ways.
Accordingly, we place our analysis within recent scholarship on areas studies drawing
perspectives from Science Technology and Society (STS) studies, infrastructure studies
and urban studies. Here, we, first and foremost, engage questions that revolve around
how mobile-based infrastructural developments advance new ways of discerning techno-
logical and infrastructural landscapes. We highlight the complex, lived infrastructural
configurations of mobile telephony beyond the often-cited expertise of system builders,
designers and experts. Therefore, we bring the STS lens from the confines of the labora-
tory into the ordinary environments of an urban area, with the goal to challenge simple,
technologically deterministic understandings of infrastructure and society, not least
within area studies. Secondly, and as important, we offer a located and situated represen-
tation of the urban terrain, drawing inspiration from ‘theory cultures alert to their own
locatedness and sources of inspiration, open to learning from elsewhere, respectful of
different scholarly traditions and committed to the revisability of theoretical ideas.’8
Thus, we suggest a re-visiting of how we discuss and write about cities and urbanization
in area studies:9 i.e. not simply as a relation with the rural but as a “thing.”10 This, we
argue, is imperative for the production of alternative epistemologies as writing and dis-
cerning urban terrains and their compositions necessitates a seeing again and a revising
of how areas and their issues are discussed and written about.
And thirdly, we add to the state of research in area studies that recognizes the manner
in which African urban contexts today are beginning to show a state of trajectory toward
a new kind of urbanism in which the appropriation of mobile technologies is central to its
materiality. We engage with ‘the vibrancy and complexity of African cities with fresh
 JOURNAL OF EASTERN AFRICAN STUDIES 3

eyes,’11 going beyond ‘negative’ and ‘shadowy’ characterizations,12 particularly those that
describe the continent as revealing a dark side, or constituting a ‘black hole of the infor-
mation economy.’13 We also go beyond approaches that draw on ‘the tropes of moder-
nity, backwardness, and underdevelopment’14 to obstruct the apparent reinvention of the
African continent in the twenty-first Century. We contend that the continent has
changed drastically since Castells et al.15 wrote about Africa’s technological ‘apartheid,’
‘dependency,’ and ‘underdevelopment’ ‘at the dawn of the information age.’ Not only
is Africa today the world’s fastest digitalizing region, it is manifesting some of the
most significant urbanization trends of any continent.

Researching infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony in Africa

The last two or so decades have witnessed much research interest in mobile telephony in
Africa. As work in this area has progressed, commentators have moved beyond studying
mere impacts, contributions and setbacks,16 toward exploring the disruptive and trans-
formative nature of mobile telephony17 in different socio-cultural and geographical con-
texts.18 These studies have examined opportunities that mobile accessibility and
innovation in Africa presents,19 sometimes highlighting their specific socio-economic
impacts20 as problem-solving devices and drivers of changes.21 A few studies have
paid historical attention to mobile telephony, highlighting its growth and development22
as well as embodied alterations, contours and practices in African areas.23 These contri-
butions are widely reported in research within the social sciences, particularly in the
realms of innovation studies, business studies, development studies, Science and Tech-
nology Studies (STS) and adjacent disciplines.
In Kenya, different studies have drawn from the case of mobile money platforms, par-
ticularly M-Pesa to capture the technological developments of mobile telephony in the
country and East African region at large. Omwansa and Sullivan’s ‘Money, Real
Quick’ still remains one of the few exhaustive accounts about the inception and initial
growth and technology of Safaricom’s M-Pesa platform as a leapfrog24 and disruptive
innovation in Kenya. Other writers have examined mobile money’s transformative
aspects in the business world;25 customer experiences and the products in the
market;26 and regulatory and supervisory approaches to the practice and technical oper-
ations of mobile money.27 Here, M-Pesa is often cited both as a platform that grew to
become a radical technological model, and one that leapfrogs ahead of mobile-enabled
innovation amidst severe lack of a fixed-line infrastructure in many African areas.
While these studies do offer valuable contributions about the foundational state,
capacity and development of mobile telephony, there is need to examine M-Pesa and
similar platforms as technological infrastructures that reflect endogenous innovation
in Africa. Thus, it is imperative to examine these mobile phone-based platforms as tech-
nologies that in bypassing standard and conventional evolutionary adoption paths28 –
and avoiding the business-as-usual sort of development trends – are aiding alternative
infrastructural trajectories and configurations all together. In the process, it is imperative
to examine how Africa is seemingly beginning to catch up with smart, intelligent, mobile
and flexible ways of development without needing to follow trajectories of the highly
cited technological models of “the Global North”. Consequently, rather than develop a
general reconstruction, explanation or understanding of the growth and development
4 P. K. GUMA AND M. MWAURA

of mobile telephony (a thing that previous efforts do), or attempt a response to apparent
complexities with theoretical and methodological frames and constructions of these
studies, it is important to move beyond such efforts to explore reconfigurations, reforma-
tions, or simply, transformations of mobile telephony and innovation within a situated
space of the African city.
In addition, there is still an urgent need to unmoor mobile telephony as a technology
that is situated and shaped by pre-existent practices and ways of life. Here, more con-
certed effort is needed to examine the distinct situated and socio-material construction
of the technology. A common predisposition among contributions on technology has
been to take for granted the situated nature of mobile telephony and treat mobile tele-
phony as a single, homogeneous, all-embracing and monolithic place and space, a pre-
disposition that is neither desirable, feasible nor realistic. This raises concerns about
the intricacies relating to research on technology and innovation. Thus, as many accounts
remain highly detached and separated from actual lived contexts, it has become necessary
when investigating mobile telephony, to move beyond ‘technology determinism where
technology is perceived to develop independently of society’29 and one-size-fit-all frame-
works and methodologies, to those that attend to idiosyncrasy and context-specificity. As
Berker, et al.30 argue, ‘[t]he technological context of today is drastically different’ as new
technologies are becoming more and more flexible, fluid and mobile and used differently
by different categories of people and institutions in diverse real-world locations. Within
situated areas of Africa therefore, it has become imperative ‘to produce knowledge that
speaks to African-lived realities’ within the ‘universal wheel of knowledge production.’31
Moreover, there still remains little emphasis in area studies on the nature, substance,
dynamic and complexity of the relationship between mobile telephony and infrastruc-
ture. To this end, deliberate consideration of infrastructure configurations of mobile tel-
ephony in urban Africa becomes imperative. There is not much awareness or sensibility
about the material connections and encounters of mobile telephony that have become the
backdrop ingenuity and innovation in present urban infrastructure systems. This speaks
to a lack of proper account and understanding of infrastructural configurations of mobile
telephony. Such configurations need to be properly addressed within specific contexts
and realities by moving mobile telephony to the center of debate through a lens that
views the ‘technical and social as inseparable outcomes of ongoing and historically con-
textualized practice … .’32 This highlights the need to illustrate the centrality of technol-
ogy through situated practices and ways of life, recognizing that its ‘technological and
service innovations’ can ‘come about as a result of user practices.’33 As Chéneau-
Loquay34 argues, ‘innovation comes about as much a result of user practices as in labora-
tories’ as ordinary people demonstrate creative abilities to innovate. A great addition
therefore would be to reiterate the vitality of situated knowledges, practices and insti-
tutions. Particularly, there is need for more East African explorations to understand
what, precisely, technological innovation means (for urban infrastructure) in African
areas: the intersections, the continuities, and the ruptures.
In this article, we examine “infrastructural configurations” of mobile telephony, by
which we mean the nature in which mobile phones and mobile-based technologies are
being configured infrastructurally. Accordingly, we discern the rise of new and emergent
mobile-based infrastructural developments amidst necessities of connectivity with real-
time supply and demand of services. We examine the ways in which mobile phones
 JOURNAL OF EASTERN AFRICAN STUDIES 5

are being utilized in the provision of services leading to new arrangements in cities. We
portray these formations through use of mobile telephony, allowing rearrangements of
technology through interface with urban infrastructure. In this process, we contend
that infrastructural configurations encompass socio-technical processes and of ordinary
processes connected by common actions of urban residents. Likewise, the day-to-day
experience and engagement with infrastructure provide innovative and interesting lens
to discern infrastructure configurations. This lens is encapsulated through Lawhon
et al.’s35 ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ that ‘enable a clearer analysis of
infrastructural artifacts not as individual objects but as parts of geographically spread
socio-technologic configurations,’ which bring together ‘relations, capacities and oper-
ations, entailing different risks and power relationships.’
In so doing, we draw inspiration from recent anthropology of infrastructure literature
that uncovers the vastness and intricate complexity of diverse temporalities and spatial-
ities of technological infrastructures in Africa.36 For instance, Mutongi’s ‘Matatu’ draws
an account of minibuses as an embedded part of the city’s landscape through both its
simple to complex components, to reveal how urban space and technology is remade
by ordinary residents in the city’s critical infrastructure and political economy through
its actors.37 Nyabola highlights the collision between technology, society and politics
in Kenya, where different groups of people appropriate technologies for a political
agenda.38 In addition, Kimari’s work uses infrastructure assemblage to capture hetero-
geneous phenomena,39 where in ‘The Story of a Pump’ for instance, 40 she depicts
how a simple infrastructure in the ruins of Mathare brings to light the comingling
broadly categorized as political, social, ecological and economic.
While this literature does not explicitly examine infrastructure through the lens of
mobile telephony use and appropriation, it in fact sets a good precedent for such an
examination. For instance, it reflects the thinking and concerns of the time, as much
as it makes distinct contributions to the expansion of theorization of urban and infra-
structural transitions in Africa. Its narration of infrastructure and technology bring
forth the many interrelated tales beyond official narratives of a city and country: both
the seen and the unseen, the imagined and the experienced, and the particular and the
general. We believe that its contributions add to the repertoire of knowledge key for
understanding the production of infrastructure and technology as well as the city and
the urban terrain. Moreover, it feeds into overriding calls for alternative theorizations
of the urban. It reflects general trends in the attempt to ‘write the African city anew,
against a “target” for developmentalism or overly structural explanatory schemes.’41
Respectively, we add to these contributions by considering mobile infrastructures
which while being some of the most obvious in many African urban terrains, are still
barely discussed: airtime sellers, M-Pesa kiosks, and cell towers. We examine these
mobile infrastructures not simply as individual objects, but as situated and socio-material
constructions. As a result, we examine their configurations as processes that are infused
with the social. Hereby, we examine infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony as
socio-technical rather than merely technical reality. This focus matters, in part, because it
is imperative for highlighting how mobile infrastructures are constantly interpreted and
negotiated by social groups connected to them. Thus, it is integral for ruminating
ongoing, provisional and contingent processes and practices that go into the making
and shifting of infrastructure through its interface with mobile telephony.
6 P. K. GUMA AND M. MWAURA

The case of Buru Buru, Nairobi

The default description of Buru Buru, for the longest time, was that it is a middle-class
residential estate. Popularly known as Buru, the estate is located in the Eastlands neigh-
borhood in the Makadara Division part of Nairobi City County. Buru Buru was devel-
oped between the 1970s and 1980s with financing from the Commonwealth
Development Corporation. Of late, Buru Buru has become a concentration of urbaniz-
ation and urban exchange activity strongly influenced by socio-spatial exigencies of mar-
ketization as well as neoliberal doctrines of free market, free trade, free will and personal
initiative.42 Since its inception, the Estate has attracted a diversity of business prac-
titioners and professionals and expatriates, thereby becoming an exciting hub of essen-
tialist identities: self-identified “underground” artists; Sheng (a slang that combines
Swahili and English); and mathrees with incredibly shouting exteriors that vary from
normal graffiti to pictures of top athletes and artists and art colors, and vibrant interiors
of cool conductors, wide screens and loud music. Buru Buru also constitutes modern
architecture of mainly white storey maisonettes and bungalows as well as striking
orange tiled roof tops all characterized by different kinds of detached units secured by
gates that are sometimes neatly positioned along tarmacked roads.
Today, Buru Buru is highly shaped by organic and dynamic influences, both as a
sphere that is divided and fragmented. On one hand, Buru Buru represents the new
age of a faster, paced and more flexible and dynamic urban lifestyles, which partly
justify the new infrastructures of living and dwelling. It also reveals the rise of the
middle-class consumer who would later constitute key demographic of frontier capital-
ism, and the spiraling of the private sector and non-government projects. These develop-
ments have pushed Buru Buru to an urban conglomeration in a developing urban area.
Suffice to note is that on approaching the main center of the estate, what becomes obser-
vable is the rise of partial modifications to the originally orderly white houses with red
roofs. Other times, these houses have become interspersed with numerous gray
looking units that serve a rental purpose.
On the other hand, however, Buru Buru is an estate that is synonymous with cosmo-
politan hybridization. Its aspiration to semblances of modernity is synonymous with
rapid growth of the middle class while at the same time constituting a dynamic space
of mixed modes of living and dwelling that define its heterogeneity. For instance, Buru
Buru possesses pockets of informality as it is currently surrounded on all sides by so-
called slummy areas. These areas are developing a range of unobtrusive grids and collec-
tions of minor and apparently disjointed rooftops of mabati (iron roof) and matope
(mud) units, flexible and dynamic flood-resistant footpaths and cul-de-sacs, minimal
social and sanitation services. It is apparent that even some of the originally well-
thought-out open spaces such as playgrounds for children are now occupied by multi-
storey apartment blocks and shopping centers. While this has allowed people to make
more efficient use of existing urban space within the currently built area of the estate
– thereby reducing inefficient sprawl or peripheral development more evident in some
of Nairobi’s other estates – the general perception among residents is that the estate
has shrunk into a place that is by and large a victim of its own success so much so
that to live in Buru Buru is no longer associated as a sign of upward mobility. This is
understandably the case as Buru Buru bares the marks of an estate where the initial
 JOURNAL OF EASTERN AFRICAN STUDIES 7

neighborhood planning assumptions have not worked efficiently – and where proper
planning revisions and updating to accommodate or curtail the changes are non-existent.
Thus, we examine Buru Buru as a representative space and focal point for discerning
infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony in urban Africa. In so doing, we trans-
cend the tendency to view cities as vast and homogenous spaces, as opposed to constella-
tions of diversity and heterogeneity, by demonstrating what effects mobile telephony has
had within a single estate in the context of an East African city. Buru Buru makes for an
intriguing case because of how the intersection between the deployment of mobile tech-
nologies and processes of urbanization has played out over the last two or so decades.
Recently, Buru Buru has evolved into a sphere increasingly configured through prolifer-
ations and significations of mobile telephony. As such, it has come to reflect a changing
complexity upon which the African urban contexts are being redrawn and renegotiated
through mobile telephony use and appropriation. Within this context, Buru Buru
becomes important for examining infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony
as it reveals the unfolding of mobile-based infrastructural developments within situated
local contexts. While characterized by a myriad of place-specific articulations, Buru Buru
is also a place where global franchises and developers have directly designed modern pro-
jects for ordinary residents in the estates. Moreover, it is synonymous with new mobile
phone-based initiatives (like M-Pesa and token meters) and old mobile phone appropria-
tions (in the operations of kiosks and Mkokoteni handcarts).

Methodology
Our research process in the estate constituted a detailed ethnographic approach, drawing
from observations and open-ended interviews from three visits in Buru Buru between
June 2016 and June 2021. Observations targeted the use of mobile phones for Mkokoteni
handcart operations, electricity token meter connections, and mobile phone kiosk pro-
cesses. However, these observations did not necessarily imply a research strategy of
immersion but rather structured urban walks. The interviews, on the other hand,
people of considerable ingenuity and heterogeneity including agents at mobile phone
kiosks (5), operators of Mkokoteni water handcarts (5), users of token meters (7), and
specialists in mobile phone repairs and screen replacement (5). In total, twenty-two resi-
dents were interviewed. The snow-ball sampling method was used to identify key infor-
mants and executives with knowledge revolving around the translation and localization
of urban plans and digital technologies. The interviews were semi-structured and lasted
45 minutes to 1 hour and 30 minutes.
These approaches were important for providing a useful entry-point for understand-
ing infrastructure configurations of mobile telephony in Buru Buru. They were chosen
because contrary to the first generation of literature, telephony is not a monolithic or pla-
celess technology. Rather, it is used by diverse people, in diverse real-world locations.
Mobile telephony is thus embedded in and shaped by urban environments and develops
place-based styles in its development, delivery and appropriation. Thus, our approaches
were important for tracking the growth of mobile phone-based infrastructures as well as
what residents think of the efforts to digitalize infrastructure, to foreground their
thoughts, critiques, and reflections, such as (i.e. how do they experience infrastructures
in the age of mobile telephony; what “innovation” means to them).43 Thus, they provided
8 P. K. GUMA AND M. MWAURA

good insight into what is thought and experienced about the age of mobile telephony in
the urban terrain.

Three vignettes
On approaching the main center of Buru Buru estate, what becomes observable is the
increased uptake of mobile telephony in the estate (as much as literary anywhere else
in Nairobi, or urban Kenya). Vast billboards with mobile service offer for residents;
large posters of leading technological companies and delivery options for food stores
and supermarkets; side-by-side small and ordinary grocery stands, fruit vendors and
ad hoc hotels commonly referred to as kwa-mathe; established business premises plus
local mutindwa markets and roadside sellers with “till numbers” for mobile payments;44
boda boda delivery drivers on transit; etc. Under this section, we highlight how residents
are appropriating mobile phone applications and gadgets through key infrastructure
operations in the estate through the lens of three specific examples and vignettes: the
mobile phone kiosk, the electricity token meter, and the Mkokoteni water handcart.

The mobile phone kiosk

Buru Buru attests to the role of mobile phone kiosks along its main junctions and streets
in the peripheries. In Nairobi, mobile phone kiosks date back to colonial times as dukas45
that with time have taken different shapes and forms. Today, kiosks constitute an ordin-
ary type of a duka and offer a range of added mobile phone products and services. Even
some of the largest stores and supermarkets in malls and arcades now will most likely
have an M-Pesa or Airtel money kiosk or both. Thus, mobile phone kiosks have
moved from being peripheral technological infrastructures to a significantly mainstream
feature of Nairobi. In Buru Buru, these kiosks are now quite established, as revealed
through our observations and structured city walks. Many of these technological infra-
structures tend to have one or more boards that advertise different rates or at least
details of what the specific kiosk sells.
Mobile phone kiosks have become intricately bound into the lives of the urban resi-
dents, quickly diffusing in the city sphere as the link that facilitates money transfers, pay-
ments, depositories and withdrawals. These kiosks are often overtly green, this being the
official M-Pesa color. M-Pesa advertising at most kiosks is mostly composed of green
colored posters and signs sometimes also composed of light emitting diodes. Oftentimes
mobile money kiosks are strategically located on pavements and corridors of different
busy streets and corners, and they occupy small alley corner shops or metal kiosks,
made by local welders. Most of these structures are operated by young ladies and some-
times men too, who are commonly employed by the structure owners and appropriators
that tend to often be well off employed and enterprising residents.
From our discussion with several kiosk owners and retailers,46 what becomes interest-
ing is the ways in which these mobile infrastructures are cementing a strong presence in
Buru Buru, providing access to smart services for handsets and by so doing, different
modalities of digital access, connectivity and infrastructure. Mobile phone kiosks
combine both social and technical elements. Take the case of Mark,47 a mobile phone
kiosk owner in Buru Buru who runs a kiosk structure within a prime area of Buru
 JOURNAL OF EASTERN AFRICAN STUDIES 9

Buru’s business town. The kiosk combines as an electronics shop, a cooking gas refilling
point, and offers photocopy services. Mark also deals in Chinese phones and phone
screens and gadgets – some of them pirated under particular brand-name labels and
others produced by relatively obscure but legitimate companies like Tecno and G-
Tide. These low-cost and often short-lived phone gadgets are a popular item in Mark’s
kiosk due to high demand. Notwithstanding, Mark’s main revenue comes from M-
Pesa: for instance, he offers such services as mobile phone-based withdrawals, deposits,
sim card registration, sim card replacement, and helps customers with other kinds of
mobile transactions and queries. His kiosk offers M-Pesa services, Airtel money services
and is an official bank agent for both Equity Bank, Co-operative Bank, Family Bank,
Kenya Commercial Bank. Mark manages to maintain his float at an ever-high amount;
as we observed, two deposits of KES 88,900 (US$ 825) and KES 50,000 (US$ 465)
were done at the kiosk within the short time that we spent at the relatively busy kiosk.
Mark’s major complaints with the mobile phone kiosk business was it requires high
taxes which he notes are now at KES 10,000 (US$ 93) per year as these tend to increase
almost every other year. The other challenges he faces has to do with the common inci-
dences of theft and fraud in the business. For instance, we figured that he used a blue-
light note verification device and said, in addition, that he intended to buy the verifica-
tion/ note-counting device in the near future. Because he deals with large amounts of
money, sometimes people take advantage of this to stock fake notes in between original
ones, hence the need for such gadgets. While Mark’s kiosk is legally connected, some
kiosks tend to be illegally connected and largely unauthorized.
Kiosk owners’ profit generally comes from deposits and withdrawal commission fee
and for this reason the more integrated the mobile money payments are becoming the
less direct deposits and withdrawals are transacted. Most of the participants were mod-
erately comfortable with the returns from their individual stores. For example, Jere,48 a
long-time mobile phone kiosk owner argued that ‘there are so many mobile phone stores,
you turn anywhere in this city and its all-green kiosks.’ According to Jere, one must
diversify their sources of profits, and ‘this necessitates us to expand the stores by
dealing in a wide range of products and services.’ Indeed, most mobile phone kiosks
in Buru Buru are ordinary shops selling food and basic commodities or electronics.
For some, mobile telephony services are an addition to existing services that most
general shops offer such as electronics and groceries.
Esther,49 one of the other entrepreneurs we came across during our structured city
walks, for instance, had diversified into other areas such as being a bank agent for
several banks in addition to selling groceries and providing mobile money services.
Nevertheless, she established that, like Mark, M-Pesa was still her biggest source of
revenue. She argued that this was because of the integrated nature of M-Pesa with
most of the banks he acts as agents for. This, she said makes more M-Pesa customers
trust her shop with what she referred to as ‘big money.’ Still, this could be evidenced
by the fact that within 60 minutes of our conversation, several large deposits were trans-
acted via M-Pesa and one of the banks by some of her pop-in customers. She attributed
the flow to the fact that most people prefer transacting at kiosks rather than the bank pre-
mises in the urge to avoid long queues. She also argued that her kiosk was positioned in a
strategic location: for instance, the kiosk is near three major banks (Co-operative Bank of
Kenya, Stanbic Bank Kenya and Equity Bank Kenya) of which she is an agent to two.
10 P. K. GUMA AND M. MWAURA

Esther, however, complained about the bureaucratic nature of processes required to for-
malize kiosk operations in the city. For instance, she noted that to open a mobile phone
kiosk, one requires a business permit from the Nairobi City County. The owner also
needs a certificate of good conduct from the director of criminal investigation that is
taken yearly plus a Kenya Revenue Authority number that ensures they pay an annual
tax return. To enable a transaction, one needs a capital of KES 50,000 (US$ 465) float
plus, the business account must always have a considerable float as this float is what basi-
cally determines how much their customers can transact (withdraw or deposit). Here, the
different requirements and calculations that go into these operations are all based on the
role that mobile phone kiosks have attained within the urban sphere.
At an aggregated level, mobile phone kiosks depict the extent to which mobile tele-
phony has proved to be a catalyst of urban and infrastructural change. Moreover, they
reflect a reliance on mobile infrastructures like kiosks and widespread use and appropria-
tion of mobile media, devices and applications as tools of access, innovation and trans-
action, and reliance. As a spatial and aesthetic phenomenon mobile phone kiosks in Buru
Buru have allowed new formations and a renegotiation of urban space. Beyond contri-
buting to the reconstitution infrastructural and technological remodeling, they reflect
innovation capacities of local structures which reflects the utility of local knowledges
in the making of technology and technological infrastructures.

The electricity token meter

In light of the ubiquity of pre-payment for a host of domestic services (including internet,
TV packages, etc.) both in poor, middle and upper class households, token meters have
attained a critical role for residents in Nairobi. In Kenya, token meters are deployed by
Kenya Power, the main electricity provider in the country. They offer an infrastructure
ensemble that is relational in its interface with pre-payment and credit-loading com-
ponents, and complementary digital soft-loaning facilities. Mobile money platforms
are central to the functioning of token meters and open up space for them to become
powerful catalysts and the sine qua non for electricity access.
These technologies have shaped the landscape of Buru Buru to an incredible extent –
particularly in how residents make meaning of their existence in the city spaces and how
they interact with the authorities and the state. They have created users whose everyday
life is now predicated by their use of mobile-based applications for electricity infrastruc-
ture access. During our study, for instance, it became apparent that token meters50 have
gone a long way at simplifying payment processes in part, by curtailing time-consuming
post-paid and analogue processes associated with long queues in “paying halls.” For
instance, it was revealed during our interviews that users in Kenya traditionally paid
for electricity use via over-the-counter transactions. Here, bills would be mailed in
hard copy to customers which they (customers) would have to remit in cash at the com-
pany’s various halls, cash offices or designated receipting centers such as banks and post
office premises. These processes were more often than not, supported by manual systems
in the different paying halls. As the residents we spoke to narrated, towards the end of the
month, the queues would be very long and generally exhausting. However, the token
meter option, they argue, is different from the prior conventional processes as it does
not involve large amount of paper to handle multiple procedures, tools, and spreadsheets
 JOURNAL OF EASTERN AFRICAN STUDIES 11

for electricity payment. Some residents that we interviewed argued that fewer and fewer
people now need the service since most have gotten used to paying for the electricity bill
directly through M-Pesa from their phones.51 Moreover, they added that the M-Pesa Pay
Bill service for tokens in particular has improved with time.
As Jimmy explained,52 one thing worth appreciating about the electricity token
meter, is the process of acquiring the token and the associated loading of the tokens:
this process is analogous to mobile telephony (i.e. buying airtime credit from a
scratch card or digitally produced voucher at selected stores for the mobile phone).
Just like is the case with buying airtime credit, the electricity token can be purchased
from specific registered shops including mobile phone kiosks and the numerous
cyber cafes (or places of business in Nairobi that offer customers hi-speed internet
access and other computer services) at the shopping center. These shops still offer
the service and have the blue, yellow and white KPLC logo with tokens symbol on
their doors. Alternatively, tokens can be purchased the same way mobile phone or
sim-card codes are purchased such as through the M-Pesa or Airtel money Pay Bill
service. They are then to be “punched” in the handle remote keypad of the user inter-
face unit to instantly load electricity in real-time. Hence, electricity units for the meters
are purchased as a pre-payment meter alphanumeric single-use token or pin code
which typically takes the length of 20-digits. This code – the token – serves as the
pin which users use to obtain electricity units. The code is purchased both from
across a counter at designated points-of-sale and automated vending machines at stra-
tegic points operated by Kenya Power, or telecoms companies. The most common
option however is one that allows for mobile phone-based payments where mobile
phones have become very popular for purposes such as purchasing services, making
payments, and settling electricity bills. Thus, without the necessity for a distinct phys-
ical presence, the user has the option of self-processing the tokens from a centralized
KPLC Token vending system through authorized electronic data networks.
The residents we spoke to explained that they were happy with the token meters. Take
the case of Kisio who has lived at Nakwakipi court in Buru Buru for 13 years. At the
estate, Kisio’s family uses M-Pesa for purchasing electricity tokens. According to Kisio,
‘we now have meters in our houses that we can easily see as the units decrease. I now
approximate how many units we use in a normal month.’ This is because the meters
are mostly fixed at the door entrance and of late the meters are portable meaning home-
steads could decide on where to have them. Formerly, residents often complained of over
inflated bills that would be texted to them by the Kenya power company after their
monthly analogue meter reading. Kisio captured the complaint by arguing how ‘before
we used to wait for text messages from Kenya power in between the month which
were not detailed, I mostly suspected they guessed the figures as I honestly did not
always see them come to read the meters.’ Though the complaints of inflated bills in
the token system were sometimes expressed by our interlocutors as well, the interlocutors
were more confident with this system than the previous post payment system. However,
most of them highlighted their discomfort with the high taxes and fuel charges categor-
ized in the token bills breakdown. Moses, a friend of Kisio described these as ‘too high a
tax on top of the other daily taxes Kenyans pay.’
Notwithstanding, the residents appreciated some offers from mobile telecoms compa-
nies such as Safaricom. One example is the offer referred to as Okoa Stima,53 a platform
12 P. K. GUMA AND M. MWAURA

to acquire a loan for electricity access in their household. Teddy54 who has used this plat-
form argued that the amount of the loan that one is able to receive is based on a pre-
determined credit limit on past relationship of undertakings with the telecoms
company. It comes at a facility fee that is payable within seven days. Teddy appreciated
Okoa Stima because it provides a unique product that is both immediate as it is incre-
mental and frugal; can be accessed by means of a “feature phone” – or non-smart
phone; and does not necessarily require access to mobile internet but operates via
SMS, SIM card toolkit, or USSD. However, Teddy argued that this service charged a
fixed ‘facilitation fee’ of 10% which according to him is increasingly high; and that the
amount credited is due within seven days. In the event of late- or non-payment, the cus-
tomer becomes susceptible to negative effects such as getting shut out of the system by
‘accidental default,’ or even suffering in other unintended ways, such as directly deduct-
ing mobile money balances. Nevertheless, Teddy thinks that the product is a household
success as it aligns with the ‘kadogo economy’ (an economy that thrives upon a small-
scale-driven way of life). Accordingly, the service has enabled him to navigate the chal-
lenges of abrupt and often-untimely blackouts and expiration of electricity tokens in the
meters.
The above experiences highlight the social and spatial impact of mobile technological
innovations that target situated conditions. At a broader scale, the spread and adoption of
token meters in Buru Buru is reflective of the extent to which mobile phone-based tech-
nologies are shaping the estate’s landscape. As technologies that involve more improved
forms and pathways of automation and virtually cash-less payment, token meters high-
light a new breed of technological innovations in Buru Buru and African cities at large.
Moreover, they highlight the dialectic of mobile-based infrastructure and situated articu-
lations, creating new realities and terrains of infrastructural configurations of mobile
telephony.

The Mkokoteni water handcart

Water handcarts, commonly known as Mkokoteni are characteristic of Buru Buru streets.
The carts, which have a long history in Nairobi, are more or less made of simple metal
rods, wooden planks and old tires. They are commonly designed in jua kali spaces55 by
welders who often possess the required expertise to engineer new technologies at prices
ranging from KES 10,000 (US$ 93) to KES 20,000 (US$ 186) per item. In Buru Buru,
Mkokoteni handcarts often possess artistic captions with Swahili terms and catchwords
sometimes in addition to the owners’ names or pseudonyms or other identification
labels like a phone number. Mkokoteni handcarts are often strategically parked on
road sides from where clients can request them to transport water from further water
points to a household or business premise. For example, our structured city walks
often revealed several Mkokoteni handcarts stationed next to public water points awaiting
along with yellow and blue jerricans. Similar handcarts were also often seen parked in
rows at the Mutindwa market, a popular local open marketplace in Buru Buru. At
such points, their operators could be seen often trying to hawk or sometimes simply col-
lecting and distributing water jerrycans from one point to another.
Mkokoteni handcart drivers are a largely heterogeneous group of workers. While the
Mkokoteni operators and drivers are sometimes also their owners, but in other cases,
 JOURNAL OF EASTERN AFRICAN STUDIES 13

Mkokoteni are owned by a few enterprising individuals who hire them out to the young
men and women that then become tasked as custodians or consigns to make money with
them. The Mkokoteni owners in return receive considerable fees at the end of the day,
week, or month. One owner for instance intimated that they made up to KES 20,000
(US$ 186) a week.56 Often, the workers do not need proper licenses to operate; but
some owners do possess single business permits from the Nairobi county government.
The drivers, whose function is to carry or move a service to people’s homes, communities
and areas in general, purchase piped water in bulk, sell the water often in smaller quan-
tities of jerrycans at a slightly higher price, and collect the money due. Tom is one of such
drivers. He gets the water from different private or council water points at around KES 10
(US$ 0.093) and KES 20 (US$ 0.19) per jerrycan and sells it in smaller quantities of 20-
liter jerrycans at a cost of KES 20 (US$ 0.19) and KES 50 (US$ 0.46) each to households,
barbershops, salons, hotels and other businesses. This makes the Mkokoteni instrumental
for supplying water. On the domestic level, Mkokoteni carts are instrumental particularly
in parts of Buru Buru where water flows only two or three days a week two days in a week.
Most residents have water tanks for sustenance but as some residents we spoke to men-
tioned, there are times when they must contact the Mkokoteni drivers for water delivery
in times of shortage.
Mobile phones are of great importance in the daily work of the drivers and operators
as most of their clients contact them for their services by phone. For Tom,57 these ser-
vices usually involve M-Pesa which as he argues, is the most preferred service of his
clients. They pay him through M-Pesa where they send the money to his Safaricom
phone number directly or through his linked till number. He uses M-Pesa to pay for
the water he gets from the central place (broker or the water tankers). The M-Pesa pay-
ments, he notes, are good as they allow him to connect with his customers easily. Both
his mobile number (Safaricom) and till number (M-Pesa) are written on the Mkokoteni
handcart. He says that most of his customers pay in alternating sequences. He appreci-
ates the platform more for the fact that it allows him manage his money better; he can
keep the money on the platform, can save it for the bills, but also can use it to pay for
things elsewhere. As he argues, the advantage of having the money on M-Pesa is that it
is safer there and can be used to directly pay for his personal bills like electricity at
home or even at his local supermarket. However, the challenge with mobile money
is when very small transactions have to be transacted on the platform like is the
case with the nature of the Mkokoteni business: the M-Pesa withdrawal transaction
cost is too high for him since he does not deal with too much money. This makes
him prefer that his customers pay him through cash. He sometimes tries to make
the customer shoulder the transaction cost by requesting them to send KES 30 (US$
0.28) on top of the due amount but this discourages his customers so it is not a
good option.
Like Tom, the other Mkokoteni drivers that we spoke to accept payment via mobile
money in their transactions with clients and they themselves did mention that they
paid for water purchases through the same mode. However, some still pointed out,
that sometimes the system charges extra fees, especially during money withdrawals.
However, such costs can always be avoided if the Mkokoteni driver acquired a till
number for their operations. As Owuor,58 another Mkokoteni driver, revealed to us,
14 P. K. GUMA AND M. MWAURA

most of my customers keep demanding that I get a till number for my operations as that
would make it cheaper for them to pay me via M-Pesa. I am not however sure that Safaricom
will give my Mkokoteni a till number as they usually require a business to be established not
a “small hustle” like mine.

Owuor wishes to acquire a till number and integrate it to his bank account such that any
money received via M-Pesa is automatically saved in the bank. Most of the participants,
including Tom and Owuor, admitted increased use of mobile money services came
during the Covid-19 pandemic. Nana, for instance argued: ‘when Corona came we
were all afraid and had small tanks at our kiosks for our customers, we also feared touch-
ing notes and thus required our customers paying us through M-Pesa.’ These accounts
demonstrate the extent to which mobile telephony and its associated platforms are
offering valuable alternatives at the interface of water suppliers and consumers within
the value chain of Mkokoteni water operations and distribution.
Nonetheless, the integration of mobile payment systems in the everyday operations of
Mkokoteni handcarts signals the convergence of new mobile technologies (associated by
faster, paced and more flexible urban lifestyles) and old mobile infrastructures (that are
synonymous with disappearing pretentions of modernity). Mobile-based operations of
Mkokoteni handcarts portray how the mobile phone is allowing new formations and
articulations in old infrastructures. The intersection between new mobile configurations
with old technological infrastructures has played out – amidst its apparent capacity to re-
invent itself – over the last two or so decades. This intersection, which is largely predi-
cated upon the old and the new interfacing in the contemporary present, has created
new realities and new configurations of urbanity. It takes us beyond speculative framings
and geographical imaginations of the urban as a sphere that is consistently shaped by
global impacts, and draws us to situated actions, knowledges, innovations and
ingenuities.

Conclusion
This article sought to examine infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony in
urban Africa. Drawing from three vignettes in Buru Buru (including the mobile phone
kiosk, the token meter for electricity, and the Mkokoteni water handcart), we demon-
strate how infrastructures are being configured through the use and appropriation
mobile phone-based technologies and platforms. We contend that these configurations
are evolving hand in hand with the nature of Buru Buru’s urbanization. For instance,
they are embedded within the usual personal apparel and everyday life and contexts of
the urban terrain; and are enforced through place-specific innovations and ingenuity
of ordinary residents, where new incoming technologies (like the mobile phone and
mobile money) interface with the old and existing technologies (like the kiosk and Mko-
koteni). These materializations highlight the imperative of place in the shaping of tech-
nology: technology evolves within a situated context and becomes valuable only in terms
of how people use it within its given context. Here, that the emergent infrastructural
configurations of mobile telephony are symbolic of the complex and lived realities of
urbanity in Buru Buru, speaks to the ways in which urban infrastructures are not only
imposed on but built through their interface with context specific realities of a place.
 JOURNAL OF EASTERN AFRICAN STUDIES 15

In summation, findings of this study invite re-imaginations of not just the infrastruc-
tural configurations of mobile telephony and innovation, but also of conventional area
studies. For instance, our approach transcends African studies’ approach to the urban;
such as the tradition where the urban has long considered rural-urban connections,
rather than seeing the urban or city as a “thing” that can be studied by itself. Thus, we
believe that there is a possible different trajectory of understanding cities and urbaniz-
ation. This article underscores the significance and complexity of imagining and repre-
senting space through emergent technologies and infrastructures. Such an awareness that
becomes even more imperative in the age of mobile telephony. Looking further at
material connections between mobile telephony and infrastructure and variegated
configurations within an urban terrain is important for better understanding African
cities through their diversities and heterogeneities, continuities and discontinuities,
and incompleteness and partiality both visible and invisible. Within this scope, it
becomes important to articulate the ‘internal and external divides and national and
regional boundaries but also a wide range of terrain and geography, both real and ima-
ginary.’59 Such insights are imperative for thinking about ‘new’ geographies60 – whether
as regions, continents, or invented geopolitical concepts such as “the global South”.

Notes
1. Also known as a subscriber identity module, a SIM card is a removable smart card that
stores identification information for mobile phones.
2. SMS stands for ‘Short Message Service’ and refers to standard text messages mobile phones.
3. Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) is a communications protocol used by
mobile phones to communicate with the mobile network operator’s computers.
4. A mobile-based financial package account by Equity Bank, Kenya on Safaricom M-Pesa that
helps clients save easily and offers interest on savings, as well as lending and insurance
facilities.
5. M-Shwari is a paperless banking service offered through M-PESA that enables the user to
open and operate an account through the mobile phone, via M-PESA, without the need
to visit a bank.
6. Fuliza M-pesa is a service launched by Safaricom that allows registered M-Pesa users to
transact even if there is insufficient funds on their M account – the extra money is
carried over as a loan that is immediately deducted whenever one recharges their M-Pesa
account.
7. Mkokoteni is a Swahili word for a two-wheeled trolley pushed or drawn by hand, usually
used by traders to ferry heavy goods from one place to another – often in major towns
and city suburbs.
8. Robinson, “Comparative Urbanism,” 188.
9. Myers, African Cities.
10. We recognise that over the last two decades, research on world cities and global cities has
unsettled the nation-state as the default unit of analysis in social science. Rather than
seeing the world as comprised of a mosaic of national political and social units, alternative
geographies of networks connecting cities and urban regions have risen to prominence. See,
Bunnell, “City Networks as Alternative Geographies,” 27–43.
11. See, Myers, Rethinking Urbanism.
12. Ferguson, Global Shadows.
13. Castells et al., “The Mobile Communication Society,” 19.
14. Koch, “Urban ‘Utopias’,” 2445.
15. Castells et al., “The Mobile Communication Society,” 92.
16 P. K. GUMA AND M. MWAURA

16. Manica and Vescovi, “Mobile Telephony in Kenya”; Mbiti and Weil, “Mobile Banking”;
Oduor et al., “How Technology Supports Family Communication.”
17. Ndemo and Weiss, Digital Kenya, 509; Tonny and Sullivan, “Money, Real Quick.”
18. De Bruijn, “Mobile Phones.”
19. Cardon, “Innovation par l’usage”; Chéneau-Loquay, “Innovative Ways,” 3.
20. Buku and Meredith, “Safaricom and M-Pesa in Kenya”; Jack and Suri, “The Economics of
M-PESA”; Mbiti and Weil, “Mobile Banking.”
21. Kamga and Cishahayo, “Information and Communication Technologies.”
22. Buku and Meredith, “Safaricom and M-Pesa in Kenya”; Jack and Suri “The Economics of M-
PESA”; Mbiti and Weil “Mobile Banking.”; Chéneau-Loquay, “Innovative Ways,” 3;
Cardon, “Innovation par l’usage”; Hahn and Kibora,“The Domestication of the Mobile
Phone”.
23. Chéneau-Loquay, “Innovative Ways,” 3; Cardon, “Innovation par l’usage”; Hahn and
Kibora “The Domestication of the Mobile Phone”; Manica and Vescovi, “Mobile Telephony
in Kenya.”
24. That is, where newly innovative concepts bypass a trajectory of their predecessor.
25. Ndemo and Weiss, Digital Kenya, 509.
26. Muchiri, A Handbook of Mobile Money Business in Kenya.
27. Madise, The Regulation of Mobile Money.
28. Ndemo and Weiss, Digital Kenya, 509; OmwansaTonny and Sullivan, “Money, Real Quick.”
29. Ward, “Internet Consumption in Ireland.”
30. Berker et al., Domestication of Media and Technology, 14.
31. Achieng, “Breaking the Cycle,” 251.
32. Ito et al., “Technosocial Situations,” 259–260.
33. Chéneau-Loquay, “Innovative Ways,” 3.
34. Ibid.
35. Lawhon et al., “Thinking through Heterogeneous Infrastructure,” 722.
36. See, also, the work of Anand et al., “The Promise of Infrastructure”; Guma, “Incompleteness
of Urban Infrastructures,” 728–750; Guma, “Recasting Provisional Urban Worlds,” 1–16;
Larkin, “Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” 327–343; Von Schnitzler, “Traveling Tech-
nologies,” 670–693; and others, which addresses processes of commodification of basic
infrastructure, different moral economies of the metered electricity and piped water.
37. Mutongi, Matatus.
38. Nyabola, Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics.
39. Kimari, “The Story of a Pump”; and Kimari and Ernston, “Imperial Remains and Imperial
Invitations.”
40. Kimari, “The Story of a Pump.”
41. Lawhon, “Thinking Through Heterogeneous Infrastructure.”
42. Kahora and Mwangi “Remapping Buru Buru,” 162–168.
43. See, e.g. Godin, Models of Innovation.
44. A Till Number is a special business service number that allows customers to pay for goods
and services through a mobile payment channel such as M-Pesa.
45. Duka is Swahili for ‘shop’.
46. Nana, owns kiosks at Mutindwa market where she sells second hand phones and spare parts;
Doga, repairs phones and watches at a corner shop.
47. Mark, an M-Pesa owner whose kiosk triples as a phone shop and cooking gas refill point and
offers photocopy services in a duka at the heart of the estate.
48. Jere, a long-time mobile money kiosk owner whose kiosks sells general basic household
items including food items;
49. Esther, M-Pesa and Bank agent and kiosk owner, also sells electronics.
50. e.g. Jimmy, resident of Buru Buru who works in the central business district; Kisio, resident
of Buru Buru for 13 years; Moses, resident of Buru Buru; Mark, water supplier at Mutindwa
market.
51. Moses, Kisio’s neighbour and friend.
 JOURNAL OF EASTERN AFRICAN STUDIES 17

52. Jimmy, resident of Buru Buru who works in the central business district.
53. A mobile phone-based soft-loan facility launched in 2015 by Safaricom to keep pre-paid
meter clients from darkness in case of a black-out where users are able to acquire electricity
tokens on credit in real time.
54. Teddy, electricity token user at his shop and household.
55. Jua Kali is Swahili for “fierce sun”, an old phrase referring to tradespeople, travelling pedlars,
artisans and other kinds of labourers that work under scorching daytime conditions.
56. Tom, Mkokoteni service provider in Buru Buru; Waithaka, Mkokoteni service provider in
Mutindwa market; Teddy, electricity Token user at his shop at her shop and household.
57. Tom, Mkokoteni service provider in Buru.
58. Awuor – Mkokoteni around Mutindwa market too.
59. Simone, “People as Infrastructure,” 425.
60. Robinson, “Comparative Urbanism,” 188.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID
Prince K. Guma http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8511-5664

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