Eastleigh: East African boom town

09/08/2011 / / 1 Comment

The first of three pieces on economic development in Eastleigh, this article will give some brief descriptive orientation to the neighborhood, with the follow-ups exploring some hypotheses for the rapid economic development.

The first week of research has been a whirlwind of interviews and neighborhood orientation – a stark contrast to last year’s first week spent largely organizing ourselves and preparing for travel. This owes much to Neil’s preparatory work getting a feel for the town, and our luck in meeting an excellent local informant on the first day. While checking out the largest new hotel in Eastleigh, we came across Kaamil, a local cable TV and online newspaper reporter from Mogadishu who’s been working in Eastleigh for the past nine years. Kaamil’s reporting instincts make him fearless in knocking on doors and helping arrange high-level interviews at a blistering pace.

Our local guide Kaamil

Click for larger map image

This first report will give a brief description of Eastleigh and some of the economic action in the neighborhood. Our thinking is that getting a handle on the economic dynamics in this neighborhood is a good starting point for contextualizing the motivations and experiences of the Somali diaspora with connections here. We’ve had a number of interviews with business leaders, property developers and retailers, who have all been tremendously helpful in giving us access and information across a range of social levels. Although there’s certainly a lot more to learn about a place as complex as Eastleigh, here’s a basic description of commercial development in the town.

One of the first things to stand out about Eastleigh is the sheer volume of activity. Eastleigh has developed into one of Kenya’s largest commercial districts, with approximately 100,000 residents, more than 30 large shopping malls, thousands upon thousands of retail outlets, and a huge number of hawkers covering the sidewalks and even roadways, all packed into less than one square mile of land.

Shopping malls lining Jam Street, Eastleigh

Somali merchants serve as the primary wholesale distributors for low-end apparel and electronics across the entire region. Every day large trucks are loaded with goods from Eastleigh to supply markets throughout Kenya and as far as Tanzania, Uganda, southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.

Commercial traffic along First Avenue outside the Olympic Shopping Mall

Growth has been explosive since the 1991 Somali civil war, and particularly meteoric in the past few years, with new retail and residential space popping up all over town.

Shopping malls have been a particular focus of ours in this first week, as they serve as the hub for activity in the garment and electronics sectors, as well as housing banks, travel agents, cyber cafes, clinics, development and construction firms, restaurants, mosques, professional training centers and more. They’re also a major focus of investment from Somalis here and abroad.

The mall concept originated with the old Garissa Lodge, which was the main hotel for Somalis visiting the area in the early 90s. Somali merchants would display goods on their beds during the day for prospective buyers, and eventually the entire hotel developed into a series of small shops operated out of the hotel rooms. This basic model has been transported into today’s malls filled with tightly packed small shops. The micro subdivision model of retail space offers low barriers for market entry and a wide selection of goods within each shopping mall.

Wholesalers / retailers such as these in the Sunlight Mall cut costs by consolidating retail and storage space

Until recently, the banking system serving Somalis in Eastleigh was virtually non-existent, which meant that most real estate projects here have been realized out of equity rather than debt. Property developers will often create a funding structure that is a hybrid of Somali community investment practices and Islamic finance models. Networks of Somalis who know and trust one another pool funds, thus circumventing the need for external financing from banks with security taking the form of existing assets. Such models can be quite similar to the Sharia’a-compliant financing vehicles of limited partnership (Mudaraba) or joint venture (Musharaka). The idea behind the Sharia’a-compliant financing is to enable Islamic investors such as local Somalis to increase their return via leverage with borrowed capital without breaking Sharia’a rules that prohibit charging interest, the use of hedging instruments, or involvement in certain sectors like gambling.

In line with such practices, a developer may raise capital by charging prospective shop owners a high upfront fee called ‘goodwill’. Definitive numbers for the neighborhood as a whole are hard to come by, but our informal surveys indicate that an upfront non-refundable payment of 25 to 40 times the monthly rent is typical for a 5-year commercial property lease. While the practice of charging ‘goodwill’ generates no small amount of controversy among shop owners, property developers claim that such fees are what allow them to realize property development projects out of equity in the absence of widespread access to traditional banking services.

There is also considerable investment in hotels and residential apartments, which along with the shopping malls are steadily replacing the older single level courtyard-style residences in Eastleigh.

New developments among older single story residences

A small sample of historical development at the southern edge of Easleigh illustrates the pace of new construction in just the past five years. In that time, property prices have doubled in most areas, and have jumped by nearly 500% in some places.

Satellite view comparison of development in southern Eastleigh 2006 and 2011 (Click on image for enlarged view)

Despite a new trend towards finished glass facades, most construction is generally of basic quality, and construction sites tend to be relatively inefficient and labor intensive.

Overhead view of construction site. All concrete is mixed by hand into a single mixer at the lower right, then raised by winch and delivered by wheelbarrow.

Close-up of supports for laying of upper floor

One property developer told us that such properties usually take a year to move through the permitting process (in which bribes play a central role), and then another 18-24 months for actual construction.

The rapid expansion of banking outlets in the city and other higher tier economic services such as commercial insurance providers, along with newer projects built to a higher standard, such as the Grand Royal Hotel, indicate that Eastleigh may be reaching a more advanced stage of economic development due to market saturation and attendant competition.

View of the Grand Royal Hotel - currently the tallest structure in Eastleigh

The big question is whether market saturation will lead to a general slowdown or bursting of a property market bubble, or whether the next stage will entail slower, but more sustainable growth. Some new shopping malls are sitting on significant retail vacancies, but this could be due to an over-saturation in specific markets like clothing retailers which favor these small sub-divided retail spaces, while other sectors such as financial services and healthcare seek more appropriate locations.

The primary complaint from residents and developers alike is the sorry state of local infrastructure. Paved roads and municipal services like garbage collection are nearly non-existent, leading to the local business association to file a suit against the Nairobi City Council.

Intersection of Second and 10th Avenue in Eastleigh after heavy rains and two days of drying out.

Water and electrical services are also woefully inadequate for the level of growth in this area, and collections of household water jugs, along with large diesel generators powering shopping malls are common sights. Claims of government corruption and speculation that fears of competition threats to the downtown business district are behind the lack of infrastructure investment are common among local residents. That said, the Kenyan High Court recently ruled that the City Council is barred from collecting taxes from 3,000 businesses for not providing municipal services, and there is talk now of large-scale infrastructure projects slated for Eastleigh later this year.

The next post will explore the common argument / local rumor that the boom in commercial development in Eastleigh is driven by ransom funds from Somali piracy.

If you have any questions or ideas to add to this post, please feel free to comment below. We’re just getting started with our investigations and analysis, and so welcome any insights you might have to offer.

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Neil Carrier’s Website

The Oxford Diasporas Program Website: Diaspora, trade and trust: Eastleigh, Nairobi’s Little Mogadishu

Hans Rosling: It’s Easier to Reach Fame Than Impact

17/06/2011 / / 4 Comments

Hans Rosling is a perfect case study in the potential impact of a single great presentation shared via social media. As a professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinskaya Institute, Rosling has spent years conducting research into the paralytic disease Konzo in Africa, developed a stunning public resource for global development data visualization – gapminder.org – and worked tirelessly to dispel myths about global development. Rosling’s superstar moment, however, came with this now-famous TED talk:

https://ted.com/talks/view/id/92

If you haven’t seen it, the TED website nicely summarizes the effect of his presentation work:

What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus.

I recently asked Rosling about lessons learned using social media, and his advice on teaching in the digital age (Rosling’s comments in red):

What are the most important lessons you’ve learned about using social media for teaching and outreach?

It is easier to reach fame than impact. If it’s so personal, you run the risk of standing in the way of your content.

The issue of entrepreneurialism and outreach is particularly tricky for academics hoping to use social media for impact. There’s much to be said for using emotion and passion as the vehicle for conveying information, and Rosling seems to succeed here because he balances intense passion with very high quality information and analysis.

Most of us fear the label of an empty self-promoter, and many of us are uncomfortable with taking responsibility for the development and maintenance of our own personal ‘brands’. However, for academics, actively managing their online identity, exploring new ways to generate wider community interest in their work and developing a more authentic personal presentations are significant professional skills we should be developing. As the academic market continues to undergo transformation, more of us will need to get comfortable promoting our work and ideas outside of the classroom.

What’s the single most important piece of advice you would give to someone just starting out in university-level teaching?

Pick the subjects and courses that really interest you rather than those that are predicted to give you nice job and salary, but study what you study very hard and go deeper and broader than what is required.
This is a tricky issue for new academics, as the pressure for secure positions and tenure strongly impacts decisions about how we approach our work. As a new academic, should you follow your passions and expect that the security will follow, or chase the security in order to have the freedom to follow your passion?

The depth of study recommendation goes hand-in-hand with the issue of passion. A challenge for both students and teachers these days is learning how to work with an unprecedented volume of digital information to develop solid analysis. Online search can promote an over-reliance on readily-accessible, superficial sources, and can offer students an easy way out of deeper research and contemplative consideration of sources. Access to nearly unlimited digital information presents tremendous opportunities for accessing new information, but also presents potential paralysis for those who haven’t developed a nose for quality sources and an understanding of what constitutes sufficient research. Too much information can be just a debilitating as too little, and establishing that balance should be a key research skill we help our students develop.

Are there any special skills we should be teaching our students in the digital age that are different than those we would have taught them in the past?

Critical thinking, reasoning and a quest for sources of all information. And when in doubt, rely on Wikipedia. It is amazingly good, especially if you carefully read the history of the text of interest.

Closely following on the last point, the use of Wikipedia by students is a deeply contentious issue among academics. Wikipedia has become the first, and often the last stop for many students in their research, and for many has become the symbol of a superficial approach to learning that exchanges depth of original knowledge for ease of access. I know of many academics who strongly warn their students away from the site (and refuse to accept references to the site in writing assignments), with warnings about the unreliability of crowd-sourced information.

While there is much to be said for an approach to deep knowledge that relies on the analysis of original source material and peer-reviewed academic writing, Rosling’s point should be taken for a number of reasons.

– It’s foolish to expect that students will simply ignore Wikipedia, as it simply covers too many subjects with useful depth. Often it can serve as a good orientation and entry point for new subjects, and a venue for cross checking certain kinds of information.

– One of our tasks as teachers should be to help students orient themselves within the flood of information available on the internet, and learn how to identify quality, reliable information. Learning how to identify the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia (and other crowd-sourced materials) and of finding reliable ways of digging deeper into topics should be an important part of digital literacy. Exploring this issue also holds many embedded lessons about the kinds of issues that crowds handle well, and those they handle poorly.

– As Rosling says, a careful reading of the discussion section of Wikipedia entries can be an excellent way to see the development of collective knowledge. If you’re unfamiliar with this side of Wikipedia, just click on the ‘Discussion’ tab in the upper right corner of each page entry:

An interesting example of a Wikipedia discussion page

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Certainly, it’s as uneven and imperfect as the rest of the site, but to throw Wikipedia out of our classrooms because of its flaws ignores the much deeper lessons we could be teaching our students about managing massive amounts of information and developing meaningful, up-to-date analytical skills in the digital age.

Incidentally, if you want to see more of Rosling in action, this is my personal favorite Rosling lecture, given in 2009 at the State Department:

https://ted.com/talks/view/id/620

Social Media Rockstars – Reese Leysen

10/06/2011 / / No Comments

The first in a regular series, Social Media Rockstars profiles success stories in reaching a wide audience via social media channels, and asks them what they’ve learned about creating impact and building communities in the digital world.

This week’s feature is on Belgian internet activist Reese Leysen. Reese is a self-described self-development activist, a co-founder of the I Power Project, a longtime Net Neutrality activist, and co-producer of the YouTube channel AtheneWins. A mostly game-themed channel, AtheneWins has generated nearly 375,000 subscribers, 24 million channel views and more than a quarter of a billion total upload views.

I’ve been following Reeses’ work for several years, and recently interviewed him about his work, future plans, and lessons learned.

 

First, how would you describe what you do to someone who isn’t a follower of your internet work?

Reese: When I get this question asked at any sort of situation where people aren’t very interested and want a quick short answer, I usually say something like “I work for YouTube”, which is true in the sense that I’m a YouTube partner and make a living from that.

An elaborate way to answer that question would be to talk about how I work together with my closest friends, Chiren, Tania and my brother Dean on online entertainment in order to grab the attention of a very large audience so that part of this audience takes an interest in what we’re really about, which is ‘self-development activism’. We run an online community/social network called I Power and our main goal with this project is to inspire and create the best environment possible for people to exchange ideas, find others to collaborate with and just generally ‘get serious’ about being open-minded and pro-active in their lives.

But a very simple answer to this question would just be: I try to make a positive difference in the best way that I can. In the end, I Power is just a means to an end, I just want to make the world a better place and I’m always open to bigger and better ways to do it. But at the moment, working on an approach where we can, over the years, perhaps have a huge impact on how ‘self-help’ is perceived and help move that whole sphere to a more concrete form of it (what we call ‘self-development activism’) seems to be the absolute best thing I can do.

 

You say you could be described as someone who works for YouTube. What’s a normal workday?

Reese: I’d say 50%-60% of my ‘work time’ is spent editing, the rest is spent shooting, answering mails and interacting, working out planning with Chiren, and keeping an eye on I Power and moderating the site a bit. The reason why a lot of time is spent editing is because the Athene videos are almost pure improv and the continuity or ‘story’ is created in editing.

 

That makes editing a huge part of the creative process, rather than just consisting of ‘putting the best takes together’. I have different types of work days, many of them are just spent editing all day long, luckily a lot of them are also very social (when Chiren &  Dean and I are shooting and throwing around ideas) and one day a week or so I spend just by myself thinking about what we’re doing, re-evaluating things and possibly shooting and editing a vlog as well.

 

 

What was the path that brought you to ‘self-development activism’, and how do you differentiate it from mainstream approaches to ‘self-help’?

Reese: As a group of close friends who would often debate about philosophy, ethics, morality, politics etc, we initially became known as political activists with our Belgian ‘NEE’ project six years ago. What we learned from this is that we were able to make a difference just by being creative, even without having much budget or means to do it with.

This was huge to us because we had often debated about whether or not a tiny group of people could somehow contribute on a ‘large’ scale to somehow making the world a better place. With this knowledge and experience, we asked ourselves: what is the best thing we can do? If we want to make things better, what’s the best way to go about it? It didn’t take long for us to all agree on the answer: if we can inspire people to be more open-minded and pro-active, we would be addressing the root of most of the problems that all societies face. The idea for I Power (including the name!) was born long before we even started ‘Athene’, but we knew we had a long way to go before we would have enough of a following to launch it in a significant way.

Self-development activism makes more sense to us as a term, rather than ‘self-help’. People who achieve satisfying levels of emotional balance and clarity of mind tend to have a very positive impact on their environment and the most the most effective practices of self-development seem to be aligned with our brains’ evolutionary inclination towards contribution and altruism. Self-help practices tend to focus on nothing more than temporary and shallow quick-fix approaches when they are disconnected from this, and we wanted to give it a label that clearly communicates that that’s not what we’re about.

 

Looking at your current YouTube videos, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious connection to your self-development work. What is your strategy to connect the Athene character videos with your larger aim of encouraging more contribution and altruism?

Reese: To answer this fully I have to go over the evolution of how we’ve approached Athene and I Power. It’s obvious that, in the beginning, we were just doing Athene and other projects to gain subscribers and establish an audience, and then at a certain point we launched I Power and for a while we used AtheneWins for all I Power videos and announcements. I think it was around half a year later that we reached sort of a tipping point: we had a community that was really into SDA on one hand and on the other hand we had a huge audience with Athene of which most are not interested in I Power. Not only did this make things difficult in the sense that we got much more complaints than support whenever we’d put an I Power vid on AtheneWins, but it also created serious problems for the community: angry Athene fans coming to I Power to troll everyone is something that we really had to work on (and still have to be careful with to avoid today).

Since then, we kept things mostly separated (AtheneWins & IPowerChannel etc). Though whenever we’re doing something really huge, whether it being an urgent net neutrality thing or the release of the AToE documentary, we do at least announce it on AtheneWins. I think, in the past, the way we experimented with ‘gaming the system’ on YouTube took its toll on our fanbase in the sense that it made them intolerant towards anything we would throw at them that would be non-Athene (they felt they were being ‘tricked’ into things).

Here’s what’s happening now: we’ve come back from a long Athene hiatus and I Power has moved from being a side-project to an important priority to us, as we had always planned would happen one day. Much of our fanbase has both grown up a little bit more and has also become more flexible in the sense that the days of us pulling annoying tricks on them to gain more subscribers are long gone and it’s now very clear to everyone that AtheneWins is a combination of entertainment as well as glimpses into what we’re really about. With a very successful Athene comeback, we’re now experimenting with a bunch of different things to achieve our goals: as I type this I’m about to edit what could be a really funny but also very insightful Athene SDA-oriented video, as well as a related video for Chiren’s new personal channel that we’re about to launch and that will undoubtedly attract tons of fans who are really into his ‘persona’ and get more people interested in our ‘serious’ side. Putting SDA stuff into Athene videos and Chiren having a non-Athene channel are just a few of the things we will be doing to bring I Power to a bigger audience as it has now become a bigger focus of ours. There’s tons of ideas on our list and I’m really excited about em!

 

Obviously there’s a problem with not pleasing anyone if you’re trying to reach a mass audience, but there’s an alternate trap if you orient yourself too much towards pleasing the crowd. How do you maintain a balance between entertaining and communicating what you feel is important?

 Reese: We’ve always looked at things in a very long-term frame and for the most part of our projects we have been much more focused on entertainment than activism. This way we can keep a large crowd interested and at the same time have a lot of impact when we take action. We’ve noticed in the past that the community and the fanbase can grow tired of us quickly if we focus too much on the activism but they become huge supporters if we balance it the right way. However, the main plan is actually to expand the team and go about this much more efficiently in the future. This is something we’ll be making videos about in the near future, we’re looking for people to join us in our projects, not just as supporters but as equals, meaning they contribute ideas and if they make more sense then we go with those instead of our initial ones etc. We’ve come a long way but we’re only in the very early starting phases of the I Power project. It’s a learning process and we’re now trying to figure out how we go about expanding the team, how we go about optimizing things so we can keep the AtheneWins channel growing and reaching even bigger audiences while at the same time we turn I Power into a much bigger priority of ours.

 

So what advice would you give to someone who wants to become a social media rockstar?

Reese: What we’ve learned and are really starting to take to heart now in how we do things is that these seem to be the key ingredients:

– care

Use YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, e-mail etc to really interact and not just ‘announce’. Have as much ‘conversation’ with your audience as possible. This is especially important when your audience is small or even tiny (like one or two people maybe when you’re just starting out). What’s really crucial in this is that you view everyone as being really important to you. For example: even if I get the most ridiculous hate-filled troll comment on a vlog, I often try to respond to that with genuine caring. I think having the ability to say “maybe you’re right, I’m sorry that this or that annoyed or disappointed you, please let me know what you think I should change/improve” is one of the most underrated things ever when dealing with controversy or ‘haters’ in your audience. And toward people who love you: same thing, realize how big of a deal that it is that there are people checking out your shit, even if it’s one or two guys, and express it. Most powerful way of doing this is individual responses to each comment, people never forget it when you do that.

– confidence

This works best when you really know what you’re doing and/or have a big following and can often be the opposite of the ‘caring’ approach but both approaches have their place. When you look at people who have a big following online, whether it’s Gary Vaynerchuk or in self-development Tony Robbins or in our case, ‘Athene’, so much is often attributed to how they ‘don’t give a shit’, how they seem to know what they’re doing and are relentlessly driven in how they do it. If you can express that in what you do, it can be incredibly inspiring and can often be even more important than caring in certain areas. As I’m typing this I just now realize that the Athene/Chiren duality can actually be boiled down to confidence/care and that’s probably a big reason why that has worked so well thus far.

– adapt but persist

Very delicate balance, things take time to grow but at the same time figuring out what works, what goes viral and what connects people has been a learning process for us and we haven’t always made the right calls in when to adapt and when to persist. The road we’ve traveled has taught us a lot in that. The most legendary call we ever made in this is when we started doing Athene: we were extremely determined, working hardcore every day on a movie project that we thought was going to get us awards and make us huge and give us the platform we needed. While doing this, we played around with making these ‘Athene’ videos and, while we were so immersed and passionate about our movie project… After the first few Athene vids we had to face reality: the chances that the movie was gonna become as big as Athene was promising to become were slim. So we adapted to that fact and… It’s a good thing we did.

Security Issues in Social Media

07/06/2011 / / 3 Comments

The following is an Executive Summary from a keynote I gave recently to an international business group focused on security issues. The major themes will be explored in detail here soon.

Traditional approaches to the security implications of social media tend to focus on social networks as vehicles for software virus transmission, and potential risks such as stalking and identity theft. Further attention should be placed on the data contained within emerging social graphs, which through sites such as Facebook can reveal both objects (e.g., people, photos, events, and pages) and the connections between them (e.g., friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags). Criminal networks are learning to exploit such information, allowing much more sophisticated forms of social engineering to be used in identity-based fraud. However, criminals may also be vulnerable to exposure through the information contained in social graphs, and the use of such data should be understood by investigators.

The spread of social networking services also has important implications for privacy, transparency and security through the convergence of social media and mobile devices with Internet access, location awareness and digital imaging capabilities. Social media adoption enables a wide range of self-organizing behaviors, which is shifting power away from traditional institutions, and into the hands of interconnected users. While the range of novel social services incorporating these capabilities is difficult to predict, future erosions to privacy and threats to security are just as likely to come from the sharing activities and security practices of other users as they are from governments or service providers. Significant divides over appropriate levels of sharing, transparency, privacy and connectivity will continue to emerge on both inter-cultural and inter-generational levels. Bridging these gaps will present ongoing challenges to global businesses with multi-generational workforces.

For organizations that resist the temptation to block access to these services at work, social media offers enormous opportunities for learning and information sharing. Social media can also lend unprecedented speed and scale to customer education and relationship building. Organizations seeking to benefit from a shift in economic activities based on knowledge stocks to knowledge flows should understand both the network structure and psychological drives behind the recent burst of social media activity. One important element in adapting to competitive and criminal pressures should be sustained efforts to harness social media based knowledge flows, and proactive efforts to define best practices and norms of participation within these digital environments.