The rights of Deaf persons need to be respected in order to prevent discrimination and ensure equality in Kenya’s criminal courts. Inclusive communication in the country’s criminal justice system is key and can only occur when information that is passed and received is understood by both the Deaf and hearing parties. The aim of this article is to determine how Deaf people can be supported and accommodated in order to ensure their effective participation at all levels of Kenya’s criminal justice system. With the backdrop of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the author contends that the State has an obligation to put in place reasonable accommodation and other accessibility measures that go beyond the provision of mere sign language interpretation, if the right to participation of Deaf witnesses is to be fully realized in the country’s criminal justice system.

How should we understand 1970s Kenya, with its combination of inequality and relative political stability? This article offers a new perspective on that by following the early history of the Harambee Co-operative Savings and Credit Society—the most prominent of many such societies that grew in those years. The rise and crisis of this co-operative provides evidence of mismanagement and the pursuit of personal advantage—but also suggests that civil servants saw the importance of enabling wider accumulation. As a result, the lowest-paid employees of government could see through Harambee—and other co-operatives—a possible, if precarious, route to a future as property-owners. That possibility helps explain both the institutional strength of Kenya’s provincial administration (whose employees were the members of Harambee Co-operative) and how a substantial number of Kenyans could develop a sense of themselves as citizens with a stake in the political system.

Donkeys (Equus asinus) play a vital role in supporting rural and peri-urban livelihoods across Kenya, yet their welfare remains poorly characterised and often compromised by human practices and environmental pressures. This study examined welfare challenges and opportunities across seven counties representing urban, high-potential, semi-arid, and arid production systems. A total of 392 donkeys were assessed using the Standardised Equine-Based Welfare Assessment Tool (SEBWAT), and structured interviews were conducted with owners to capture practices and environmental contexts. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and multivariable logistic regression. Approximately 80% of donkeys exhibited at least one welfare concern. Common problems included poor body condition (48.2%), spinal pain (46.9%), lameness (33.4%), and mutilations (41.6%). Variation was observed across systems with donkeys in urban and high-potential areas showing more spinal sensitivity and behavioural distress. Key predictors of poor welfare included work type, terrain, limited veterinary access, housing, owner negligence, and donkey age ≥ 6 years. Owners prioritised community education (64.5%), veterinary outreach (52.0%), humane handling (27.3%), and improved access to feed and water (21.9%) as key interventions. These findings provide insights for designing targeted, context-specific interventions. A holistic approach addressing both human and environmental challenges is essential for safeguarding donkey welfare and protecting livelihoods.

Civil society in Gramscian conception is an arena of hegemonic contestations and therefore essentially political. Development is also a political process inasmuch as it involves power in the allocation of resources and values. Yet, some African states as elsewhere globally, attempt to create and reproduce a legal–policy environment that favours an ‘apolitical’ ‘development’-oriented civil society while disabling those perceived ‘political’. This article argues the state–civil society relationship ambivalence is a product of competing visions of what constitutes ‘politics’ and ‘development’ and their governmentalities. Drawing on existing literature, primary interviews and media articles, the paper attempts to bring into conversation discourses on the political and development roles of civil society and how these have shaped state–civil society relationships from colonial period to the present day Kenya. Reflecting on manifestations of assumed role dichotomy and implications for state–civil society relations, the paper argues that the dual roles are complimentary and mutually reinforcing. The dual roles have also resulted in multiple relationships between state and civil society.

Faith-based organizations (FBOs) have long played a role in international development, and are increasingly involved in environmental sustainability initiatives. Despite these contributions they have, until recently, been largely ignored in scholarship and by secular agencies. This article adds to the growing recognition of FBOs, exploring the identity and function of FBOs doing environmental and development work in Kenya through document review, qualitative questionnaires and participant observation. A diverse group of FBOs with varied identities and engaged in a broad range of activities revealed several strengths and challenges of faith-based environmental and development work. Of particular note is the key role churches and faith-based agencies can play in effecting sustainable and holistic change in Global South countries, due to their rootedness in the community, the social capital they help to produce, and the respect they receive from the people.

This article analyses the Ufungamano Initiative, a broad-based movement involved in constitutional reform struggles in Kenya. By analysing the rise, operations, achievements, and challenges of the Initiative, I argue that contemporary constitutional reform struggles in Kenya were societal responses to an avaricious political and economic class. It is further argued that the movement resulted from a fragmented elite consensus that widened political opportunities for contentious politics and therefore forced concessions for popular engagement in re-defining the relationship between the people and the political class. Ultimately, the Ufungamano Initiative’s power eroded as a result of multiple competing parochial interests in the movement.

According to social and fiscal contract theories, governments provide core social services largely to maintain their legitimacy. But does the state itself have to provide the services? In most developing countries, both nonprofit and for-profit schools and health clinics exist alongside those of the state. However, limited research has measured the relationship among citizens’ use of these services and attitudes about state legitimacy. This paper examines whether nonstate service provision is associated with decreased government legitimacy. We find a negative relationship between the use of for-profit services and state legitimacy, but no clear relationship between nonprofit service provision and legitimacy, even when controlling for satisfaction with services provided. We propose several explanations for why for-profit service provision could affect legitimacy that are not present in nonprofit services.

This article is a case study of the Kasarani Stadium in Kenya as a heuristic through which to understand President Daniel Arap Moi’s political style and priorities during the first decade of his regime. Drawing primarily from national and international newspapers, the archives of national and international sporting organizations and associations, records of the Kenyan government and biographies of Moi, I explore how Moi gave political meaning to sport to advance his populist politics at home and project Kenya on(to) the international stage. At home, he used sports to define himself as a leader of the ordinary mwananchi (citizen), in touch with the experiences, challenges, and visions of the common Kenyan. Internationally, he used sports to chart Kenya’s foreign policy and fashion himself as an international political personality. The article concludes that the study of sports and sporting infrastructure offers a productive way to write social, political, and cultural histories of postcolonial Africa.

Education is thought to be an essential tool for building social cohesion in an ethnically diverse society. This paper evaluates the effect of exposure to a more diverse student body on trust, tolerance, and patriotism in one country where the government has made explicit efforts to use schooling to foster social cohesion: Kenya. In the wake of electoral violence in the 2007 elections, Kenya’s government expanded the number of ‘national schools’, schools with required regional diversity quotas, from 18 to 103. We leverage the policy change to compare 984 secondary students in schools that differ in their use of a diversity quota. We measure friendship with outgroup members, trust, tolerance, and national identity. Our findings indicate that national school students are more likely to have inter-ethnic friendships and are associated with a higher prioritization of civic national identity over subnational identities. We find that diverse friendships act as a mediating factor for increased trust and tolerance.

Countries in Africa face serious and worsening poverty brought about by historical and recent factors including the global economic downturn and national debt crises. Different actors have tested several mechanisms with the promise to alleviate poverty. Bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) and social assistance programmes in the form of cash transfers are such models. Despite the hype associated with the models, both demonstrate little achievement in the promotion of well-being in Africa, but instead, businesses are profiting at the expense of the poor. In this paper, we argue that the two models are precursors, handmaidens and the embodiment of the financialisation of social policy in Africa. Drawing on field interviews in Kenya, we demonstrate how the models have enabled financialisation of social policy through a narrative of financial inclusion of the poor, integration of market players in social protection, and through motives to orient the poor towards service-oriented markets.

This study explores the complexities of land formalization and the ongoing struggles for land justice among the Îgembe of the Kenyan Central Highlands. It begins by reviewing the prevailing argument that the formalization of land rights contributes to socio-economic growth and tenure security in the Global South. The study highlights the relational nature of rights in different contexts in African countries and discusses both the evidence and the scepticism surrounding land formalization. While the aim was to restore land rights to local people from colonial powers, the introduction of land registration in Kenya allowed political elites to appropriate land. The Îgembe people, having experienced land injustice in their local socio-historical context, have navigated the complexities of land disputes using indigenous institutions alongside state legal processes. I argue that success in land disputes often comes from a combination of personal courage and the use of both indigenous and formal legal frameworks.