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Inter-Ethnic trust amongst the Urban Poor Youth in Nairobi

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Michelle Mboya

  • April 4, 2016
  • 8:20 am

SECTOR

Social science

PROJECT TYPE

Field experiments

DOI

Location

Kenya

BEHAVIORAL THEME

Trust | Urban | Ethnicity | Politics
OVERVIEW

This paper tests for interethnic trust amongst the urban poor youth in Nairobi. Whilst tribalism is a known problem in Kenya, I seek to see whether the younger generation who is believed not to be tribal centered, still carries the baggage of tribalism. Ethnic rivalries have been largely political and until today, Kenyans still vote in ethnic blocks. I carried out the ‘Trust Game’ (Berg, 1995) for 212 participants living in Kibera, a slum in Nairobi, Kenya. The ‘Trust Game’ would analyze how young people trust other people with their money based on ethnicity alone. Such an experiment would be able to capture ethnic biases outside of politics and voting trends.

THEMATIC AREAS

The importance of this background is to note several things. The first is that Kenya has been largely a peaceful country and the only thing that has ever made Kenyans turn against each other is related to tribes and ethnicity. Second, whilst ethnicity was something that could divide people in the past due to language differences and custom differences, ethnicity in Nairobi today should not be a dividing factor. Everyone speaks the same languages, English and Kiswahili, and no customs divide tribes in urban areas such as Nairobi. The third is that even though Kenya is very ethnically diverse, there are three or four main tribes, which dominate and lead; other tribes tend to align themselves with one of these. Fourth, two of the main suspects of the 2007-8-election violence, tried by the ICC, are the current president and the deputy president. Before the 2013 election, Kenyans knew that the president and vice president were being tried for the crimes. This did not affect the candidates’ electoral campaign. This underlines that ethnic alliances are very strong and can withstand almost any pressure. The voting trend in 2013 still showed that most Kenyans vote for people of their tribe.

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