Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T11:07:06.769Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Seeking Incorporation? Voluntary Labor and the Ambiguities of Work, Identity, and Social Value in Contemporary Kenya

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2015

Ruth J. Prince
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

This article seeks to understand why Kenyans have responded so enthusiastically to the recent push, by the government and NGOs, for voluntary labor within health and development projects and interventions. It argues that voluntary labor gains meaning and value in relation to broader economies of work and unemployment, to anxieties about identity, recognition, and belonging, and to aspirations for personal as well as national development. In the context of precarious economies and the contraction of formal employment opportunities, voluntary labor constitutes valued, if unpaid, work; it offers opportunities for those excluded from formal employment to gain a valued identity and a sense of social worth; and it makes volunteers visible to powerful institutions (state and nonstate) that hold the keys to personal growth, social recognition, and developmental futures. Voluntary labor is a site of struggles about identity, social value, and recognition, which the decline of twentieth-century trajectories of progress has made acute.

Résumé:

Cet article cherche à comprendre pourquoi les Kenyans ont répondu avec tant d'enthousiasme à la poussée récente, par le gouvernement et les organisations non gouvernementales, pour le travail bénévole au sein de projets et d’interventions de santé et de développement. Elle fait valoir que le travail volontaire gagne sens et valeur notamment par rapport aux économies du travail plus larges et du chômage, aux anxiétés liées à l'identité, la reconnaissance et l’appartenance, et aux aspirations de développement tant au niveau personnel que national. Dans le contexte des économie précaires et de la réduction de vraies possibilités d'emplois, le travail volontaire constitue un vrai travail, même s’il n’est pas rémunéré; pour les personnes exclues du marché de l'emploi il offre des occasions d'acquérir une identité valorisée et un sens de valeur sociale; et il permet aux volontaires de devenir visibles face aux institutions importantes (étatique ou non étatique) qui détiennent les clés de la croissance personnelle, la reconnaissance sociale et le développement à terme. Le travail volontaire est un lieu de luttes pour l'identité, la valeur sociale et la reconnaissance, exacerbé par le déclin des trajectoires de progrès du XXe siècle.

Keywords

Workidentityyouthdevelopmentcitizenshipvoluntary laborEast Africa
Type
ASR FOCUS ON VOLUNTEER LABOR IN EAST AFRICA
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , September 2015 , pp. 85 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, Vincenne. 2012. “The Other Road to Serfdom: Recovery by the Market and the Affect Economy in New Orleans.” Public Culture 24 (1): 185‒216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allahyari, R. A. 2000. Visions of Charity: Volunteer Workers and Moral Community. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barkan, Joel D., and Holmquist, Frank. 1989. “Peasant‒State Relations and the Social Base of Self-Help in Kenya.” World Politics 41: 359‒80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banegas, Richard. 2001. “Nouvelles figures de la réussite et du pouvoir.” Politique Africaine 82: 5‒23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayart, Jean-François. 1993. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Beisel, Uli. 2014. “The Blue Warriors: Science, Democracy and Public Health in Malaria Control Experiments.” In Para-states and Medical Science: Global Health in Africa, edited by Wenzel Geissler, P., 281‒302. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Berman, P. A., Gwatkin, D. R., and Burger, S. E.. 1987. “Community-Based Health Workers: Head Start or False Start towards Health for All?” Social Science and Medicine 25: 443‒59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boesten, Jelke, Mdee, Anne, and Cleaver, Frances. 2011. “Service Delivery on the Cheap? Community-Based Workers in Development Interventions.” Development in Practice 21 (1): 41‒58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bornstein, Erica. 2003. The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Branch, Daniel. 2011. Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 1963‒2011. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Brown, Hannah. 2013. “Home-Based Care Is Not a New Thing: Legacies of Domestic Governmentality in Western Kenya.” In Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa, edited by Prince, R. and Marsland, R., 140‒61. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Burton, Andrew, and Jennings, Michael. 2007. “Introduction: The Emperor's New Clothes? Continuities in Governance in Late Colonial and Early Postcolonial East Africa.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 40 (1): 1‒25.Google Scholar
Chabal, Patrick, and Deloz, Jean-Paul. 1999. Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 2011. Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Escudero, Verónica, and Mourelo, Elva López. 2013. “Understanding the Drivers of Youth Labour Market in Kenya.” ILO Research Paper series no. 8 (September). www.ilo.org.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eliasoph, N. 2011. Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Englund, Harri. 2008. “Extreme Poverty and Existential Obligations: Beyond Morality in the Anthropology of Africa?” Social Analysis 52 (3): 33‒50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Englund, Harri. 2011. Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Feher, Michel. 2009. “Self-Appreciation: Or, the Aspirations Of Human Capital.” Public Culture 21 (1): 21‒41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: African in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Ferguson, James. 2013. “Declarations of Dependence: Labor, Personhood and Welfare in Southern Africa.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 223‒42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geissler, P. Wenzel. 2011. “‘Transport to Where?’ Reflections on the Problem of Value and Time à propos an Awkward Practice in Medical Research.” Journal of Cultural Economy 4 (1): 45‒64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geissler, P. Wenzel. 2013. “Stuck in Ruins, or Up and Coming? The Shifting Geography of Urban Health Work in Kisumu, Kenya. Africa 83 (4): 539‒60.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Geissler, P. Wenzel, et al. 2013. “Introduction: Sustaining the Life of the Polis.” Africa 83 (5): 531‒38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibbon, Peter. 1996. “Structural Adjustment and Structural Change in Sub-Saharan Africa: Some Provisional Conclusions.” Development and Change 27 (4): 751‒84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Government of Kenya (GoK). National AIDS and STDS Control Programme (NASCOP). 2001. National Guidelines on Home-Based Care for HIV-AIDS. Nairobi: Government of Kenya.Google Scholar
Government of Kenya (GOK). National AIDS Control Council (NACC). 2005. Kenya National HIV/AIDS Strategic Plan 2005/6–2009/10. Nairobi: Government of Kenya.Google Scholar
Government of Kenya (GOK). NGOs Coordination Board. 2007‒8. “Survey of NGOs in Kenya.” Nairobi: Government of Kenya.Google Scholar
Green, Maia. 2000. “Participatory Development and the Appropriation of Agency in Southern Tanzania.” Critique of Anthropology 20: 67‒89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haines, Andy, et al. 2007. “Achieving Child Survival Goals: Potential Contribution of Community Health Workers.” The Lancet 369 (9579): 2121‒31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hearn, Julie. 1998. “The NGO-isation of Kenyan Society: USAID and the Restructuring of Health Care.” Review of African Political Economy 25 (75): 89‒100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardt, Michael. 1999. “Affective Labor.” Boundary 26 (2): 89‒100.Google Scholar
International Labour Organization (ILO)/Federation of Kenya Employees. 2013. “Kenya Decent Work Country Program, 2013‒2016.” www.ilo.org.Google Scholar
Jennings, Michael. 2003. “We Must Run while Others Walk: Popular Participation and Development Crisis in Tanzania.” Journal of Modern African Studies 41 (2): 63‒187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jennings, Michael. 2009. “Building Better People: Modernity and Utopia in Late Colonial Tanganyika.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 3 (1): 94‒111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Becky, and Khanna, Sunil K.. 2004. “Community Health Workers and Home-Based Care Programmes for HIV Clients.” Journal of the National Medical Association 96: 496‒502.Google Scholar
Justice, J. 1983. “The Invisible Worker: The Role of Peons in Nepal’s Health Service.” Social Science and Medicine 17: 967‒70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kelly, Ann. 2011. “Will He Be There?” The Journal Of Cultural Economy 4 (1): 65‒79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kalofonos, Ippolytos. 2014. “‘All They Do Is Pray’: Community Labour and the Narrowing of ‘Care’ during Mozambique's HIV Scale-Up.” Global Public Health 9 (1‒2): 7‒24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lal, Priya. 2012. “Self-Reliance and the State: The Multiple Meanings of Development in Post-colonial Tanzania.” Africa 82 (2): 212‒34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lehmann, Uta, and Sanders, David. 2007. “Community Health Workers: What Do We Know about Them? The State of the Evidence on Programmes, Activities, Costs and Impact on Health Outcomes of Using Community Health Workers.” Geneva: W.H.O.Google Scholar
Lewis, Joanna. 2000. Empire State-Building: War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925‒52. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Li, Tania Murray. 2010. “To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations.” Antipode 41 (S1): 66‒93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, Tania Murray. 2013. “Insistently Seeking Social Incorporation.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 252‒53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maes, Kenneth. 2012. “Volunteerism or Labor Exploitation? Harnessing the Volunteer Spirit to Sustain AIDS Treatment Programs in Urban Ethiopia.” Human Organization 71 (1): 54‒64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maes, Kenneth, and Kalofonos, Ippolytos. 2013. “Becoming and Remaining Community Health Workers: Perspectives from Ethiopia and Mozambique.” Social Science and Medicine 87: 52‒59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mains, Daniel. 2012. “Blackouts and Progress. Privatization, Infrastructure and a Developmentalist State in Jimma, Ethiopia.” Cultural Anthropology 27 (1): 3‒27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malik, Shiv. 2011. “Young Jobseekers Told to Work without Pay or Lose Unemployment Benefits.” The Guardian, November 16. www.guardian.co.uk.Google Scholar
Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Mansuri, Gazala, and Rao, Vijayendra. 2004. “Community-Based and -Driven Development: A Critical Review.” The World Bank Research Observer 19 (1): 1–39.Google Scholar
Manton, John. 2013. “Environmental Alkalism and the War on Filth: The Personification of Sanitation in Urban Nigeria.” Africa 83 (4): 606–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marsland, Rebecca. 2006. “Community Participation the Tanzanian Way: Conceptual Contiguity or Power Struggle.” Oxford Development Studies 34: 65‒79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maxon, Robert. 1995. “The Kenyatta Era 1963‒78: Social and Cultural Changes. In Decolonization and Independence in Kenya 1940‒93, edited by Ogot, Bethwell A. and Ochieng’, William R., 110‒50. London: James Currey.Google Scholar
Meinert, Lotte. 2011. “The Work of the Virus: Cutting and Creating Relations in an ART Project.” In Para-States and Medical Science: Global Health in Africa, edited by Geissler, P. Wenzel, 257‒80. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Mkandawire, Thandika. “Thinking about Developmental States in Africa.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 25 (3): 289‒314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mindry, Deborah. 2001. “Nongovernmental Organizations, ‘Grassroots,’ and the Politics of Virtue.” Signs 26 (4): 1187‒211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muehlebach, Andrea. 2012. The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muehlebach, Andrea. 2013. “On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination.” American Anthropologist 115 (2): 297‒311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nichter, Mark. 2008. Global Health: Why Cultural Perceptions, Social Representations and Biopolitics Matter. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Google Scholar
Nading, Alex M. 2012. “‘Denge Mosquitoes Are Single Mothers’: Biopolitics Meets Ecological Aesthetics in Nicaraguan Community Health Work.” Cultural Anthropology 27 (4): 572‒96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nading, Alex M. 2013. “‘Love Isn’t There in Your Stomach.’” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 27 (1): 84‒102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oanda, Ibrahim, and Jowi, Otieno. 2012. “University Expansion and the Challenges of Social Development in Kenya: Dilemmas and Pitfalls.” JHEA/RESA 10 (1): 49‒71.Google Scholar
Gudo, Calleb, Olel, Maureen, and Oanda, Ibrahim. 2011. “University Expansion in Kenya and Issues of Quality Education: Challenges and Opportunities.” International Journal of Business and Social Science 2 (20): 203‒14.Google Scholar
Pandian, Anand. 2008. “Devoted to Development: Moral Progress, Ethical Work and Divine Favour in South India.” Anthropological Theory 8: 159‒78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parrenas, Rheana. 2012. “Transnational Volunteerism in a Malaysian Orangutan Rehabilitation Center.” American Ethnologist 39 (4): 673‒87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perlin, Ross. 2011. Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Pfeiffer, James. 2003. “International NGOs and Primary Health Care in Mozambique: The Need for a New Model of Collaboration.” Social Science and Medicine 56: 725‒38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pigg, Stacy L. 1997. “Found in Most Traditional Societies: Traditional Medical Practitioners between Culture and Development.” In International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, edited by Cooper, Frederick and Packard, Randall, 259‒90. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Prince, Ruth J. 2013a. “Tarmacking in the Millennium City: Spatial and Temporal Trajectories of Empowerment in Kisumu, Kenya.” Africa 83 (4): 582‒605.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prince, Ruth J. 2013b. “Situating Health and the Public in Africa.” In Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives, edited by Prince, Ruth J. and Marsland, Rebecca, 1‒52. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Prince, Ruth J. 2014. “Precarious Projects: Conversions of (Biomedical) Knowledge in an East African City.” Medical Anthropology 33 (1): 68‒83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Redfield, Peter. 2012. “The Unbearable Lightness of Expats: Double Binds of Humanitarian Mobility.” Cultural Anthropology 27 (2): 358‒82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robbins, Steve. 2008. “Foot Soldiers of Global Health: Teaching and Preaching AIDS Science and Modern Medicine on the Frontline.” Medical Anthropology 28 (1): 1‒27.Google Scholar
Roy, Ananya. 2012. “Ethical Subjects: Market Rule in an Age of Poverty.” Special Issue, “Poverty Markets: the New Politics of Development and Humanitarianism.” Public Culture 24 (1): 105‒8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sassen, S. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Schler, Lynn, Bethlehem, Louise, and Sabar, Galia. 2009. “Rethinking Labour in Africa, Past and Present.” African Identities 7 (3): 287‒98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singh, Prabhjot, and Sachs, Jeffrey D.. 2013. “1 Million Community Health Workers in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2015.” Viewpoint. The Lancet 382: 363‒65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Matt Balie, and Laurie, Nina. 2011. “International Volunteering and Development: Global Citizenship and Neoliberal Professionalization Today.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36: 545‒59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swidler, Ann, and Watkins, Susan Cotts. 2009. “Teach a Man to Fish: The Sustainability Doctrine and Its Social Consequences.” World Development 37 (7): 1182‒96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Barbara P. 1987. “Development through Harambee: Who Wins and Who Loses? Rural Self-Help Projects in Kenya.” World Development 15: 463‒81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tousignant, Noemi. 2013. “Pharmacy, Money and Public Health in Dakar.” Africa 83 (4): 561–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watts, Michael. 2002. “Should They Be Committed? Motivating Volunteers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.” Development in Practice 12 (1): 59‒70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wendland, Claire. L. 2010. A Heart for the Matter: Journeys through an African Medical School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wendland, Claire. L. 2012. “Moral Maps and Medical Imaginaries: Clinical Tourism at Malawi’s College of Medicine.” American Anthropologist 114 (1): 108‒22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whyte, Susan R., et al. 2013. “Therapeutic Clientship: Belonging in Uganda’s Mosaic of AIDS Projects.” In When People Come First: Anthropology and Social Innovation in Global Health, edited by Biehl, João and Petryna, Adriana, 140‒65. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Wipper, Audrey. 1978. “The Maendeleo Ya Wanawake Organization: The Co-option of Leadership.” African Studies Review 18 (3): 99‒120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
World Fact Book. 2008. Washington, D.C.: CIA. bartleby.com.Google Scholar