In hard situations, people ought to be creative and critical to the challenges surrounding them.
This is an art that the Kibera business people have made perfectly realistic. It is true that slum life is hard, especially when it has to do with finance and economy.
To address the issue of shopping needs, business men and women have devised the now operational 'kadogo economy' where almost everything is repackaged into smaller quantities.
As Jackson Otiende, a shopkeeper in Kisumu Ndogo puts it; it is an efficient way of selling out their products to their customers. Otiende said that most of the slum residents are casual labourers paid on a daily basis and the money they earn is not sufficient for them to make bulky shopping. It is this that motivated them to repackage their goods to smaller amounts to ensure affordability.
‘'Sometimes our customers have less money and they seriously need our products. We cannot deny them because these are very basic commodities. For instance, we have sugar selling as less as ten shillings and bar sops going for ten shillings,’' said Otiende.
It should be noted that the kadogo economy is only applicable to household goods like salt, sugar, maize floor and rice.
These developments have been lauded by local area residents terming it as affordable and also helping them avoid borrowing from neighbours.