The sun is rising in Kenya’s Kajiado county, just outside Nairobi, and a truck is rumbling over dusty ground towards a riverbank. Young men guide the driver to a parking spot and then spring into action, each with a scoop, filling the truck from a heap of the most desirable building sand for which the area is famous.
The driver passes the time with a snack and a mug of tea poured from a flask by a mobile vendor. He pays each of the young men around US$10 for their labour and the landowner US$40-US$50 for the sand. The driver then starts out on his journey to deliver sand to hardware stores, building sites or informal selling points in Nairobi and its suburbs, paying county taxes and police bribes along the way.
Sand mining sites like this have been mushrooming along Kenya’s numerous river systems. They are serving a construction boom sparked by urbanisation and grandiose infrastructure programmes.
Yet Kenya has been singled out by the UN’s environmental programme as a country of unsustainable sand harvesting. The industry is troubled by insufficient regulation, environmental degradation and, at times, violent conflict.
We are peace and security researchers who have studied controversies around sub-Saharan Africa’s infrastructure projects. In a recent study, we researched contestations around sand harvesting, as well as sand commodity chains in Kenya. We mapped where industry benefits are concentrated and looked at how locally established governance mechanisms work to distribute benefits – and harms.
We examined sites in seven Kenyan counties. In the west, we visited Homa Bay near Lake Victoria. Outside Nairobi, we studied sites in Nakuru and Kajiado. In the drier eastern parts, we visited Taita Taveta and Makueni – once a hotspot of violent conflict among sand mining cartels. In dry regions, sand is critical to water storage, where it’s used to create dams that boost underground water storage. On the Kenyan coast, we studied sites in Kwale and Kilifi, which serve developments in and around the city of Mombasa. We spoke to loaders, landowners, leaders of informal youth groups and cooperatives, transporters, brokers and administrators.
We found the industry to be ordered and unruly at the same time.
National regulation on sand harvesting in most counties is rarely enforced. Therefore, the stability of extraction and transport of sand hinges on complex informal rules that distribute the benefits of the industry. The greatest profits in the sand industry are not made at the extraction sites but higher up along the commodity chain. Sand supports large numbers of people at the community level.
We argue that making the most of Kenya’s sand industry doesn’t lie in introducing top-down legislation. Rather, existing informal regulation should be harnessed and harmonised within formal rules. This would go a long way towards ensuring sustainable livelihoods and widespread inclusion.
The winners and losers
Scholarship on the extraction of natural resources across the global south has demonstrated the tendency toward the removal of natural resources and accumulation by powerful agents. They forcefully control mining activities and value chains and leave behind high social and ecological costs, a phenomenon known as extractivism.
Extractivism depletes ecosystems and deprives communities of the use of natural resources, fair access to them and the opportunity to benefit from the wealth generated.
Does sand harvesting in Kenya display these characteristics? Not entirely.
Sand is perhaps a bit different to precious minerals like gemstones. It’s bulky, less valuable, and in many countries widespread and accessible with basic tools. Sand is found in rivers and fields, and on private and common land.
At harvesting sites, groups of loaders and homegrown sand cooperatives are in many places highly organised with rules, rosters and even external shareholders. They ensure a wider distribution of gains at the local level. Loader group membership positions are coveted and bought at a high price from group organisers, and some groups or cooperatives build up economic strength and attract better transporting contracts. Larger contractors dictate conditions, driving down prices at the harvesting sites.
As a development mineral, sand also feeds concrete production that’s pivotal for grand infrastructure and housing schemes. These have the potential to boost economic growth.
However, there are certainly some tendencies for benefits to flow away from the source. Unsurprisingly, the largest profits are made at urban markets. While truck drivers at harvesting sites pay around US$90 for a 12-ton truck of sand, the same load is sold in Nairobi for up to US$400. In-transit costs such as taxes, bribes, fuel and salaries amount to around US$100.
Landowners accumulate revenues, too. However, where land is contested upon a backdrop of colonial and post-colonial dispossession – such as in the Kedong site in Nakuru – this can be particularly controversial. At one point when landowners hired excavators, community members rioted and destroyed them, fearing complete displacement from their source of livelihood.
County governments also benefit greatly from local taxation and have little incentive to regulate overextraction from fragile sites.
Bribery in the sand business also thrives on the informality. The police capitalise on regular sand transporting routes and uniformly request US$4-8 from every truck. Overloading can be managed with a “fee” at weighbridges. Some drivers find ways to store sand and sell it without their bosses’ knowledge.
Though ecological harms were not fully explored in our work, we found evidence of them, particularly in drier counties, such as Taita Taveta and Makueni, where river sand is a vital container for water storage. Communities are aware of the environmental cost of overextraction and call for better regulation of the industry.
What needs to happen
Effective collaboration is needed between various layers of governance to make the sand trade in Kenya equitable and sustainable.
This is largely absent. One notable exception is the robust and participatory management of sand in Makueni county, which also took decisive action against cartels and prevented exports out of the county until ecosystem recovery was certain.
Instead of introducing top-down legislation to manage the industry, however, harnessing existing informal regulations and harmonising them within formal rules would go a long way towards ensuring sustainable livelihoods and widespread inclusion, as the Makueni case has demonstrated.
These discussions matter because Kenya, among many other countries in the global south, is rapidly urbanising and has a number of huge infrastructure projects in the works.
Several of the sites we studied provided sand for the construction of the Standard Gauge Railway (built from 2014 to 2019). While many communities benefited from the project, it also exposed unequal relations between government, businesses and communities that made exploitative sand extraction possible.
Given that the railway line will be extended to the Ugandan border, regulation that allows for broad local participation is critical for assuring trust in the Kenyan governance system.
Kennedy Mkutu receives funding from FORMAS the Swedish Research Council for the promotion of research for a sustainable society as well as from VR – the Swedish Research Council.
Jan Bachmann receives funding from FORMAS, the Swedish Research Council for the promotion of research for a sustainable society as well as from VR – the Swedish Research Council.
