Middle-Income Groups in Kenya. Conflicting Realities Between Upward Mobility and Uncertainty
For more than a decade scholars mostly from economy and development studies have
described the rise of a newly emerging ‘middle class’ in the Global South including
Africa. This has led to a ‘middle class narrative’ with the ‘middle class’ as the backbone
of economic and democratic development. Especially with regard to the stability
of the position of the people in the ‘middle’, empirical social science studies challenge
the ‘middle class narrative’ and at their uncertainty and insecurity. This tension
between upward mobility at the one hand uncertainty and instability at the other
hand (the vulnerability-security nexus) and the options to cope with this challenge
under the condition of limited provision of formal social security is the focus of this
case study on Kenya. Instead of an analysis of inequality based on income, it is more
helpful to start from the welfare mix and the role of social networks as main elements
of provision of social security. Against this background, we identify different strategies
of coping that go together with different sets of values and lifestyles, conceptualised as
milieus, that are not determined by the socio-economic situation.
Keywords: middle class, middle-income group, social policy, social security, vulnerability, social networks, lifestyles, milieus, Africa, Kenya
Vol: 1/2019 - Article 1.4
