Nairobi is known as Africa's Silicon Savannah. M-Pesa launched there in 2007, and water ATMs and digital utility payments followed years later as part of a push to bring cheap e-services into the city's informal settlements. Mathare, the third-largest informal settlement in Nairobi, dates back to the 1920s and has been part of that experimentation from early on.
A new study in Urban Studies, co-authored by Jan Fransen with, Erwin van Tuijl, Harrison Kioko Simon, Stephen Ochieng Nyagaya and Samuel Kiriro, looks at what happens when that infrastructure meets daily life in one of the city's most vulnerable neighbourhoods. The researchers interviewed 46 households and ran two community workshops, asking one basic question: when something goes wrong, how do people actually use their phones?
Something goes wrong often. Income loss is the most common shock, since most residents work casual jobs with no guarantee of pay from one week to the next. Fire, crime and illness follow close behind, made worse by poor housing, patchy infrastructure, and an uneasy relationship with the authorities. Of the 45 coping strategies the researchers documented, 18 involved digital technology in some form.
They sort these into four types. The first, belt tightening, is what households with the least to fall back on do: sell off digital assets, skip meals, and use mobile money to receive gifts and small loans from family or church networks that have largely gone digital. It helps. It just doesn't fix anything. Mostly it replaces support that used to happen face to face, before everything moved onto a phone.
The second type is maladaptive. Quick access to micro-credit apps like Tala, Branch or Fuliza solves a problem today and creates a bigger one tomorrow. Several respondents ended up blacklisted by credit reference bureaus after defaulting, which locked them out of mobile banking entirely. "Taking loans from the phone is easy," one respondent said. Another, a single mother who borrowed money after her house burned down, told researchers the debt left her unable to sleep.
Used differently, the same tools support adaptive resilience. People look for casual work on WhatsApp, sell goods through Facebook and TikTok, or build small businesses by posting photos of whatever they have to sell. It's not transformation. It just means households can respond faster and with more options than they'd otherwise have.
The fourth type, transformative practices, is the rarest. It covers things like organizing waste collection digitally, running community health campaigns, or building income streams that combine online and offline work over years rather than weeks. These cases tend to involve people with stronger digital skills and better access to begin with. Most respondents lack the skills to use more specialized platforms. Only two households in this group clearly had steadier circumstances overall.
The researchers treat informality not as a failure but as the predictable result of formal systems that don't fit. Water ATMs were installed in Mathare as a cheaper alternative to existing water kiosks. Of the 25 that went in, only three still worked by the time of the study. Thirteen had been taken over by community groups, and gangs demolished the rest to protect their own income from selling water. The pattern keeps repeating: solutions built elsewhere, dropped into a context they were never designed for.
So their main recommendation is almost anti-climactic. Skip the next blueprint smart-city initiative. Start by understanding what people are already doing with the tools they have, and build support around that.
The full article, "Informal smart urbanism: A case study of digital resilience in Mathare informal settlement," is open access in Urban Studies. You can read it here.
About the authors
Jan Fransen, Institute of Housing and Urban Development Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and International Centre for Frugal Innovation (ICFI).
Erwin van Tuijl, Department of Urbanism, TU Delft, and International Centre for Frugal Innovation (ICFI).
Harrison Kioko Simon and Stephen Ochieng Nyagaya, Nuvoni Centre for Innovation Research, Kenya.
Samuel Kiriro, Ghetto Foundation, Kenya.