University of Bristol researchers Neil Carrier and Gordon Omenya published their findings on Cannabis and urban livelihoods: Illicit opportunities in Kenya’s towns and cities, in the International Journal for Drug Policy in April 2026.
The following is an edited version of their report, which can be read in full here.
Cannabis is a relatively reliable commodity in urban Kenya. Its trade is accessible for those lacking alternatives and depends on informal regulation through relations built on trust. Traders find cannabis trade accessible and profitable. Some invest earnings in other activities and for paying school fees and other necessities. .
Its value is supported by illegality, making it profitable compared to other informal economic activity. Its risks are real but can be managed in a country where law is often a terrain of negotiation and corruption an everyday phenomenon. Traders highlighted how dealing with police is their key challenge, but the trade operates relatively openly as traders form relationships with police and mitigate risks through bribes.
Cannabis is an important commodity in Kenya’s towns and cities and that cannabis’ urban livelihoods should be considered alongside rural ones in discussions of future policy.
Editor’s note: Cannabis remains illegal in all its forms in Kenya, unlike Malawi, Rwanda, the DRC, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Botswana, Ghana and South Africa which have all embraced cannabis reform to some extent.
An accessible and flexible trade
The accessibility of the trade resembles other employment in the informal sector. Rather than requiring much financial capital or formal qualifications, other types of social capital regulate entry into the trade. ‘Trust’ is a key social attribute required to enter the trade. ‘Trust’ has been analysed in relation to the trade in khat in Kenya, and is important given that informal trade cannot rely on formal protections such as legally-binding contracts even though credit is often given.
For example, in Somali business, people often hide their khat consumption which might jeopardise trust. However, in this instance, cannabis use is a form of social capital for entering the cannabis trade, one that people otherwise with limited social capital can possess.
However, not all traders are consumers, and building trust through consuming seems most pertinent for younger men in the settings studied: there are likely different pathways to building trust that are gender and age-related. The common form of credit in Kenya’s informal economy – giving retailers small amounts of a good on the proviso they return a certain amount of the takings keeping the rest for themselves – also increases the accessibility of cannabis retail as little start-up capital is required.
In some ways, cannabis is an ‘equal opportunity’ employer, though one that in fact gives young smokers in Kenya an advantage.
Cannabis retail is therefore accessible, yet also a flexible commodity: while some participants sold cannabis full-time, others entered only when need arose or opportunistically. The sale of cannabis and other drugs is often a temporary ‘side-hustle’ of people seeking to overcome ‘financial impediments’, rather than ‘career criminals’.
A valuable commodity
While many other income opportunities in Kenya’s urban informal economy allow traders to survive, it is clear that cannabis can offer more rewards than the usual commodities sold in the informal sector, potentially earning eightfold from cannabis what you might from other informal enterprises.
Cannabis’ illegality matters in relation to price as it is this illegality which underpins its commodity value: the dangers of arrest in dealing with such a substance push up its selling price, and cannabis is greatly in demand which gives it a stable market. Also, while relative to alcoholic drinks and khat, cannabis in the form of rolls is cheap at point of retail, those who can obtain wholesale quantities can make considerable profit.
Clearly there are different levels to the cannabis trade, and those selling 20 rolls are unlikely to gain much from the trade, nor are those who are employed by others to prepare the rolls.
However, given how several interlocutors spoke of cannabis as the thing that feeds their family or educates their children, and given the scale of the cannabis trade in urban Kenya, cannabis is likely helping to support many people and households.
As in urban environments in the Global North, illegal drugs like cannabis offer rewards that exceed many others in the formal and ‘hidden’ or informal economy.
The rewards of the urban trade can also benefit rural areas, showing how rural and urban livelihoods can blur together in Kenya.
Negotiable laws
It is also evident that the risks of dealing cannabis can be mitigated.
This relates to the other dimension of urban Kenya – and urban Africa more generally – the everyday corruption that many see as blighting Kenyan society.
Indeed, selling cannabis in Kenya is not a simple matter of breaking the law and hiding activities from police. It is often a matter of negotiation and navigation within everyday patterns of corruption that go far beyond cannabis itself.
Indeed, trading anything – licit or illicit – in the informal economy often involves making such unofficial payments to state officials, legalised cannabis would not necessarily insulate traders from predatory police.
One does not have to spend long in Nairobi and elsewhere to see informal hawkers of clothes and food hiding from city council askari (council officers charged with enforcing regulations) and paying bribes to be allowed to trade permit-free.
Furthermore, while negotiations are often framed as dealing with predatory police officers, as is indeed often the case in Kenya and elsewhere including Nigeria, there is nuance as traders benefit from this everyday corruption which frees them to deal in an illegal and lucrative commodity: as long as regular payments are made, cannabis becomes effectively quasilegal: de jure illegal but de facto legal.
In the context of Kenya, cannabis laws – like many other laws and regulations there – become not something solid, but a terrain of negotiation that can benefit both police and those breaking the law.
A reliable commodity?
For all the above reasons, cannabis is something that many turn to as a trade item in economically deprived urban environments.
Africa’s contemporary cities are often portrayed as places of great uncertainty and precarity, places where people navigate highly unstable, shifting landscapes of informality, criminality and weak and corrupt states.
In all this, it might be supposed that an illicit drug like cannabis might add in yet another volatile factor. Yet as the above suggests, for many it brings some stability.
Indeed, it has several reliable aspects: there is no shortage of consumers in towns and cities, there is a solid reliable supply for retail, its value holds firm, and Kenyan police are reliably malleable through the sort of payments made above.
Even in consumption, cannabis offers traders something reliable in bringing relief from the pressures of life through its use in morning ‘meditation’.
Of course, such solidity can crumble. Relationships with police can become predatory rather than symbiotic, and the dangers of arrest are real. Competition is also strong, limiting prices that can be charged.
Consuming cannabis in excess was also cited as a reason that some traders do not use earnings wisely. In these ways, cannabis can damage livelihoods as much as help them: illicit livelihoods are not a sustainable answer to urban poverty. However, they are a solution that makes sense in the highly uncertain context of life in urban Kenya, and urban Africa more broadly.
Conclusion
All this shows that many cannabis livelihoods in Kenya are distinctly urban in nature.
In fact, given that much cannabis sold in Kenya is nowadays imported from farms in other countries, Kenyan cannabis livelihoods might very well be primarily urban. Cannabis fits relatively seamlessly into Kenya’s wider urban informal economy where its illegality generates both opportunities and risks – risks that can be navigated in a country where laws are often negotiable.
In this way, it acts as a resource for people with few other opportunities both as a side-hustle and as a main employment, and bring some stability as a reliable trade good in a precarious context.
For these reasons, cannabis’ urban livelihoods need to be considered in discussions of cannabis policy in Africa and beyond at a time when new policy towards cannabis is being developed and debated.
While rural producers are often the main target of initiatives such as alternative development and generally given more sympathy than urban ‘peddlers’, cannabis’ continued importance in the continent owes much to those hustling a living from its trade in cities such as Nairobi.
These traders often come to the illicit cannabis trade in socio-economic contexts of informality and precarity, and better policy can be developed with an understanding of how selling cannabis makes sense in these contexts.
While cannabis legalisation is not necessarily helpful for these illicit traders, as such urban livelihoods are potentially threatened by legally regulated cannabis markets, this understanding of why people trade it should at least encourage a rethink of the punitive approaches of much existing legislation in Kenya and elsewhere, approaches that only add more uncertainty to already precarious lives.
#
