Why Mitumba industry is only the second-best option for Kenya

What is mitumba? Literally speaking, mitumba means bundles in Swahili. In Kenyan parlance, mitumba refers to the second-hand clothes whose most famous marketplace is Gikomba.

Most of those clothes are in reality donations from the US and Europe. That is why Kenyans sometimes refer to them cheekily as ‘dead mzungu clothes.’ Such teasing aside, we need to critically analyse the mitumba value chain so that we can verify whether their traders and Kenyan consumers are the primary beneficiaries of this sector, or whether a few well-heeled cartels reap the lion’s share of the sector’s benefits. In the 1970s and 1980s, when I was growing up, my mother could not go to Gikomba or Toi market to buy secondhand clothes for me and my siblings. At the time, the mitumba sector was practically non-existent. The clothes our mother bought for us back then or received as donations were mostly made in Kenya.