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Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the promises and ambitions of Kenya´s social and financial protection interventions, drawing attention to how caring capitalism may be a site generative of new possibilities even when Kenyans experience its failures.

Paper long abstract:

Social and financial protection interventions by the Kenya government have often targeted ordinary Kenyans, especially those in the informal economy. Such interventions including cash transfers, the national health insurance (Supa Cover), and more recently the financial credit facility ´the Hustler fund´, are utopian and aim to provide financial support and expand access to public services such as healthcare. The interventions are structured and organized differently. Their point of convergence, however, is the intention to increase the purchasing power of those considered to fall within the informal economy. The interventions are also framed within a progressive language of state responsibility for the welfare and healthcare of its citizens, substantive citizenship, inclusion, alleviation of poverty and national transformation. Yet, they enter and operate within layered histories of differentiated citizenship, rising costs of living and unemployment, increasing privatization of public services, a fragmented and struggling public healthcare system and a growing debt economy. Drawing on ethnographic research on these interventions in Kenya, I examine their promises and ambitions and how these are in tension with the experiences of Kenyans targeted by them. The resources provided by the state ´caring´ interventions are both limited and unreliable and many beneficiaries of these schemes are often compelled to invest, maintain, and depend on pre-existing informal networks and/or establishing new ones, shaped and reshaped by a new terrain of proliferating digital technologies in Kenya. I draw attention to how caring capitalism may be a site generative of new possibilities even when Kenyans experience its failures.