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Paper short abstract:

We map and compare value chains of sand from rural harvesting sites to city markets and sites of large scale construction in order to understand the networks of actors who control the lucrative business and whether sand displays extractivist characteristics typical of many other minerals.

Paper long abstract:

Urbanization and large infrastructure projects hinge upon the availability of massive quantities of sand. Despite being the planet’s most mined mineral, sand has until recently slipped the attention of critical scholarship of mineral extraction. To some extent, there is good reason for it. The sand frontier is a widely distributed space that evades tight control of extractive agents. Due to the wide availability of sand in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa and its ‘low value’ in relation to weight, for long there was little incentive to commodify sand. What is more, the harvesting of sand has for a long time been rather uncontroversial. However, the speed of urbanization and the scale of grand infrastructure projects rolled out across the continent in the last two decades upended the imaginary of sand as a ‘socially thick’ development mineral. Excessive sand removal has made visible the depletion of ecosystem, the destruction of rural livelihoods and profits made in the extraction and trade of sand that benefits actors elsewhere as features of another resource frontier.

Based on ongoing empirical work on sand extraction and trade in Kenya, in this paper we map and compare the value chains of sand from rural harvesting sites to the sand markets in Nairobi and Mombasa to the sites of large construction and infrastructure works. This exercise yields important knowledge about the networks of actors who control the lucrative sand business in one of the fastest urbanizing countries on the continent.