Coping with uncertainty: women in the informal fish processing and marketing sectors of Lake Victoria
The paper, through a rational choice and social capital approach, asks which strategies the fishmongers employ in order to cope with the instability of the fishing industry. It focuses on the fishmongers coping mechanisms in two local institutions, namely the jakambi institution (the relationship between a fishmonger and the captain of a fishing boat) and the rotating credit association.
The paper looks at whether economic capital or social capital, in the form of social connections, make a fishmonger succeed in the jakambi institution, looking also at trust and power relations between the fishmongers and fishermen.
It discusses the reasons for the successful performance of rotating credit groups, and argues that the functioning of such groups can only be adequately explained by a focus on instrumental aspects as well as analysing the role of moral economic behaviour and trust among members.
The study finds that:
- in order to enter both a jakambi position and a rotating credit group, it is necessary to have both social capital and economic capital, indicating an interplay between both these forms of capital. The fact that the acquisition of social capital in many cases will require investment of economic capital has often been neglected in the broader social capital literature
- a negative consequence of social capital in the form of social networks is exclusion. The paper argues that the poor lack the economic capital required to mobilise their social capital and this indicates that social capital in the form of social networks is not a coping mechanism for the most marginalised in a community
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