O.A. K'Akumu

University of Nairobi | UON · Department of Real Estate and Construction Management

This study investigated factors affecting affordability in the mortgage housing sector in Kenya. Housing affordability is a major problem experienced by urban households in Africa. According to the African Development Bank (The middle of the pyramid: Dynamics of the middle class in Africa, market brief, 2011), only three per cent of the entire Afri...

This article presents a critical analysis of the Konza proposal as a smart (silicon) city being built in Kenya. This covers its developmental ideologies including the concept of economic city, urban innovation, and corporate state control. It finds out that the ideology of smart city as economic city where the developers had promised to generate ab...

Purpose Following calls at different times in the United States for the definition of the body of knowledge (BOK) of real estate discipline, this briefing sets out to define the intellectual boundaries of real estate and applies the definitional concept to map out the scopes of real estate professions and real estate valuation vocation Design/meth...

Purpose This study reviews the teaching of real estate in the USA for the first 100 years after the foundational curriculum was laid down in 1923 by three key institutions: the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), the Institute for Research in Land Economics and Public Utilities (The Institute) and the American Assembly of Collegiate...

This study examines the dynamics of Urban Land Use Succession (ULUS) in Upper Hill, Nairobi, highlighting the impact of neoliberal policies and private sector-led urban redevelopment. It investigates how land tenure, public infrastructure, and planning controls shape urban landscapes, leading to patchwork land use patterns and environmental misalig...

Kileleshwa, située à cinq kilomètres du centre-ville de Nairobi, a connu une transformation immobilière phénoménale sous la forme d'appartements de grande hauteur remplaçant les bungalows initialement construits dans la région. Le quartier s'est imposé comme l'un des quartiers haut de gamme de Nairobi, alors principalement occupé par de hauts fonct...

The primary aim of this article is to document the process of turning research data into a peer review journal article in the built environment disciplines. This is necessary to educate prospective authors who wish to convert their research output into quality journal articles. It proceeds to do this by first explaining how to do the write up in a...

Purpose The study seeks to identify and document definitional challenges that hamper the delineation of the scope of real estate as a discipline and as an industry. Through literature review the article distils the perception of body of knowledge (BOK) of real estate within the academia. Two main issues are flagged up: the problem of undefined BOK...

This article reviews the smart city as a policy concept in Abu Dhabi. It conceptualizes smart city development goals into urban and extra-urban and review smart city development programmes in terms of ex-post and ex-ante. Extra-urban refers to development goals that go beyond the spatial or conceptual boundaries of the city. This will help to demon...

This article looks at the socio-environmental consequences of highway development on host communities in one of Nairobi’s peri-urban corridors. It is inspired by the fact that whereas governmental decision makers have supported highway development by arguing that such construction promotes economic growth and development, decreases traffic congesti...

This article analyses the civil–military relations in Kenya in the context of civilian-activated politicization that is taking place the same way it happens in Latin America and the United States under the former Trump administration. In Kenya, this involves the use of the military in noncombat internal missions such as infrastructure development a...

Regulation is usually justified by the public interest in theory but in practice may end up serving special interests. This paper evaluates the regulatory frameworks for engineers and engineering technologists in Kenya with the view to establishing whether they take the public interest into consideration or only other special interests. Taking publ...

Konza technology city has been proposed as a flagship project in the ICT sector that would propel the Republic of Kenya to the status of a newly industrializing, middle-income country providing a high quality of life to all its citizens by 2030. It is billed as a sustainable, eco-friendly and smart city. Taking the perspective of the built environm...

Involvement of the army in civilian duties is not a unique phenomenon in Africa. This study undertakes a document analysis of this phenomenon in Africa in the case of the President Kenyatta's involvement of military officers in the management of municipal service provision in metropolitan Nairobi to reveal the political meanings it engenders betwee...

Statistics are useful indicators that may inform urban development and management decisions. This article reviews production of official statistics in Kenya to bring up their implications for urban policy and governance. It approaches the issue from the point of view that official statistics are always inadequate in developing countries. In this co...

The article draws academic attention to capture risks in the regulatory statutes that may lead to capture by regulators. It takes a practical outlook of Kenya for empirical demonstration of the statute-based capture risks. The article uses the Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) framework to identify the risk factors in the regulatory environment fo...

This paper reviews the political thinking as embedded in the text of the statute constituting the regulation of the engineering profession in Kenya. It specifically focuses on the regulator’s political strategy of consolidation of jurisdictional power and its concentration of regulatory power. Jurisdictional strategies include expansion into the wo...

This paper revisits the ideas of Julian Diaz III that were expressed in his journal article titled, “Science, Engineering, and the Discipline of Real Estate” that appeared in the inaugural volume of Journal of Real Estate Literature in 1993. In this article, Julian Diaz III made a bold attempt to use ontological constructs to help define conceptual...

This paper converts the six reasons for inclusive development proposed by Gupta into a heuristic device for evaluation of inclusive development in road infrastructure projects in Nairobi. The Gupta Rationale entails six key evaluative elements of, that is, whether the project has achieved: Welfare of the poor and marginalized, Human rights, Economi...

Purpose This paper brings up the regulatory environment for valuation and estate agency practices in Kenya. Its main purpose is to assess the regulatory institutions to determine whether consumers of real estate services are protected from risks in the property market and to compare Kenya's situation to other markets in the world. Design/methodolo...

This paper considers the regulation of three aspects of surveying profession namely, agency surveying, cadastral surveying, and valuation surveying in Kenya. The regulation boards are examined in the context of their enabling legislations. All the professions belong to one professional organisation, the Institution of Surveyors of Kenya (ISK), mode...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the opportunities which accrue from application of PPPs in development of down market urban housing in Kenya, hence attracting private players to partner with the public sector. The provision of down market urban housing in Kenya faces challenges like: application of outdated technologies, inadequate inn...

Publications in the field of institutional economics

Purpose Low income urban housing in Kenya is underdeveloped as a result of uninnovative financing, hence the many slums and informal settlements in the country, hence the need for enhanced participation of the private sector through application of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), which has been cited as one of the possible solutions. The purpose...

This study evaluates the valuation process for property taxation under the County government in Nairobi. The valuation process is an important element of the property tax administration process because it links the market value of the property with the tax paid. Where the valuation process is unable to capture the full market value of the property,...

Purpose This study aims to evaluate the property tax base under the local government property taxation in Nairobi City and its implication on revenue adequacy of the city. Nairobi has grown both in population and in physical extent resulting to increased demand for urban services. The city faces challenges of adequate infrastructure service provisi...

The State Department of Housing in Kenya puts the housing demand in the country at 250,000 housing units per year, while actual supply is 50,000 units p.a. This demand for housing has accumulated to 1.85 million units as at 2018. This has led to the growing proliferation of slums and informal settlements, with the Department showing that there are...

The State Department of Housing in Kenya puts the housing demand in the country at 250,000 housing units per year, while actual supply is 50,000 units p.a. This demand for housing has accumulated to 1.85 million units as at 2018. This has led to the growing proliferation of slums and informal settlements, with the Department showing that there are...

This chapter explores the challenges encountered in the use of compulsory acquisition of land as an instrument of land policy. A timeline approach is adopted where the challenges are sequenced into three legal regimes that are historical: the colonial era (1895–1963), the independence constitution era (1963–2010), and the 2010 Kenya Constitution er...

The paradigm of the public management of irrigation infrastructure and services has failed in developing countries. Currently, there is a general tendency of transferring the management of such infrastructure and services to the local farmer organizations (also known as water users associations) in an exercise technically known as irrigation manage...

The County Government of Nairobi faces a myriad of capacity challenges that have impeded fire disaster management in the City. This is further compounded by the lack of a comprehensive legal and institutional framework for disaster management in Kenya. Whereas the County Government enlists assistance from other public, private and civil society org...

Scholars of economic development have always hinted that urbanization process in the developing world does not follow the historical patterns discerned in the developed world where a strong relationship between a country’s GDP and urbanization had been observed. To confirm or refute this thesis this study considers the pattern of relationships betw...

Water supply and sanitation are important requisites for basic human needs and primary health care. Their inadequate provision has far reaching economic and humanitarian consequences. In Kenya this is well expressed in terms of child mortality. This paper analyses the mortality rate data from consecutive decennial population censuses conducted in t...

Water supply and sanitation are important requisites for basic human needs and primary health care. Their inadequate provision has far reaching economic and humanitarian consequences. In Kenya this is well expressed in terms of child mortality. This paper analyses the mortality rate data from consecutive decennial population censuses conducted in t...

This is an assessment of the regulatory environment in which artisans operate to produce dimension stone in Nairobi where the quarrying of the same becomes an aspect of artisanal mining; an activity that is fraught with regulatory issues in developing country situations. Regulation is considered in the context of formal and informal rules of engage...

The study looked at the opportunities and constraints facing artisanal units involved in the production of dimension stone. Twenty-seven observable variables were derived from literature and developed into a questionnaire with prompts to indicate the level of their influence in the input environment of artisanal stone producer organizations. The qu...

Artisanal dimension stone (i.e., blocks cut and shaped from natural rock using hand tools) has attracted scholarly attention as part of the informal sector of the construction industry and as part of the productive enterprise of artisans. One of the areas that intrigue scholars in this respect is the market environment of the subject product. In Na...

Purpose ‐ The aim of this paper is to use the case study of Nairobi in Kenya in order to fill the gap of knowledge on the component ratios of new building costs that has been missing from international literature. Design/methodology/approach ‐ Using survey methodology that considered firms of contractors registered and operating in Nairobi Kenya, t...

This study considered the enabling environment of artisanal dimension stone (i.e. blocks cut and shaped from natural rock using hand tools) for building in Nairobi, Kenya. It relied on the socio-technical system theory to capture the forces (variables) that influence the business/enabling environment of the building material. The socio-technical pe...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to look at the applications of factor cost indices in the building industry in Nairobi, Kenya against the possibilities established through a review of the principles so as to establish the extent of use in practical situations in the industry. There are two organisations involved in compilation of factor cost i...

This paper reports on a study involving the market environment for artisanal dimension stone in Nairobi, Kenya. Taking the point of view of exchange relationships within a market systems framework it maps out economic interactions involving actors in this market such as suppliers of raw materials, producers, marketers and users of artisanal dimensi...

Kenya is in the process of reforming its national statistical system that has been catering to the various sectors of the economy including the building construction sub-sector. This paper evaluates opportunities that the reforms may bring for the improvement of building construction statistics. It starts by a conceptual review of the pertinent iss...

O.A. K'Akumu examines reforms that have been put in place by the Water Act of 2002 in Kenya. He shows that the government remains an active and powerful player in the management of water while local institutions need to be strengthened for effective water resource governance. Development (2008) 51, 56–62. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100457

Water is an essential commodity for human life. It is also a political and environmental good. The latter attribute makes it a suitable candidate for analysis in the context of political ecology. This is what this paper does for Kenya's transitory period of water reforms. This paper considers conceptual issues concerning political ecology before pr...

As the world gropes for an understanding of and solutions to poverty, one of its typologies that has come to the fore is housing poverty. Housing poverty afflicts developing countries in particular, and solving it may bring about solutions to other forms of poverty. One of the strategies that can be used to promote the understanding of housing pove...

Sustainable construction is a major challenge to developing countries more so when it comes to the use of artisanal materials in the construction process. This review identifies and examines the challenges facing developing countries in this respect: environmental degradation, poverty, informal settlements, inappropriate regulatory mechanism, inapp...

In the current sustainable urban development discourse, a distinct school of urban ecology has emerged based on the ecological conceptualization of urban development. Four main theoretical strands can be isolated, viz. urban growth, urban political ecology, ecological footprints of cities, and urban metabolism. This forum paper faults these 'organi...

Effective governance is regarded as essential for national water management frameworks. Many countries are therefore striving to institute effective governance in their water sector. Kenya is one country that has instituted such governance framework in the recent past. This article evaluates Kenya's water governance framework in the area of water s...

Construction is a strategic industry in developing economies like Kenya. In order for construction to ably perform this role, there is a need to provide information on its various economic aspects including raw materials, products, processes, finance and labour. Construction statistics of Kenya have been evaluated in order to ascertain their adequa...

Residential segregation is an urban phenomenon that has intrigued researchers the world over and sustained a debate for decades. However, the debate has not been engaging Africa as much as it does countries of Europe, America and the Far East. In Africa, the colonial governments and the apartheid regime in South Africa initiated residential segrega...

The world over, the role and eligibility of the state in the provision of water supply is increasingly coming into question. Policy makers and analysts are advocating the abdication of the state in favour of private participation. This is expected to bring with it a host of benefits to all the stakeholders concerned. Kenya is one of the developing...

One of the services that have been poorly provided in the urban areas in Kenya is water and sanitation. There are many reasons, which can be attributed to poor provision of water and sanitation as undertaken by the local authorities in Kenya. The path to remedy the poor provision of water and sanitation has been charted in privatisation in the form...

A successful informal sector of sustainable ICT clusters requires that the ICT provided are the ones in demand by the entrepreneurs and that they should be located strategically, in order to generate optimal utilisation and avoid the loss of man-hours by the informal sector having to search for the services. There should also be a strategy aiming a...

This paper reviews published official statistics in Kenya. It begins with a theoretical study of statistics in general and housing statistics in particular. From here it undertakes a comparative study of housing statistics in other countries especially the US for which statistical programmes are found to be comprehensive, objective oriented and rat...

Privatization of water utilities is widely practiced in the belief that market forces may help achieve conservation as per the Dublin Principles (Fourth Principle). Kenya has adopted the privatization strategy with the commercialization, inter alia, of its water utilities. This paper looks at the legal, political, social, economic, commercial and e...

The main objective of this paper is to determine whether the ecological tax reform paradigm that hitherto is employed by a section of industrialised countries as an instrument of environmental management has potential applications in developing countries. The paper focuses on a case study of environmental management policy in Kenya and reveals that...

This paper considers how the government of Kenya's plans to privatize water supplies in urban areas could ensure that the needs of those living in informal settlements and of others with inadequate water provision are served. The need for reform in the water sector is evident from the years of poor performance and the growing numbers lacking piped...

This paper considers how the government of Kenya's plans to privatize water supplies in urban areas could ensure that the needs of those living in informal settlements and of others with inadequate water provision are served. The need for reform in the water sector is evident from the years of poor performance and the growing numbers lacking piped...

This paper analyses the problems of project implementation programmes. Taking a case study of Thika Dam Component of the Third Nairobi Water Supply Project, the analysis reveals that delays in land acquisition among other factors had a serious impact on the overall performance of development project. The impact of delays in acquisition resulted int...

The study set out to investigate the problems faced in the process of acquiring land and the effects of these problems on the project implementation plan. The study found out the problems to include: computation errors especially for unregistered land payment of compensation, inadequate compensation leading to complaints and resistance, litigation,...