‘Rain That Falls in the Forest': Kigali's Motari at the Bottom of the Pyramid

The notion of the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) invokes the image of a productive vertical articulation between larger corporate enterprises and smaller businesses and poor populations. Such an articulation appears to be underway for motorcycle taxi drivers in Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda. Efforts to enforce tax and regulatory compliance, as well as a host of other measures are aimed at integrating their business into the formal economy at the BoP. However, from drivers’ perspective these formalising efforts are of dubious value and carry considerable risk. Efforts at formalisation exist in tension with the underlying social processes that enable drivers to access motorcycles and which thus reproduce the sector. Moreover, integration into the formal economy entails the extraction of rents that threaten their livelihoods and offer few benefits in return. Motorcyclists’ livelihoods, that are in practice highly informal, are formalised to the extent that they can be exploited, but leave the sector’s actual operation dependent on informal processes. Moves to integrate motorcycle taxi drivers at the BoP thus have the effect of drawing money upwards, leaving riders below struggling for a living. ‘Like rain falling in the forest’ they wet the canopy, but leave the forest floor dry.