Collection of Street Photographs and Portraits from Busia, Kenya.

Busia, Kenya. It is a border-town in Western Province that borders Uganda. It is a bustling town with huge amounts of cross-border traffic driving on a single 2-lane road that cuts through the whole town. You will see semi-trucks backed up miles, and a mix of motorcycle taxis (colloquially called boda-bodas), buses (a.k.a mutatus), and bicycles weaving in and around the trucks to get by.

The town has also been recently featured in the news as the "birthplace" of the randomized control trial (RCT) movement in development economics research, which is what my work primarily focuses on. You can learn more about it on NPR here: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/09/1181448838/busia-kenya-nobel-prize-randomized-control-trials

My two-week stay in Busia was a particularly interesting time because the city government was expanding the small two-lane road to a four-lane road which caused all sorts of short-term chaos in the traffic lines and mass amounts of dust in the air. Yet, people managed to get from one place to another and continue to live their life as normal.

Busia is one of the larger towns in the Western Provinces with a population of about 80,000 people. Ask anyone who lives there, the place has grown considerably in the past decade, and even in the last 2-3 years. The brand name ads, multi-story apartments, office buildings, and hotels are newcomers to the area, relatively speaking. It's a border town and the locals often cross over to the Uganda side to visit friends, family, and buy cheap beer, and other goods. Smuggling makes up a large illicit economic sector. Drugs make up some of the goods that are smuggled, but also normal goods like produce, clothes, and oil are brought in and out, duty-free.

The energy of the downtown area near the border is buzzing. The purpose of this small set of photos is to show the setting, the environment, the energy, and the spirit of this area of the town.