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Urban agriculture (UA) has recently received increasing attention in both scholarly and policy cycles as a potential tool for poverty alleviation in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper focuses on urban crop cultivation (UCC) and examines men's and women's motives and needs in UCC, the (perceived) contribution of UCC to household livelihoods, and the benefits men and women derive from it. Although the contribution of UCC to overall household food and incomes appeared to be modest, for the majority of farming households such benefits were nonetheless greatly valued and bore varied and important meanings for men and women. The paper also examines the implications of recent national UA policy responses in Kenya for urban development and household livelihoods, and for equitable distribution of UA's benefits for men and women.

This research investigated the neighbourhood effect hypothesis in the context of the 1992 and subsequent 1997 and 2000 elections in Kwanza constituency, Kenya by examining the influence of voters' local contexts on their voting decisions. The findings of the research indicated that while the voters were alive to local conditions and issues, it is the political dynamics and conditions obtaining at higher levels in the wider political contexts at the constituency and national levels, underpinned by ethnic antagonisms defined within contexts of the struggles for national political power and patronage, that influenced their voting decisions more profoundly. Utilising ecological and individual-level data, the results indicated that ethnicity rather than voters' local contexts per se was the most salient factor in influencing voting decisions, not least because it determined voters' patterns of social and geographical interaction as well as mutual political communication.

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