ABSTRACT
This article explores the acquisition of a wide variety of skills by low income Kenya Africans, outside the scope of government and voluntary agency programmes. Many thousands of such {mostly young) Africans arrange types of unofficial fee-paying apprenticeships for themselves at the feet of older, often illiterate craftsmen. The process represents an indigenisation in Kenya of important elements of East African Indian craft training—not least in the product types and the innovative re-use of scrap materials. It appears to have important implications for the success of the government's official formal sector apprenticeship schemes, but indicates considerable difficulties for any attempt to identify this informal world as an autonomous sector of Kenya's larger economy.
