One of the least dense-settled areas in Moi's Bridge, photographed in the rainy season

Hired workers shelling maize using a tractor-driven sheller.

Farm work may be manual or mechanized. Here hired workers used an oxen-pulled plow digs troughs for planting maize.

Farm labor here is mobilized both from within the household and by hire, and I investigated the role of ethnicity in hiring workers. The theoretical basis for this question is that since obtaining information, negotiating, supervising, and enforcing contracts are all costly procedures, institutions may be created to reduce these transaction costs. Since information networks may work better within ethnic groups than between them, and since ethnic institutions may be better able to provide sanctions against contract violations, it would follow that farmers would prefer to hire workers from their own ethnic groups.

My finding was that indeed employers disproportionately hired co-ethnics, but interestingly, there were no variation in types of contracts used, neither was there any variation in rates of shirking by the ethnicity of workers. The exception was in the use of reciprocal labor exchanges which were for the most part done between co-ethnics. Unlike other contracts which require immediate payments and are either heavily supervised or are paid by the piece, reciprocal labor exchanges involve delayed payments and longer-term obligations which require a greater reliability than the other contracts.

My conclusion was that while ethnicity is still a factor in labor transactions, the commercial approach to agriculture and labor, and the use of the piece-rate wage contracts, have enabled cross-ethnic contracting.