Warrior mothering under pressure: caring for children with disabilities in Nairobi

Source abstract

This paper examines the socio-economic pressures experienced by mothers caring for children with disabilities in Nairobi exploring how they navigate stigma, economic precarity and limited access to disability services in the city. Drawing on interviews with mothers of children with disabilities carried out between May and August 2022, this article conceptualises caregiving as a process of ‘developing pressure sores.’ Using this clinical metaphor, I show how urban pressures accumulate in stages: initial ‘discolouration’ emerges through stigma and social isolation, as disability is stigmatised and care becomes a gendered burden. Over time, these pressures deepen into ‘infection’ through the compounding costs and inaccessibility of therapy, transport, schooling and healthcare within a city marked by precarious livelihoods and uneven welfare provision. In response to these pressures, mothers engage in ‘warrior-mothering,’ negotiating urban bureaucracies through forming caregiver networks, taking on strategic debt and participating in Nairobi’s hustle economy. These practices redistribute pressure and help prevent wounds from deepening in the absence of a caring state. By foregrounding disability and caregiving within debates on urban stress in African metropoles, the paper contributes to scholarship on hustle economies, social reproduction and insurgent citizenship.