The phenomenon has several names and one shape
Jugaad describes frugal, improvised problem-solving under resource constraint — the term comes from Hindi, associated originally with improvised vehicles assembled from spare parts by Indian farmers, and has since been studied as a distinct innovation mode in management and development economics (ResearchGate: Institutions and frugal innovation).
Système D — "the D is for débrouillardise," resourcefulness, the ability to improvise under scarcity or bureaucratic constraint — is the term used across Francophone Africa and Haiti for the same category of behavior, studied in depth as l'économie de la débrouille in Kinshasa's informal trade networks (Ayimpam, The Economy of Resourcefulness in Kinshasa; Foreign Policy, "The Shadow Superpower").
Resilience engineering, a field with no particular geography at all, studies the same gap under the names work-as-imagined (how a system is specified to function) and work-as-done (how people actually make it function, including every informal adjustment the specification never anticipated). Erik Hollnagel's foundational argument is that this gap is not a defect to be closed but a structural feature of any sufficiently complex system — safe, functional performance depends on the informal adjustments, not in spite of them (Hollnagel, Safety-I to Safety-II).
Three literatures, three continents, three disciplines — economics, anthropology, safety science — independently describing one shape: formal systems under-specify, and people fill the gap, consistently enough that the filling becomes its own body of transmissible knowledge.
Measuring the gap, in one city's own numbers
Nairobi's version of work-as-imagined is published and specific. Kenyans faced an average of 8.39 hours of power interruptions a month in FY2026, averaging 3.23 hours per interruption and peaking at 5.49 hours in May 2026 (Kenyans.co.ke, EPRA data). Since March 2023, Kenya Power has logged 5,582 scheduled interruptions totaling 43,000 hours of planned outages across 1,109 of Kenya's 1,452 wards (PawaSwitch). Nairobi's water system supplies roughly 525.6 million litres a day against 900 million litres of demand — about 70% of need (Nation.africa).
These numbers describe work-as-imagined's failure rate. They say nothing about work-as-done — the actual, specific, teachable adaptations that fill the resulting 8.39 hours, 43,000 hours, 30% shortfall. That's the gap this project's field-guide entries were built to document, not as statistics, but as procedure.
Nineteen entries as a dataset, not just a narrative
The field guide this paper documents the research case for — built in parallel, as a nonfiction graphic-novel project, The Hitchhiker's Guide to Actually Living Here — organizes 19 entries across 10 fixed categories (utilities, money, transit, bureaucracy, home life, social code, food and body, street smarts, language, digital life). Each entry follows the same structure deliberately: a numbered sequence of concrete steps, a stated rationale for the step order specifically, and a closing statement of what the workaround actually buys the person doing it. That structure is not a storytelling device first — it's a data schema. Strip the narration and each entry is a short, structured case report: Code | Category | Precondition (what formal system failed) | Procedure (ordered steps) | What it buys.
Three entries, drafted in full, sit inside the categories with the clearest measurable gap: Utilities (001, water rationing; 002, grid failure) and Money & Hustle (101, informal mobile-money banking in the near-total absence of branch infrastructure — Kenya's mobile-money system is itself one of the most studied real-world débrouillardise adaptations of the last two decades, a workaround that outgrew the gap it was built to fill). The other 16, one or two per remaining category, are written at the same structural depth and await the same treatment.
No claim is made that 19 entries from one author in one city constitute a representative sample of anything. What they constitute is a consistent instrument — same schema, same categories, applied repeatedly — of exactly the kind resilience engineering and frugal-innovation research both say is missing: granular, procedural documentation of work-as-done, rather than the aggregate failure statistics of work-as-imagined that institutions already publish.
What this is not, yet
- Not a formal ethnography. Ayimpam's Kinshasa study and the jugaad literature are built on structured fieldwork across many informants; this is one person's documented adaptations in one city, deliberately narrow rather than broad.
- Not statistically representative. Nineteen entries is a taxonomy depth check, not a sample size. Extending the schema to other contributors, or other cities, is the obvious next methodological step and is not yet underway.
- The graphic-novel form is a distribution choice, not a validity claim. Illustration and narrative voice make the schema legible to readers who would never open a resilience-engineering paper; they don't substitute for the citation discipline above, which is why every empirical claim here carries a real, checkable source.
- The cross-literature synthesis is this paper's contribution, not a discovery. Jugaad, Système D, and work-as-done/work-as-imagined are each well established on their own terms; connecting a Nairobi field guide to all three, explicitly, appears not to have been done before — that gap, not the underlying concepts, is what's new here.
What happens next
The narrative project continues on its own track — 15–20 fully illustrated pages over the next few months, documented separately. This paper's own next step is narrower: extending the same fixed schema (precondition, procedure, payoff) to entries contributed by people documenting their own workarounds in other infrastructure-gap contexts, which would convert this from a single author's taxonomy into the kind of structured, comparable dataset the jugaad and resilience-engineering literatures currently lack.
Appendix — an earlier draft of this paper, before it became a research paper
Before
I went to Haverford for computer science, then built a career in Philadelphia. I assumed the specific knowledge — how to actually run a day here — would still be there when I came back, the way you assume your native language stays fluent. It wasn't memory. It was muscle, and muscle atrophies.
The return
The disorienting part isn't that the power goes out or the water doesn't come. It's that you're supposed to already know what to do about it — you grew up here — and you don't, not anymore, not at the speed it's needed. You relearn in real time, in public, usually mid-crisis: which order to wash in when there's one bucket, what to prioritize on a battery that won't outlast the blackout, how a kiosk transaction actually works when you haven't used one in years. Nobody hands you a manual for your own home. You write your own, badly, one failure at a time.
Why write it down
This is working paper number 43. The other 42 exist for the same reason this one does: when something is hard enough to be disorienting, I process it by turning it into a system — data, categories, a document I can point at instead of a feeling I have to sit with. A graphic novel is a strange place to land from that instinct, but the instinct is the same one. If I have to relearn this stuff anyway, I might as well build the manual properly — and build it so someone else landing in the same disorientation, returning or visiting or arriving, doesn't have to start from nothing.
Other people who've done this honestly
I'm not the first person to turn hard personal material into something a stranger would want to read. Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi) turned a revolution and a childhood into an NYT bestseller that became an Oscar-nominated film. Maus (Art Spiegelman) is the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer. Fun Home (Alison Bechdel) became a Tony-winning musical. Climate Changed (Philippe Squarzoni) turned climate science and a personal reckoning into a single essay-memoir — and is represented by Nicolas Grivel, the closest direct comp for pairing real research with personal narrative. None of them started as a franchise. They started as one honest account, specific enough that it generalized.
The moment I'm writing into
I'm not writing this in a vacuum. In October 2026, Alliance Française Nairobi ran the first East African Comic Competition under the theme "Inhabiting the World," with Nicolas Grivel — a literary agent who has represented A Game for Swallows, Climate Changed, Incidents in the Night, and An Iranian Metamorphosis — doing individual portfolio reviews in Nairobi this week. That's not why I started thinking about this book. It's why I finished this paper instead of sitting on the idea.
