It is estimated that by 2050, the continent’s population would surge to 2.4 billion, representing a three-fold increase from the current 1.4 billion. The continent’s population, in majority, is young; while the rest of the world (Europe, US, Asia) have their median age hovering around 40, Africa is weighted at 18 years old. Already, MDPI has forewarned that, globally, the current population growth would require resources equivalent to three planets by 2050. Early enough, the continent has started paying the price indirectly.
Understand that there are works, at the bottom of the pyramid, that are neither official nor too informal. The work itself might be outside of what's considered proper but decent enough to be accepted. It could be errands with no known preexisting terms and conditions but only verbal agreements. Sometimes, you're self-employer, micro-employer, or whatever titles pay the bills. There are no clear career roadmaps but you shift only under the changing nature of jobs. Irregular income, mixed skills, no income, bad weather, insecure, low earnings, no job—name them. These kinds of jobs are every characterization of low-life. But one thing is clear; there is work done and value exchanged. These jobs exist to fill the gaps in the official system and serve those who might not be lucky to get formal jobs.
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Informal work, serving as an alternative to the limited formal economy, accounts for nearly 83% of employment in Africa. This is especially true in Kenya where more than 3 million individuals operate micro-businesses, thus adding $290 million to the economy every month and employing millions. However, the conventional view of informal businesses still upholds the deeply-rooted policy narrative that they threaten formal economies. Subsequently, much of the efforts have been about control and elimination rather than support and investment. The current policy narratives have put street vendors on the edge of irregular income, low earnings, and poverty.
Informal Dynamics
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Occurring in major and secondary cities, street vendors are facing a hard time hawking their goods. Sidewalks and other open spaces, while open to all, have become the informal workplaces for street vendors to earn a living. Nevertheless, local authorities, city planners, and traffic monitoring officers are at loggerheads with them. This stems from the perception that street vendors are misusing public spaces. For that reason alone, negation of street vending without proper alternatives has translated into misguided, biased street policies.
Secondly, municipalities have forcibly abolished illegal vending in public spaces. Mayors collude with askaris to bundle out street vendors in a bid to “beautify” cities and declutter public spaces for the intended purposes. However, this fierce enforcement has backfired as street vendors have devised avoidance strategies to continue with their hawking. At worst, county askaris have violently battled with them, thus resulting in the impounding and sometimes destruction of goods. This has shown that the use of force is not only ineffective but also costly, with the probability of breeding resistance and anarchy due to the fact that vendors have no alternative means of earning a livelihood.
Thirdly, street vendors are hesitant to relocate from their current working spaces. They have vehemently opposed relocation plans hatched out by the municipalities given the benefits, accessibility, and social network that comes with being known in their preferred sidewalks. While local authorities, on paper, are right to structurally plan urban vending, the implementation is loose, apathetic, and expedient, despite using billions to build structures. Again, market stalls are likely unmaintained, lacking water and sanitation facilities and are crowded with vendors.
Fourth, there is no legal framework guiding street vending considering that it was still being precepted as illegal. This underpins why municipalities have a hard time controlling, managing and reorganizing street vendors.
Fifth, street vendors hardly access credit that they need to grow; in short, they are excluded from the financial sector. While it is understandable that credit actors want to plan safe, it calls for innovative financial products from the private sectors because they are best placed to understand and solve fears surrounding their credit risks.
Lastly, chasing away street vendors from the designated public spaces might work only for short-term, but this signals intellectual laziness from the policymakers. The mismatch between theoretical framework and reality-based policies has indicated why transition is unsurprisingly failing. Unless socioeconomic shift is done gradually and pilot-tested, buy-in from them would still prove futile.
The genesis of neglected informal economy is tied to the government's play of the trickle-down game of pro-macroeconomic policies for long, centering only on the top cream of the income pyramid. And the results haven't been promising; at worst, they have been a recipe of neglect and misdirected policies. Still, even with debt-sustained economy, African states didn't attain the much-hyped economy-wide transformation, as characterized by limited job prospects, wasteful tax allocation, bloated tenders, ineffective socioeconomic policies, and innovation-deprived economy. The failed pro-macroeconomic policies, despite continuous use, have been tested (and is being proven once again) as ineffective by the changing demographics, especially among youth yearning to work but constrained by decades-old stagnant formal economy.
It can as well be deduced that governments often struggle to make inroads into poorer, populous urban areas with the thriving evening/street vending. Academicians, policymakers, financial institutions, international agencies, and local governments are majorly still stucked in the rhetorical macroeconomy, pursuing imagined and bottom-hostile policies. Their disinterest on the forgotten bottom-based economy is largely influenced by the Western-borrowed economic metrics, which are presently applied even when the demographic-led economy has disapproved them. One of the concerns raised by the government is that street vending is hard to quantify and account for economic transactions.
However, this worry stems from the fact that governments have had little success in adding evening economy into the taxable bracket. Consequently, it is this conception that makes the whole street vending appear bad. But, going by the dissatisfaction from the street vendors concerning how they are handled by the state authorities, government's approach to street vending is short sighted, bureaucratic, and pro-state only. If states continue to adopt macroeconomic-based mindset and tax lens, their poor relations with street vendors will still deteriorate and they may not gain anything from them.
Despite facing social threats like evictions, bad weather, police harassment, etc, street vending has showcased resilience, flexibility, and adaptability. When the pandemic striked in 2020, the formal economy was brought to a halt, but informal businesses continued to adapt to the external environment. Street vendors resorted to selling masks, hawking from home to home, moving from one market to another, etc. Yet, out of the $503 million pandemic economic stimulus availed in 2020, informal businesses only got $3 million. Surprisingly, they recovered, responded, and took necessary steps without much support from the government.
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Planning forward, how the politics surrounding street vending pans out would be dependent on how all pivot actors strike the right chord. But, time isn't on the government side to deliberately delegate street vending to local authorities otherwise the whole issue would be blown out and turned into political unrest. Street vending is a matter of national overhaul from the policy perspective, budgeting and public image. Consequently, it's time to weave a new narrative from an economic sense by acknowledging the socio-economic impact of street vending. Suggestions like accommodating street vending into road infrastructure, designing streets for all, changing the badly publicized image of street vendors, supporting them financially, etc. should be under policy considerations. The current context of street vending offers ready-made reality-based lessons but it is how they are gleaned and implemented that determine its success.
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Agreed, instead of viewing street vendors as a problem, governments should accept their important economic role. They should make policies to support street vendors with better infrastructure, financial access, and a positive image. The vendors have really tasty treats. Thanks for sharing Edwin.
Great post Edwin. Like you identified, policy is a major issue. We try so much to copy westerners when we should tailor policies to local realities