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"Informal sector (Economics) -- Africa"
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Informal entrepreneurship and cross-border trade between Zimbabwe and South Africa
Zimbabwe has witnessed the rapid expansion of informal cross-border trading (ICBT) with neighboring countries over the past two decades. Beginning in the mid-1990s when the country embarked on its Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP), a large number of people were forced into informal employment through worsening economic conditions and the decline in formal sector jobs.
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Women and the Informal Economy in Urban Africa
In this highly original work, Mary Njeri Kinyanjui explores the trajectory of women's movement from the margins of urbanization into the centres of business activities in Nairobi and its accompanying implications for urban planning. While women in much of Africa have struggled to gain urban citizenship and continue to be weighed down by poor education, low income and confinement to domestic responsibilities due to patriarchic norms, a new form of urban dynamism - partly informed by the informal economy - is now enabling them to manage poverty, create jobs and link to the circuits of capital and labour. Relying on social ties, reciprocity, sharing and collaboration, women's informal 'solidarity entrepreneurialism' is taking them away from the margins of business activity and catapulting them into the centre. Bringing together key issues of gender, economic informality and urban planning in Africa, Kinyanjui demonstrates that women have become a critical factor in the making of a postcolonial city.
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Improving skills development in the informal sector
The informal sector of Sub-Saharan Africa is comprised of small and household enterprises that operate in the non-farm sector outside the protected employment of the formal wage sector. The sector was identified 40 years ago by the ILO representing a pool of surplus labor that was expected to be absorbed by future industrialization, but rather than gradually disappearing, it has become a persistent feature of the regions economic landscape accounting for a majority of jobs created off the farm. Acknowledging its potential as a source of employment for the regions expanding workforce and improving its productivity and earnings is recognized as a priority for poverty reduction. This study examines the role played by education and skills development in achieving this objective.Until now, few studies have used household labor force surveys to capture the skills profile of the informal sector and study how different means of skills development - formal education, technical and vocational education and training, apprenticeships, and learning on the job -- shape productivity and earnings in the informal sector as compared with the formal wage sector. This study uses household labor force surveys to look at the experience of skills development in five African countries - Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Tanzania - that together account for one-third of the nearly 900 million persons living in SSA. The study defines the non-farm informal sector as the self-employed (own account and with workers), contributing family members, and wage workers in small and household enterprises.Of the nearly 36 million working off the farm in the five countries, 7 out of 10 are working in the informal sector. The importance of this study is its quantitative assessment of how different sources of skills development are related to the sector in which one works and the
earnings received in that sector. It further highlights a set of economic constraints to acquiring skills in the small and household enterprises of the informal sector that will have to be overcome if skills are to become a means for improving productivity and earnings in this sector. The study offers a comprehensive strategy for improving employment outcomes in the informal sector through skills development with examples of successful interventions taken from international experience and the five countries.
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The informal sector in francophone Africa : firm size, productivity, and institutions
This book is a major step towards improving the understanding of the complex reality of informal sector firms in francophone West Africa. It innovates by concentrating on informal firms rather than informal employment (as other studies do), and identifying 'large informal' sector firms whose sales rival those of large formal-sector firms but operate in ways that are similar to small informal operators. Not only is the regulatory environment facing these two types of informal firms distinct, but policies aimed at improving their productivity need to be differentiated. This study focuses on the urban informal sector in three capital cities: Dakar (Senegal), Cotonou (Benin), and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). The study also breaks new ground with an eclectic methodology and primary data collection. Quantitative and qualitative firm-level data were collected involving a unique and fruitful collaboration among academic researchers, government officials, the West African economic and monetary union commission, informal and formal sector business associations, and labor unions. This volume represents the culmination of a long collaboration between the Centre de Recherches Economiques Appliquees (CREA) at the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar and the World Bank.
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Africa's Informal Workers
Africa's Informal Workers is a vigorous examination of the informalization and casualization of work, which is changing livelihoods in Africa and beyond. Gathering cases from nine countries and cities across sub-Saharan Africa, and from a range of sectors, this volume goes beyond the usual focus on household ‘coping strategies’ and individual agency, addressing the growing number of collective organizations through which informal workers make themselves visible and articulate their demands and interests. The emerging picture is that of a highly diverse landscape of organized actors, providing grounds for tension but also opportunities for alliance. The collection examines attempts at organizing across the formal-informal work spheres, and explores the novel trend of transnational organizing by informal workers. Part of the ground-breaking Africa Now series, Africa’s Informal Workers is a timely exploration of deep, ongoing economic, political and social transformations.
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Mapping the invisible : the informal food economy of Cape Town, South Africa
This report argues that it is essential to understand the dynamics of the informal food retail sector because of its vital role in ensuring greater access to food by the urban poor. Existing policy frameworks to address food security and to govern the informal sector tend to neglect informal retail in the food system. As a result, the sector is poorly understood. The report therefore attempts to identify the characteristics of the sector that impact on its ability to address the food needs of the neighbourhoods in which the businesses are located. Although the research is focused on Cape Town, the findings are of broader relevance.
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The Legal Empowerment Agenda
Despite providing society with a set of crucial services, large groups of workers in the informal economy are subject to exclusion and discrimination, and their lives are characterised by various types of vulnerabilities and deprivations that result from the denial of social, economic, political and legal protection. Although not new to the development vocabulary, the informal economy has received renewed attention in recent years largely due to the ILO's 'decent work' agenda and various efforts to promote 'legal empowerment of the poor'. With an explicit focus on labour rights, the book focuses on a nuanced understanding of the regulatory and operational challenges and dilemmas related to implementing the two approaches in selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to analyzing structures and relations of power between the formal and the informal economies, the book critically discusses the work of governments, civil society organizations and the poor themselves to address the daily challenges of living in the informal economy.
Contents: Introduction, Dan Banik; Towards an effective regulatory framework for labour rights and social protection in southern Africa, Evance Kalula, Ngozi Okorafor and Pamhidzai Bamu; Poverty, legal empowerment and informal business in South Africa, Marlese von Broembsen; Waste management and the workplace, Jan Theron and Margareet Visser; Formalising trading spaces and places: an analysis of the informal sector in Lusaka, Zambia, Wilma Sichombo Nchito; The complexities and paradoxes of governing the informal sector in Malawi: the case of street vending in Zomba and Blantyre, Blessings Chinsinga and Happy Kayuni; The informal health industry in East Africa and implementation of the legal empowerment of the poor agenda in developing countries, Kanakulya Dickson; Human rights of the working poor in Uganda's informal sector, Lilian Keene-Mugerwa; Informal labour and the ethic of care: legal protection of care-givers in Malawi, Ngeyi Ruth Kanyongolo; The right to water: an inquiry into legal empowerment and property rights formation in Tanzania, Ellen Hillbom; Rights, legal empowerment and the informal economy in Africa: concluding remarks, Dan Banik; Index.
Dan Banik is an Associate Professor of Development Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway.
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