lockdown!

Zambian riot police have occupied Lusaka to prevent street vendors from selling goods, The Nation reports.

Almost all streets of the Zambian capital, Lusaka, have a multitude of vendors selling all sorts of goods making it difficult for people to move on the streets or enter shops. The vendors have even covered some lanes on main streets with their commodities. The vendors also sell their goods on the pathways, corridors of shops even entrances to shops. Some shop owners are believed to be giving some of their goods to street vendors to be selling for them outside their shops because buyers opt to purchase goods from the streets instead of shops because the entrances are blocked by vendors.

Just wondering what is so objectionable about street sellers that they have to be met with such force, and treated as if they were violent gangbangers.

night hawks and night hawkers in Karnataka

The Dekkan Herald interviews street vendors who sell "coffee, tea, biscuits, buns, dosa, rice bath, omelette and cigarettes" throughout the night. "Every night, I earn about Rs 2000," one hawker tells the paper. That's $41.50 at today's exchange rate. Not a bad haul.

the travels of a plastic cup in Indonesia

The Jakarta Post offers an excellent chronicle of the recycling supply chain in Indonesia, as a plastic cup, once thrown away, moves through layers of the informal economy into the formal economy.

Moh. Darmadi, a self-employed plastic-waste collector, roams the streets of South Jakarta’s Setiabudi neighborhood equipped with a metal picker and a plastic sack on his back. He sells his takings to a lapak — a term for businesses that buy waste material from trash collectors. The price: Rp 900 for a kilogram of plastic cups and bottles; half that amount for plastic bags.

The lapak, which employs laborers to clean, sort, and prepare the plastic, earns perhaps Rp 10 million a week per truckload of recycled materials.

The purchaser more carefully sorts the plastics, and then runs them through a shredder which chops the raw material into fine pellets. This business sells to formal sector manufacturers, for a weekly turnover of Rp 45 million.

Only about half of the plastic waste produced annually is being recycled. While plastic accounts for 13.9 percent of the waste in Greater Jakarta, only 6.5 percent is recycled, according to a World Bank pilot project on waste identification.

To increase this amount, it is necessary to work with the informal sector.

so this is progress?

Authorities in Kumasi, Ghana have torn down and burnt two thousand informal stalls in the central business district. Police started the action at 4:30 am, so when the business people arrived around 6, their stalls were already ablaze. Daily Guide Ghana reports.

Sticks, stones, and soap phones
At the same time, authorities in Accra have warned that hawkers are the big problem in the capital's Nkrumah Circle. "Walking on that pavement is very difficult, for the reason that these hawkers are overcrowded on the pavements, while they chase and pursue pedestrians to buy their phones. When passers-by try to ignore them, they turn to rain insults on these people calling them all them all sorts of names," Modern Ghana suggests, adding that some "hawkers design toilet soap to look like a mobile phone, cover it with a cell phone covering, and sell it, saying that the battery had run down so it could not be turned on."

This is absurd.

1. Burn down their markets and banish all hawkers simply because they are persistent and successful businesspeople. Whatever happened to due process?

2. I have been in many markets in Africa. In Lagos, Nigeria, many touts outside the market will grab your shirt or your hand and attempt to pull you into their stalls. When you make it clear you don't want to buy, they understand.

3. And ask yourself: would you buy a mobile phone from a guy on the street without opening it up and making sure it works?

The spurious arguments offered in these newspapers are designed to make people fear street markets. But crowds actually increase commerce and heighten public safety. And the street sellers are providing a service. If there were no customers, there would be no street vendors.

the informality of the global economy

Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), along with the Inclusive Cities Project, have issued a study that shows how informal workers--more than half the workers of the world--are impacted by the global economic meltdown.

the formal and informal economies are not entirely distinct. In global value chains, production, distribution and employment can fall at different points on a continuum between pure ‘formal’ relations (i.e. regulated and protected) at one pole and pure ‘informal’ relations (i.e. unregulated and unprotected) at the other, with many intermediate categories in between. Workers and units can also move across the formal-informal continuum and/or operate simultaneously at different points along it. These dynamic linkages of the formal and informal economies highlight the importance of understanding the ‘informality’ of the global economy and recession.

According to the report, decreased demand and crashes in commodity prices have made life vastly more difficult for informal workers: 85 percent of recyclers/waste pickers and 62 percent of street vendors have reported losing business in recent months. Three quarters of all informal workers surveyed said that their profits dropped between January and June 2009.

Rather than the traditional prescriptions of 'formalizing the informal,' the report suggests that workers support a more nuanced approach in which government would, among other things:

--support their work
--offer wage protections
--encourage participation in a social safety net
and
--recognise they are here to stay and stop harassing them

so what if everyone's in the informal economy?

Every man, woman, and child in Pakistan is a tax cheat. That's the conclusion of a World Bank study disclosed by The News, a Pakistani paper. This means that all businesspeople in the country are, in a way, part of the informal economy.

a pension fund for informal workers

More on this great idea, from Ghana Broadcasting Corporation. As the article notes, 9 million workers in Ghana might ultimately buy into the pension fund, which would then provide social protections to those informal workers. And the money collected could be invested in the informal sector, too. Social protection and venture capital investment. A potentially great combination.