Despite high prices, poor quality and inconvenience, Kenya’s urban poor continued to buy water from private vendors because it’s still their best option.
Street vending at Eastern Market, Washington, D.C.
John Rennie Short
After trying to remove street vendors from its cities for years, China is supporting them to help jump-start its economy. An urban scholar explains why other cities should do the same.
Stokvel members prefer to manage their affairs through non-state means.
Getty Images
Millions of South Africans exchange billions of rands annually but disputes involving these transactions hardly ever appear before the country’s courts.
Lockdowns to curb the coronavirus have shut down Africa’s dominant informal economy, destroying livelihoods.
Simon Maina/AFP/GettyImages
The current lockdown in Zimbabwe is going to provide a stern test for its informal economy, which is the country’s dominant economy and employs 90% of people.
Danielle Resnick, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
By better understanding the politics and governance of African cities and variations across cities, we can identify feasible opportunities to improve informal traders’ livelihoods.
The infamous Makoko slum in Lagos, Nigeria.
Stefan Magdalinski/Wikimedia Commons
In our urban world, turning the makeshift and the informal into the livable and sustainable is our greatest challenge.
This screenshot from a commercial ad was part of a campaign to improve communication and information about domestic workers’ labour conditions in Argentina.
Afip Cocina
Domestic workers in Argentina are essentially women employed in the informal economy which can enable forms of mistreatment. Today they’re fighting to formalise their status.
A street vendor in Hanoi, Vietnam. Rather than being “helpless and hopeless”, many informal workers are self-reliant and ambitious.
Wikimedia
Cecilia Poggi, Agence française de développement (AFD); Anda David, Agence française de développement (AFD) e Claire Zanuso, Agence française de développement (AFD)
The informal economy is often perceived negatively, yet recent research from developing and emerging countries indicate that the preconceptions that surround it are myths.
Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam. The country is known for its budgetary problems.
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Street vendors are the most visible of the people who work in the informal sector – up to half the urban workforce in cities like Manila – but whose needs and rights receive no official recognition.
Informal trading in Fordsburg, Johannesburg.
Shutterstock
India’s recent move toward a cash-free society helped reveal just how important physical currency is to the informal economies that the poorest families depend upon.
The headquarters of private security firm Prosegur after the spectacular robbery.
Francisco Espinosa/Reuters
Danielle Resnick, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
The harassment of informal food vendors by national and municipal governments remains a major impediment to improving the resilience of the urban poor in African cities.
Cities like Dhaka are internally diverse, even contradictory. Such variation extends to the types of economic activity that take place in them.
Reuters/Andrew Biraj
Senior Lecturer, School of Archaeology and Anthropology; Director, Australian National Centre for Latin American Studies, Australian National University