Irene, a 56-year-old Ugandan, sat on the side of the road in a colourful dress, attempting to sell fruits, biscuits and candies to the empty street in Kampala. In efforts to curb the spread of Covid-19, most people in the Ugandan capital have been confined to their houses for the past weeks, rendering streets deserted and streets vendors without customers. “But I can’t stay home; how will we eat?” she said.
Irene’s situation mirrors that of millions of street vendors worldwide, reliant on day-to-day commerce for survival. Losing their daily wages as a result of Covid-19 health measures has severely threatened their livelihoods.
“We haven’t received sufficient support from the government, but this is not surprising, the government is good at international affairs, but never cared about us [street vendors]. We always need to fight hard to secure our needs,” said Irene.
While the current focus has been on establishing emergency measures for vulnerable populations, the crisis has highlighted the urgency to consider a long term regulatory framework, beyond the Covid-19 emergency measures, to protect the working poor in improving their livelihoods, strengthen their resilience and facilitate targeting them with necessary emergency and health measures and guidelines.
Working poor and Covid-19 relief measures
In Uganda, employment in the informal sector is estimated to contribute to over 50% of GDP and employs 80% of its labour force[1], largely formed by the urban poor. While, Uganda’s economy has been consistently growing over the last few decades, a substantial proportion of the population have not benefited from this growth[2]. Hundreds of thousands of poor Ugandans, with limited skills and education, have instead resorted to informal work, such as street vending, to make ends meet. Yet, despite its role in enhancing the livelihood of Ugandans, this work often faces limited social, political and legal support, rendering the working poor particularly vulnerable to shocks such as Covid-19.
Covid-19 has simultaneously exposed their vulnerabilities and their systematic exclusion from existing urban processes.
The government has rolled out food relief packages to support vulnerable groups, which the Ugandan president stated would include taxi/boda drivers and market and street vendors. However, the exclusion of most of these working poor from existing databases implies that authorities don’t have an estimate of the number of working poor impacted, their exact locations and their level of vulnerability and needs. This has hindered the efficiency and the timeliness of identifying and targeting them with relief measures.
In fact, many have complained of slow distribution. “The lockdown was imposed two weeks ago, and we still haven’t received any food assistance,” said Margaret, a young woman selling vegetables. Moreover, Kampala residents held demonstrations in certain neighbourhood to demand that government supplies them with food[3].
The working poor and vendors associations were not consulted in the food relief schemes, and those who received the food aid reported that the packages didn’t properly account for their needs to be able to stay home. “The food packages don’t include sugar or charcoal, how are we supposed to cook without these? Our only option is to keep working on the streets to get money to buy those,” said Irene.
This dissatisfaction in the relief packages reflects the persisting disconnect between the authorities, their schemes and poor workers’ needs and realities.
To cover their basic needs, the working poor, particularly street vendors, have been forced to defy stay-at-home orders, face police threat and risk their health to keep working on the streets.
Marginalization of working poor: Case of street vendors
Street vendors, representing informal vendors who operate in public spaces such as sidewalks, streets and lots are mainly formed of the urban poor. Historically, street vending has been perceived as unproductive and an impediment to countries’ development, and street vendors have often been blamed for congestion, and vehicle and pedestrian traffic obstruction.
However, Marie, a young vendor who had still not received food aid and needed to sell bananas to feed her family, describes street vending as “a good and flexible business” and a way for her to enrol her children in schools. “If I can have more capital, I can even buy more bananas to sell and make more money,” she said.
Usually street vendors buy their stocks from market vendors using previous days’ earnings. Accordingly, their productivity and ability to cover their needs depends on previous days’ productivity, and a decline in income as a result of Covid-19 could adversely impact the amount of money they could earn, even after health measures are lifted.
Other vendors, manage to purchase the goods on credit in the morning and reimburse them in the evening[4].
Marie recognizes that it has not been easy to work on the streets of Kampala, even before the virus hit. “We need to hide from the KCCA [Kampala Capital City Authority] officers as they don’t allow us to work on the streets. We wish they could be nicer since we buy our goods from market vendors who pay fees to them,” she added. In fact, market vendors from whom street vendors purchase their goods pay fees and/or taxes to authorities.
Nonetheless, street vendors have been deemed illegal and the KCCA, which is the governmental entity responsible for the operations of Kampala, has cracked down on vendors, confiscated their goods and evicted them from the streets. “A few days ago, KCCA officers came and took all my goods and those of the other vendors on the streets claiming that we were not respecting social distancing. Before the virus, they would also do the same under the pretext that we’re not respecting sanitation standards,” said Peace, a fruit vendor. “We understand it’s their duty to enforce regulations, however, instead of treating us violently, why don’t they give us clearer steps to follow?” she continued.
Poverty reducer, not impediment to growth
Authorities should acknowledge that the value of street vending, and most informal work, lie in its ability to create income generating opportunities for a sizeable number of citizens and to help them escape extreme poverty and starvation, especially when the formal economy presents limited opportunities. Rather than hindering the work of the working poor, facilitating the recovery from Covid-19 and resilience in face of future crisis will instead require supporting them. The Covid-19 crisis should indeed offer an opportunity to bridge the gap between unprotected informal workers’ needs and authorities’ actions, and to rethink support and inclusion mechanisms for these workers.
In July 2019, the KCCA proposed the Regulation of Street Trade Ordinance aimed at regulating street vendors through registering and providing them with licenses, identification numbers and uniforms[5]. However, street vendors were not involved in the drafting of the ordinance and it failed to properly account for their interests. It proposed annual license fees that most street vendors cannot afford, granted KCCA the authority to deny issuing a license without reason and didn’t mention how vendors will benefit from regulations.
“I haven’t heard of a proposed registration, however I think it might be useful if it will facilitate our work and we could face less problems,” said Margaret. While registration could be beneficial for unprotected informal workers, it should not be focused on generating revenues for cities, but rather on protecting workers’ conditions and earnings, lowering their risk and ensuring they can be efficiently reached with information and health measures and guidelines, particularly in light of a pandemic.
Accordingly it is important to guarantee that i) licenses fees are reasonable, particularly considering existing fees the vendors might be indirectly contributing to, ii) the process of applying for licenses is simple, clear and transparent and iii) the conditions of registration explicitly list protections and benefits entailed by registration.
Benefits could include:
- Facilitating workers’ access to loans, enabling them to increase their productivity and recover from shocks.
- Allowing workers to operate freely in public spaces and ensuring they receive legal protection in case of harassment and exploitation.
- Strengthening workers’ cooperatives and involving them in urban development dialogues.
- Establishing channels of communication between workers and KCCA, enabling workers to relay grievances, and KCCA to share with workers information and guidelines.
Moreover, to effectively design frameworks and schemes and overcome the disconnect between working poor and the authorities, it will be essential to i) involve them in the drafting process and ii) collect more data on them through regular representative surveys.
In cities where unprotected informal workers form a large workforce, including street vendors, rickshaw pullers and waste pickers, development processes should include protecting their efforts to actively secure their livelihoods. As such, guaranteeing their basic social, political and economic rights and involving them in dialogues should be central to Covid-19 recovery strategy. For Irene, the most important aspect of the crisis is to learn from it, “People should learn to save and invest, but government should also support poor self-employed people” she said.
[1] https://sihanet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/The-Invisible-Laborers-of-Kampala.pdf
[2] https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/uganda/overview
[3] https://twitter.com/newvisionwire/status/1252182487817752576
[4] https://sihanet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/The-Invisible-Laborers-of-Kampala.pdf
[5] https://www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1503255/kcca-regulate-street-vendors