My Beauty Best Teacher

Kate Meagher, in her 2010 book Identity Economics chronicles the recent history of the informal garment and shoe manufacturing clusters in Nigeria's Igboland. It's a fairly pessimistic look at the possibilities for these merchants.

She writes, "If the travails of Igbo informal producers have revealed anything, it is that even the most dynamic and well established informal enterprise networks lack the ability to assert their productive interests against the distruptive agendas of local officials, let alone to defy national or global economic and political interests." Meagher calls for strengthening the capacity of informal operators while leaning on the government to find ways to work with informal merchants -- thus allowing them an opening to turn the identity economics of tribal social networks into something that can develop across regions and transcend traditional divisions...[continue reading]

Informal city. Photo: Tanya Zack.

The South African Informal City is an initiative of the Architects’ Collective and forms parts of the technical site visits offered by the Local Government Programme for COP17...Looking at South Africa’s most relevant and innovative design and research projects in terms of urban migration issues, the 20 works featured in the exhibition aim to promote dialogue around informality and urban development.
Inner city informality, in-situ upgrading, catalytic projects, un-built projects and backyard interventions are the five categories in which the projects are presented.

Cooperation, information sharing and positive action between policy makers, practitioners, academics and civil society is what the exhibition aims to promotion, together with taking a critical look at informality and urban development. “The exhibition will provide opportunities for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, and for existing research and realised projects to become part of a greater public debate,” says Karen Eicker, Architects’ Collective director.

Image courtesy of howwemadeitinafrica

Perhaps the most strikingly visible way in which formal businesses make use of System D is in the mobile phone industry. Along every road in many African and Asian countries – on median strips, on the side streets and main drags, in the middle of highways, at almost every intersection – you can find small plastic tables with umbrellas overhead.They’re called umbrella stands and they are the phone booths of the developing world. In the sparse shade offered by those umbrellas, the formal economy meets System D in an extremely direct way.

Nigeria provides a perfect case study. It’s the largest country in Africa, with a mobile phone market that seems to have nothing but upside, and a variety of telecom firms are battling for market share.
MTN, a massive multinational based in South Africa and active in twenty one countries through Africa and the Middle East, had spent years looking for a way to gain a share of the Nigerian market. With a population of close to a hundred and sixty million, Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, and one in six Africans is a Nigerian

Image courtesy of parallelozero

Women play a prominent role in informal trade, and in informal business activities in particular. These few figures are proof enough: four to five million women in West Africa are involved in collecting, processing and marketing shea nuts and butter, bringing in an estimated 80 per cent of their income (Plunked and Stryker, 2002). In Benin, women are 80 per cent of those involved in informal trade, and the figure rises to 95 per cent for informal marketing of unprocessed goods.
Madam Tinubu’s fame has no doubt been surpassed by the rich merchant women of contemporary Togo, known as the “Nana-Benz.” While these women have followed varying routes to success, they share several characteristics. Then, as now, these women conduct their businesses on the regional, and even international, stage, drawing on a long history of trading experience as informal actors. This results in their economic success, rather than initiating it. The volume of trade that passes through their hands enables them to regularly increase their economic and social capital (Humarau, 1999) even if their absence from or minimal institutional representation in formal political decision-making tends to minimize the crucial role that they could play in the development of intra-African trade. The factors that bring them together also separate them from most of the small-scale West African traders operating daily, who barely succeed in breaking even with their investments. All these groups constitute the major trading agents of both the formal and informal sectors.

Nairobi’s slums run on a functioning informal economy and have their own bars, restaurants, pharmacies, cinemas and street traders like any other neighbourhood. At the centre of these communities is a vibrant creativity and a visually evident wealth of artistic talent. This can be found in the huge mural in the Mathare slum created by graffiti artist Bankslave (Kevin Esendi), or in the performing arts programmes run by Sarakasi trust and the studio photography sessions held by Peter Olendo

Image courtesy of Think Africa

..."Ghetto" Art from KiberaWith an increase of wasani (artists) operating within Nairobi’s slums, many have come together to form collectives and establish art centres. One such group is Kibera’s "Maasai Mbili", whose name in Swahili means “the two Maasai”. The Maasai Mbili Art Centre was started in 2001 by Otieno Gomba and Otieno Kota, neither of whom are actually Maasai. The name refers to a time when the two artists would dress as Maasai to attract customers to their sign-writing business. Saving their earnings, these two artists rented a small two-storey building in Kibera and created a new art space, which became the "Maasia Mbili Art Centre". The studio attracted many other artists from Kibera who came to learn from one another. Today around ten artists use the studio as a space for their painting and sculpting.

Nigeria is experiencing solid economic growth for several years now. However, employment remains low and can hardly catch up with population growth. The sectors of the economy that are booming such as the banking, telecommunications and insurance industries, do not create many jobs.

...even a large bank branch will only employ a handful of people, while a factory can give employment to a whole town.

The prosperous petroleum sector is built virtually on extraction and not value addition as Kaduna, Warri and Port Harcourt refineries remain comatose.

It is also widely acknowledged that the informal sector provides over 70 percent of employment in the country, yet many workers daily face harassment and intimidation from Government officials at all level whilethere is no systematic programme of training and re-training in the face ofchanging technologies and market dynamics, credible programmes ofaccess to credits as well as decent workspaces.. This must change, workersin the informal economy need state support in capacity building, finance and patronage and social protection.

...tells us about life in the informal economy, what French culture classifies as System D. 1.8 billion people on the planet subsist through economic transactions that happen outside legal spheres and, by 2020, two thirds of our planet will be doing business in this domain. The future is the free market vs. the flea market.

Private citizens were the first to connect Wenzhou to neighboring regions by building roads, bridges, and highways, as well as the city’s airports and substantial portions of the dock. Even today the city is scattered with infrastructure investment firms through which groups of businessmen pool money to build the transport routes they all need to get their goods from factory to the point of sale. The result is not pretty. Aside from the confusion faced even by residents driving into the city, it is not uncommon to see sidewalks torn up to insert piping, with seemingly no intention of replacing the concrete. Nevertheless, the system is crudely efficient, merchants can all easily access factories, and the factories in this geographically isolated city now have sales networks that span the globe. ...

Images courtesy of Reason

The streets around the railway station are covered in stalls selling $3 blue jeans and $5 boots. There’s a city block dedicated to baby clothes next to a street that sells plastic signs for bathroom doors. In one run-down alleyway you’ll see people repairing televisions, making blankets, and selling fruits, vegetables, and poultry (live or dead). Further outside the center, you can find small shops dedicated to aluminum rods, sheet metal, tire rims, and tires. ... Pool halls are set up wherever there’s open space that you can set a tarp over. Gambling dens are openly advertised. Taxi drivers often drive off the meter. The karaoke parlors are numerous, and almost all of them double as brothels. The poorest residents take part in one of the largest citizen recycling programs anywhere in the world. In an alley one family collects scraps of fabric to sell to the local textile mills, another hoards scraps of paper and cardboard to send to the paper mills, and in front of a lot that looks like it is being used for a garbage dump, a man has set up a secondhand goods shop.

In "Stealth of Nations," Robert Neuwirth offers a fascinating tour of System D, a world largely ignored by academics and government officials but a world familiar to anyone who has visited developing countries. Step outside your beachfront resort in Cancun and you can't miss it. Usually foreign visitors treat the participants in this unofficial economy with either pity or distrust: pity because they assume that System D workers are on the verge of starvation, distrust because familiar guideposts—regulations, licenses, credentials—are lacking.

Often neither prejudice is correct. Mr. Neuwirth introduces us to a woman named Jandira who for a decade has peddled coffee and homemade cakes to the unlicensed vendors at São Paulo's early-morning wholesale market for pirated movies. Her street-corner business, she proudly tells him, has enabled her to buy two cars and a house and to pay her children's fees at private school. Another of Mr. Neuwirth's sources, Chinese handbag designer Ethan Zhang, prefers to stay illegal. For him it's a matter of costs and benefits: "If I want to get a license, then I will need a bank account and an office in an office building." These are not people who lack the skills to survive through legal employment; they just see no good reason to join the legal economy...[continue reading]

Here, in the squatter community of Makoko, one of the waterside shantytowns of Lagos, Nigeria, Ogun Dairo smokes fish. Without a license, on land that she doesn’t own, she has created her economic future. The fish is imported from afar, caught in the North Sea, frozen and shipped to the cacophonous port city on the Nigerian coast.

After several hours in the concentrated smoke of her scorched sawdust --- the strong fumes have stained her wax-print dress, dulling the extravagant colors -- she packs the fish in boxes, readying them to be retailed for a tiny profit on the roadsides of this West African megacity.Economic development in Africa can be found all over, hidden in plain sight. It evades our gaze because our notions of growth and development are conditioned by Western rules. We expect development to be highly organized and regulated, to involve government, and to be anchored by big corporations. In Makoko, as in most of the developing world, the great engine of economic progress is different. It is unstructured, unofficial and, to most people, unfathomable.Academics call this sub-rosa sphere the informal economy, an attempt at objectivity that unfortunately links unlicensed markets with drug dealers and gun runners. But Ogun Dairo and the billions of other unlicensed businesspeople around the world are not criminals. So I propose a new name.Sculpted From French

In French, people who are particularly effective and self- motivated are known as “debrouillards.” Former French colonies have sculpted this word to their economic reality. People doing business on their own, without registering or paying taxes, are part of “l’economie de la debrouillardise” -- or, sweetened for street use, System D.

courtesy of REculture

The informal construction sector has been the only industry capable of providing affordable housing solutions for the urban poor in developing countries. While South African housing policies rely on the formal construction sector for attaining the ambitious targets of subsidized housing delivery, township keep growing with the support of informal process.The strategies and outputs of both sectors are dramatically different; while the formal industry relies on standardization , repetition, and the use of new materials and a single technology, the informal sector takes full advantage of variety, multiplicity, recycling and combination of technologies.Surprisingly, this does not prevent the informal sector from looking for specialization and innovation...[continue reading]

Image of Sarah Mukasa

Philanthropy in Africa has become an area of increasing interest in the past 10 or more years. A key focus for interrogation is the manifestation of philanthropy in the African context - its areas of strength and weakness. Another is how to build on the traditions of philanthropy in Africa to attain stronger institutional processes that scale up localized forms of giving and ground these in principles of social justice, equality, peace and sustainable development. Africans are challenging the notion that Africa is purely a ‘donor recipient’ continent and instead are pointing to the rich traditions of giving and philanthropic practice in Africa – which in many instances have been the mainstay of entire communities.
Whilst it is known that philanthropy is an age-old practice in Africa, there is little recognition of the contributions it has made in developing and sustaining communities. In Africa today, much of the giving takes place in familial and informal community networks responding often to immediate/ welfare concerns. Burial societies, individual support to the payment of school fees and, building of community facilities are examples of philanthropy that can be found in many variations on the continent. Religious organizing has also formed a critical avenue for much of the more formal and institutionalised mechanisms for philanthropy, with programmes driven by local actors providing a range of services including education, health services and feeding programmes...[continue reading]

“Among the non-western economic blocs, East Asia has the highest intraregional trade, comprising largely intermediate goods, underpinning the region’s global trade and competitiveness agenda, and attracting ample FDI. In other words, Factory Asia has worked well. Factory Southern Africa has not. Southern Africa remains the least integrated region in the world despite the presence of a customs union and a free trade area.”Report co-author Sandeep Mahajan says a successful Factory Southern Africa requires dynamic trade based on nimble networks of multi-national firms. Formal and informal trade barriers have to be removed. “South Africa,” he says, “needs to open up, as well as integrate its own rural and advanced regions.” Current policy, he says, “tends towards mercantilism, at the cost of much larger gains from trade based on the principles of comparative advantage."

To pay the new wage, some states like Lagos will increase taxes or devise new taxes to increase their internally generated revenue. The ripple will hit the informal sector—the biggest employment sector in Nigeria. A market woman in Lagos, struggling to meet her tax responsibility in addition to other inflated costs, has no choice but to increase the price of tomato, fish, or garri. The same goes for commercial bus operators, and landlords. The load eventually falls on consumers, and that includes labour.

Living conditions cannot be improved simply by increasing wages. Using the national union, workers should fight the cankerworm that chews holes in the pockets where that wage – however small – ends up. Organized labour has a lot of leverage, and is selling it cheap on the minimum wage issue.But they could really exert effective pressure for far-reaching change. This is not to say that Nigerian workers do not need a living wage. But there would be bigger and better rewards to be had if labour campaigned on a much broader range of governance issue. That way, they can ensure the government implements policies capable of improving the economy and sustaining a genuine living wage.

Knowledge acquired through conventional science, which is usually closed and formal, can be scaled up through indigenous knowledge systems, which are open and informal.Conventional science formulates principles and theories that describe nature, whereas indigenous knowledge systems evolve values, beliefs, customs and ceremonies based on an understanding of nature and the universe.While conventional science relies on conceptualisation, empirical experimentation and interpretation to generate and share knowledge, indigenous knowledge puts more emphasis on experience and practice.Unlike indigenous knowledge, conventional science works best when dealing with what is observable and measurable. But accepting the role of indigenous knowledge is essential so that we do not mislead ourselves into believing that only what is measurable is real, and only what is controllable is valuable.

Tiffany Amber design  Jane Hahn/Getty Image for the WSJ

The Nigerian lace industry also opens a window on broader change in Africa as a whole: As the consumer class expands, so, too, has the underground, informal economy...While the informal sector, from street-side welders in Kenya to sign makers in Senegal, has created jobs and lifted incomes, it also has strained urban infrastructure. As many as 90% of African city dwellers work in the informal economy, untaxed and unaccounted for, according to the Geneva-based U.N. International Labour Organization.Economists estimate that Nigeria's informal economy is at least as big as the country's roughly $200 billion formal one.

If Egyptians can think of this…as an investment and use this time to liberate the forces of entrepreneurship, bring in the informal sector, encourage the dynamism of Egypt’s small- and medium-sized companies, and most importantly, to immediately launch skills training programs and a reform of the education system, Egypt stands a very good chance of overcoming many of the issues and barriers that kept it from becoming one of the large, emerging markets along the lines of Brazil or India.