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A paper by Amollo Lorraine presented at Changing the Change, explores the possibilities of evolving Jua Kali's into medium sized industries:

The Western concept of industrialisation has met with little success in most African countries. The poor performance of industries has led to the emergence of micro and small scale industries. In Kenya, these micro and small scale industries have been commonly referred to as ‘Jua Kali’ industries. The term ‘Jua Kali’ is Swahili for ‘Hot sun’ referring to the open air working conditions of the entrepreneurs. Most Jua Kali industries start off and remain as informal enterprises as their owners often cannot afford the expensive and rigorous process of registering with the relevant Government bodies. This informality means that the Jua kali businesses have found it hard to access business development services or export markets as compared to the formal and larger industries. (King 1995, 24-30). The Jua Kali entrepreneurs as result remain poor and their businesses small and uncompetitive. Though the Government has recognized the potential of the Jua Kali sector as an employment opportunity for many Kenyans, it has failed to create an enabling and sustainable environment for these micro and small industries to grow...[continue reading]

Mviwata's aim is "...to strengthen farmers’ groups and networks, facilitate communication and learning through exchanges among farmers for the purpose of defending the interests of small scale farmers in Tanzania..." A member speaking to the large scale land acquisitions in Tanzania, stated in Farm Land Grab that:

(Photo: REDD.net)

In my view, the solution to this problem is not money; rather, the government should obligate large-scale investors to give a part of their shares to us in exchange for our land,” -Ahmed Simba, a Kigoma-based farmer

He said the investors should give villagers time to relocate to new places close to such investments. He added that the land lease agreement should cover a few years but be subject to renewal under certain conditions.“We can benefit from large-scale investment in agriculture if we stop leaders from imposing their ideas on farmers, believing that what is in their interests (leaders) is in the interest of the nation,”

In a paper(PDF) Silou Thomas made assertions which include the following:

• in sub-Saharan Africa, the non-formal sector represents the main part of the post harvest activities particularly in food process

• people do not have any sort of conventional technical training because the bulk of the food work process is not formalized

• a gap exists between what the official education system proposes in terms of training (profiled on the modern food large scale industry) and the actual demand of the market
  

• to avoid very specialized training for engineers, and focus training on basic technology

• due to centrality of research in the delimitation of job requirements, it is essential that it be very innovative in concepts and methods

• the technologist must be aware of what society is waiting to identify, in order to give and create the technical items able to answer the specific "non-formal" and small scale company needs

Via Dissecting Leftism I came across this article called 'Econophysics' points way to fair salaries in free market':

A Purdue University researcher has used "econophysics" to show that under ideal circumstances free markets promote fair salaries for workers and do not support CEO compensation practices common today.

"It is generally believed that the free market cares only about efficiency and not fairness. However, my theory shows that even though companies focus primarily on making profits and individuals are only looking out for themselves, the collective self-organizing free market dynamics, under ideal conditions, leads to fairness as an emergent property," said Venkat Venkatasubramanian, a professor of chemical engineering. "In reality, the self-correcting free market mechanisms have broken down for CEOs and other top executives in the market, but they seem to be working fine for the remaining 95 percent of employees."

In the new work, the researcher has determined that fairness is integral to a normally functioning free market economy. Findings are detailed in a research paper that appeared in June in the online journal Entropy and is available at http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/12/6/1514/

Katharine Vincent asserts that treating Africa as the victim in the Climate Change debate is wrongheaded:

It is true that at the continental scale Africa may suffer because of it is geographic and economic vulnerability. But branding Africa as a victim does a disservice to the many examples of small-scale resilience and adaptive capacity in evidence throughout the continent.
Furthermore, perpetuating the 'Africa as victim' myth runs the risk of deflecting attention away from a systematic investigation into how such resistive measures could be expanded to reduce vulnerability.

More on the informal in Stealth of Nations:

Two articles on Africa show the importance of engaging the informal economy.

First, The Daily Trust from Nigeria points out that government policies must be retooled "to encourage our small entrepreneurs who constitute the informal sector with a view to developing and enhancing their businesses." The writer suggests that 5 to 10 million Naira per local government per year (a pittance: $30,000 to $60,000) is all it would take to make the local economies bloom.
Second, the BBC points to the Eastleigh neighborhood of Nairobi, one of the most run down communities in the Kenyan capital -- but, significantly, not one of the poorest.
Marketplaces, and a million little lean-to repair shops and small-scale factories are what most urban Africans rely upon for a living. But such is their distrust of government officials that most businesspeople in the informal sector avoid all contact with the authorities

Mauro de Lorenzo writes:

Entrepreneurial philanthropists provide credit and business education to small-scale entrepreneurs, mentor and finance small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), offer strategic advice to governments that want to improve the competitiveness of their exports and investment climates, and devise innovative ways to demonstrate "return on investment" in traditional philanthropic projects. They are entrepreneurial because they tend to believe that profitability and accountability are the best form of sustainable development and the best strategy for poverty reduction; they are philanthropists because they are private actors who do not themselves seek to make money from their efforts. Moreover, they have the potential to outflank often moribund development agencies and state-funded NGOs by demonstrating that enterprise solutions to poverty are possible, scalable, and sustainable...[continue reading]

More on the informal in Stealth of Nations:

Two articles on Africa show the importance of engaging the informal economy.

First, The Daily Trust from Nigeria points out that government policies must be retooled "to encourage our small entrepreneurs who constitute the informal sector with a view to developing and enhancing their businesses." The writer suggests that 5 to 10 million Naira per local government per year (a pittance: $30,000 to $60,000) is all it would take to make the local economies bloom.
Second, the BBC points to the Eastleigh neighborhood of Nairobi, one of the most run down communities in the Kenyan capital -- but, significantly, not one of the poorest.
Marketplaces, and a million little lean-to repair shops and small-scale factories are what most urban Africans rely upon for a living. But such is their distrust of government officials that most businesspeople in the informal sector avoid all contact with the authorities

From Lindiwe Majele Sibanda in the Guardian:

Farming First calls on world leaders to take action by developing a locally sustainable value chain for global agriculture. It emphasizes the need for knowledge networks and policies centred on helping subsistence farmers to become small-scale entrepreneurs, and it proposes six interlinked imperatives for sustainable agriculture: safeguarding natural resources, sharing knowledge, building local access, protecting harvests, enabling access to markets and prioritising research imperatives...[continue reading]Watch related videos here

Lauren Gelfand of Oxfam stated that "...Infrastructure here(Sub-Saharan Africa) needs very, very basic aid, such as help with agricultural irrigation techniques," She described the kind of aid that would make a profound and lasting impact as "very low-tech, small-scale projects..."

In Afrch:

...the real challenge for many African cities may be less how to create a city of 'clean lines' with no poor people working in the streets, and more one of how to amplify existing ways of living and working in the city into an advanced regime of higher information density. The anti-hawker and anti-kiosk stance of the political elite and economically mobile hurts many people's livelihoods and lines many policemen and womens' pockets. Alternatively, this active edge of infrastructure and economies can be understood as a future-oriented system of organization for the city—one in which flexible urban ecologies absorb new human material through a network of small-scale and low-tech productive nodes

PSD Blog reports on the trailblazing work of Beatrice Ayuru:

A few years ago, with no business training and no money, Beatrice decided that she would build her own school. "No girl should endure what I had to go through myself," says Beatrice. "Education is the best way to help reduce poverty in my region […] and giving girl children education empowers them. In my village, women are over-dependent on men."

Lira Integrated School, today has 1500 students, a school bus and an income-generating brass band. With the savings from the school, Beatrice has built a small-scale yoghurt factory and employs in total 104 people. Beatrice is far from being done. She is planning to open a university.

From Neal Bortz, talking about at Detroit News story, comes this post:

The auto industry is completely drowning because of unions. Here's a small scale union story for you ...

Detroit is trying to clean up its image. In efforts to do so, the city council wants to give a $200,000 contract to a non-profit organization dedicated to the reforestation of the city. It's being called The Greening of Detroit. The group made up of volunteers would plant 2,000 saplings in neighborhoods that have been plagued by some invasive species.

Enter the local union: AFSCME Local 542. This union has now stalled the City Council from authorizing this agreement for The Greening of Detroit. Why? Because the local union sees this as competition for the city's 50 forestry workers and they believe that the city is outsourcing THEIR jobs by allowing this non-profit organization to plant trees. Instead, this union would rather the government spend the $200,000 on trees and then pay the union workers to do the labor on top of that ... rather than allowing these volunteers to plant the trees for free.

BusinessDay reports on the reasoning behind the proposed 3rd tier market at the NSE

The purpose of third tier market is to help create a platform where small scale indigenous companies would be nurtured and get a maximum support that would enable them move to second tier or first tier market.

Innovation Africa reports:

Timely access to information and advice about how to manage plant health problems can make the difference between success and failure. Since 2003, 12 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, have introduced community-based plant health clinics as a way of providing this advice to small-scale farmers.
Plant clinics have spread rapidly because they offer a cheap and practical alternative to more conventional approaches that can help only limited numbers of farmers. They operate in easily accessible public places and are widely used to identify the causes of plant health problems and to find solutions.

Community-based plant clinics have the potential to help farmers and contribute to making agriculture a successful business, especially in resource-poor countries where advisory services are often scarce, underfunded and beyond the reach of millions of smallholders. Plant clinics provide an opportunity to coordinate the efforts of extension, research, government regulation and input supply, to reach more people and to use existing resources more efficiently.