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text/html hvrs data Street Vendors in Africa: Data and Methods
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Street Vendors in Africa: Data and Methods
Jacques Charmes
II. Methods for measuring the street vendors
1. Content and characterization of the concept
When dealing with the question of the enumeration of street vendors, the place of work is the first and main criterion used to characterise this category. In a few countries, a location of work question was added in a short and very rudimentary way to the questionnaires of population censuses (for instance in Morocco or in Tunisia). One aim of the question was to separate the outworkers from the mass of the independent or own-account workers. The question was as follows: "what is the location of work or the type of workplace?" The alternative answers were:
- an enterprise or a workshop
- the home
- mobile.
Labour force surveys may offer a greater choice of answers: for instance, the Mali 1985 Demographic Survey distinguished the following 10 types of location (this classification has been used in all subsequent labour force or informal sector surveys):
- enterprise
- shop or workshop
- building sites or road works
- fixed market
- mobile market
- home with specific outfits
- home without specific outfits
- street
- mobile
- other.
It would be useful to add collective courtyard to this list.
Other countries (for example Guinea in 1987, Niger in 1982) have further specified street vendors in fixed locations by distinguishing:
- street vendors with only bowls, baskets or mats
- street vendors with stools
- street vendors with tables (called table-owners or dressers in Niger)
- street vendors with porch-roofs or sheds, or window dress.
The categories for mobile street vendors (hawkers and peddlers) were:
- walking street vendors
- street vendors with cart, bicycle, etc...
The recent and rapid expansion of this segment of the informal sector labour force which operates outside an enterprise's premises has enlarged the concept of street vendors in many countries to the category of street workers including, among others, the following: tailors specialised in mending, carrying their sewing machines on their heads, hairdressers carrying their stools, cheap and fast meal sellers, cycles and motor vehicles' repairers and so many other services workers. Such workers for a long time have taken to the pavements and the streets of the towns. More recently manufacturing activities such as furnitures' makers or metal workers are leaving the courtyards to work on the street. The share of street vendors in the crowd of street workers has tended to drop. To take account of these changes, two items should be added to the classification of location:
- street vendors without fixed premises
- street vendors with rudimentary fixed premises.
In addition to the binary classification: sedentary/non sedentary; an intermediate category, semi-sedentary, was added to the 1992 census of establishment and informal sector in Benin. The semi-sedentary category aimed at accounting for those activities undertaken in the streets but with a kind or appearance of rudimentary fixed premises, which provide not only self-employment, but also, eventually, more or less permanent jobs to family members or other members of the labour force. The non sedentary street vendor may have a fixed place in the street, but has to remove the goods at the end of the day. The semi-sedentary street worker may leave his intermediary and final products on the spot.
Such structural changes in the characteristics of street workers imply that surveys on these types of workers need to come closer and closer to classical informal sector surveys. They need to distinguish production, trade and service activities, and no longer consider street activities as a phenomenon that will disappear.
It should be emphasised that greater attention needs to be given to similarity between street workers and outworkers whose tasks are often sub-contracted from large firms. Street vendors or workers might not be as independent as they appear: they may purchase or hire from the same supplier the goods they sell, or they may be given the goods by the supplier who pays more or less the equivalent of a salary. The occupational status of street vendors is not easy to identify. As for outworkers, it is a challenge for data collection. Similar issues of questionnaire design and data collection method are raised in enumerating street vendors and homeworkers.
Two additional issues should be considered related to the differences between street vendors in rural and in urban areas. First, street vending is not only an urban phenomenon. Perhaps even more than in urban areas, in rural areas the non-agricultural labour force is located outside enterprises' premises. Vendors are particularly numerous along roads that cross villages or at the cross-roads, and many farmers or family workers who are classified in primary activities for their main jobs, are road vendors or market vendors for their second (annual or seasonal) jobs. Second, trade and sales activities may concern goods produced by the same persons on their farms or in their homes and this represents a conceptual and methodological difficulty in rural as well as in urban areas. To sell self-produced goods should not be considered as a different activity from producing them, except if there is a kind of transformation (such as crushing the grains or cereals, but this will not be the case for fruit or vegetables) or if they have been carried long distances to be sold in market places. This is not a marginal point concerning the measurement of women's activities. It is probably an important source of underestimation of their contribution as far as this contribution is limited to commercial margins and does not take the value added in the production process into account. This is important for a correct enumeration of street vendors, because many will have declared themselves as producers in households surveys while they will be registered as vendors in establishments censuses. This must be clarified through a set of questions in these latter operations.
2. Data collection methods
As already mentioned, the location or place of work is the main feature for identifying street workers. Population censuses have been able to provide information on the number of people involved in these activities as far as they have put these items in the questionnaires, through a specific question, or at least as categories of response covering occupation and status in employment (specifically own-account workers in status of employment). Further progress would require a more detailed classification of occupational statuses. Moreover, the international standard classification of occupations also identifies a category of hawkers and peddlers in commercial occupations, but it is relegated to the 4 digit sub-category and as such is very rarely released in the official publication of the results.
A technique for estimating home-based workers and street vendors from the available sources is as follows: the residual obtained by comparing the results of a population census (or labour force survey if no census is available) and establishment census can be interpreted as consisting of outworkers or undeclared or non registered workers in given branches of activity and as street vendors in other commercial branches.
Until now, establishments censuses have been the most efficient source to capture the street vendors segment, when these operations decided to include them in their scope as in the three countries already mentioned (Niger, Guinea and especially Benin). As far as they have fixed places in the streets (tables or stools or even baskets), the enumeration is not difficult. In addition in Benin, 1992, the mobile street vendors who often gather in a few places known by everybody, were enumerated after a campaign through the mass media. A vendor, once enumerated, was given a badge to avoid double counts. Mobile street vendors in urban Benin accounted for more than 40 per cent of the total number of street vendors (informal transportation being included in this figure).
In Benin, Guinea and Niger, enumeration was accompanied by the administration of a short questionnaire collecting a few items on the demographic characteristics of the vendor and the characteristics of the activity, leaving to a second sampling phase collection of all the data required by researchers and policy makers. Given the difficulties of sampling this population, alternative methods can be used, for instance the administration of a detailed questionnaire in the first and unique phase, to 1 out of 2 or 3 or 4 street vendors enumerated.
Street vendors remain a major contradiction and possibly a black hole in the mixed surveys, i.e. the two-stage survey which is recommended to capture the various segments of the informal sector. At the first stage, a representative sample of households is selected: all own-account workers and employers in the informal sector are enumerated in the selected households. At the second stage, all economic units of these informal operators are surveyed with an establishment questionnaire and preferably on the worksite. While own-account workers are to be interviewed at their workplace, it is difficult or even impossible to find the workplace of street vendors. Based on their declaration within the household, they are usually interviewed at home and the objective of checking their declarations with the observations is not achieved, leaving room for underestimation and misunderstandings.
This does not mean that mixed household surveys are useless to measure the numbers and characteristics of street vendors. But they certainly need to be followed by in-depth surveys in the field and in establishments to prevent as much as possible the underestimation of these activities.
3. Questionnaire design for a special street vendor survey
It is important to ensure that the design of the questionnaire for a street vendor survey takes into account the main issues concerning the informal sector, and those relating to gender. In addition to the questions on location described in the preceding paragraphs, the questionnaire should include the following topics:
a) demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the person: age, sex, educational level, matrimonial status, family status (living with parents or head of household -- it may be interesting to develop a complete household questionnaire which would detail size of family, occupational status of the head, number of persons employed, unemployed, at school, sources of income, etc... ), geographical origin or place of birth, date of arrival.
b) biographic characteristics and previous job experience: rural to urban migration itinerary and various activities undertaken before entering the present job; comparative degree of satisfaction and level of income with the present situation; questions on the modalities of installation, help received from relatives, ease of entry or barriers and obstacles encountered due to the regulatory framework or to other reasons should be put.
c) present activity: detailed description (type of goods or services sold), type of installation (see above). This section should be developed along the lines presented above. Examples of questions follow:
i) Are you?
- an independent own-account worker working alone :
with other family workers, (several hours a day, or only when you are absent) / with casual employees
- associated with other persons on an own-account basis,
(in such a case, develop questions on the type of association)
- a wage employee, (in such a case, develop questions on the employer and the type of salary)
ii) Do you (or your family) produce the goods you sell? (in such a case, develop the questions on production)
iii) Do you buy the goods you sell?
- from several shopkeepers or persons: always the same / not always the same
- from one single shopkeeper or person: always the same / not always the same (in such a case, does this person sell the goods to other street vendors like you)
- from a big store
iv) What are the conditions of purchase?
- at the same price as for any customer
- goods are paid for when they have been sold
- goods are consigned against payment of a fixed amount which will be completed after sale of the whole: in this case, is there a charge for credit
v) At the end of the day (yesterday), how much have you sold?
vi) Have you deducted from this amount what you have taken?
- for eating
- for the needs of the family
- for other needs
vii) Of this amount, how much are you going to use to buy new goods to sell the next day?
- What do you do when you cannot save enough money to reconstitute the amount of goods you are used to sell?
- What do you do when you save more money than you need to spend to purchase the goods you sell?
The major difficulty in trying to reconstitute the income earned from street vending is choice of the period of reference: if the day (or the week) will be the most adequate for the receipts and for the personal and family consumption expenditures, the purchase of goods will probably require a different reference period.
Another important but easier question is the duration of work: number of hours per day, number of days per week, number of months per year. It is also important to ask what are the nonworking months. This is to verify whether street vending is still associated with seasonal agricultural activity and if it is related to rural-urban migrations. In Niger for example, due to the intensity of rural-urban migration during the agricultural season, the authorities put street vendors on trucks which brought them back to their villages where labour shortages were observed.
d) free entry and competition: these aspects of street vending are as important as the questions related to income, because they are at the core of theories of development and the determination of policy interventions by the State, donors agencies and grass-roots organisations.
While ease of entry continues to be a characteristic of street vending, street vendors have constant fights with authorities and competing vendors. As Victor Tokman put it (PREALC, 1988), street vendors must defend their sites against the municipalities, the established shopkeepers and the other vendors who try to limit the number of entries. It is an important challenge in surveys on street vendors to measure the degree of freedom and competition, and to identify the hidden barriers that keep the poor from developing their private initiatives.
Among various questions on these topics, three are emphasised here:
i) What conditions made it easy for you to begin vending and what conditions made it difficult ?
- completely free to set up
- received the help of other people (or vendors), and what kind of help
- from the family
- from the extended family
- from the village (or district)
- from the ethnic group
- from others
- had to make payments (in kind, in cash, in per cent of receipts,...) to
- the agents of the municipality
- the agents of other administrations
- the established shopkeepers
- the other street vendors
- other individuals representing the shopkeepers, the other vendors, keepers or protectors of the street, the block, the district
- other payments
ii) And if you have a place, is it easy or difficult to keep your site, and why ?
- various payments that you have to make
- various obligations that you have to respect
iii) Among all these payments and obligations, which ones do you consider as usual or natural, and which ones as excessive or exorbitant?
The questionnaire should also cover the following topics:
e) urban policies and taxation: preparation of this section will require information on the various formal and informal taxes that street vendors have to pay.
f) Social insurance, traditional solidarities and social capital: how do street vendors manage when they fall sick or when they have an accident which prevents them from working? Can they rely on their traditional cooperative networks and are the investments they have made in this form of social capital more profitable and efficient than the payments they may make to informal protectors in the market? There are different means of measuring the social capital (Charmes 1998). A survey on street vendors - unless it is part of a household survey - will provide qualitative responses (rather than measures in terms of expenditures and time use) concerning the ways and means by which street vendors cope with the costs of social insurance and can rely on the social capital they have accumulated.
g) needs, organisation and support: finally, a last section of the questionnaire should deal with the wishes of the street vendors, the ways and means they imagine or require to improve their working and living conditions.
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