Dakar’s street vendors have united in the PASI platform to assert their rights and propose alternative solutions to the evictions and relocations imposed by the authorities.
Street vendors across the Global South are exposed to repeated cycles of evictions. In the African cities of Accra, Dakar and Durban, vendors have faced a crisis on top of a crisis, as evictions have extended far beyond the period of COVID-related restrictions, complicating their efforts at recovery. But they are working to strengthen their organizational power.
In this interview, Lourdes Gula, President of PATAMABA, talks about the legacy of the organization of informal workers in the Philippines that she helped found, and shares her dreams for the future.
Society is still not valuing domestic workers more than a decade after the International Labour Organization adopted a convention extending working rights to them. Only six African countries adopted the convention, leading to widespread discriminatory practices. Empowerment programs aim to assist domestic workers in understanding their rights and negotiating directly with employers, promoting bottom-up change.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) transfers the responsibility of waste management from municipal authorities to the producers of the waste materials. Despite the important role that informal economy workers who collect and segregate waste could play in such a system, they get no mention in India’s EPR policy.
In a ground-breaking decision for street vendors and other informal workers, the Constitutional Court of Uganda found the country’s vagrancy laws, which are often used to evict or arrest workers who work in public space, to be unconstitutional.
