Street Trading

By Francie Lund, Jillian Nicholson, Caroline Skinner on January 01, 2000

South Africa was a pilot site for the action research network, Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising or WIEGO. WIEGO is an international network of researchers and of organisations of women working in the informal economy. In South Africa, research was done for SEWU, in collaboration with the University of Natal. This pilot project has focused on street traders in five cities. The WIEGO project tries to promote a more favourable policy environment, and appropriate programmes for women workers. It does this at local, national and international levels, in three main ways:
- by changing the way countries keep statistics about the informal economy, so that the work done in the informal economy is counted, and can be valued;
- by doing studies which compare different cities in the world to see how workers in the informal economy are dealt with;
- by studying and working with organisations of street traders and of home based workers to strengthen their ability to make their voices, needs and concerns heard, through establishing negotiation mechanisms at local and national level. WIEGO in South Africa has published a number of research reports on the pilot project in South Africa. Appendix 1 gives details of these reports. This book is based on material from these reports. Through it we hope to reach a wider audience than the research reports have done, It is intended mainly for South African readers, and particularly for people working at local level with street trading issues. We hope that it will be read by those involved with the WIEGO work in other African countries, such as Kenya, which follow this pilot. Finally, we hope it will also introduce the South African project to participants in the wider international WlEGO network.

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