PAPER SESSION Street Trading WHEN: Friday 4 September TIME: 11:30 – 13:30 REGISTER HERE CHAIR: Caroline Skinner (University of Cape Town); caroline.skinner@uct.ac.za Acting Like the State: Leaders’ Participation in Street Trade Management in Gauteng Mamokete Matjomane (Gauteng City-Region Observatory); Mamokete.Matjomane@gcro.ac.za The paper explores the extent to which street trader leaders participate in the everyday management […]

ACC Postdoctoral researcher Martin Magidi has co-authored an article with Innocent T. Mahiya entitled Rethinking training: the role of the informal sector in skills acquisition and development in Zimbabwe for the Journal of Development Southern Africa.   ABSTRACT Training and skills acquisition have received widespread approval as one of the most important steps towards achieving […]

WHEN: Tuesday, 19 May TIME: 9:30 – 11:00am EST   RSVP & ADD TO YOUR CALENDAR JOIN VIA WEBEX Meeting number: 477 864 257 Meeting password: H6rPKt72P95   The event will feature three presentations by WIEGO team members on the rapid appraisal and policy work by WIEGO in support of the lives and livelihoods of urban informal […]

This Rapid Response Opinion piece for Agriculture and Human Values, by ACC’s Jane Battersby, was written in the 4th week of South Africa’s lockdown period, when the country had 3465 reported Covid-19 cases and 58 deaths. In it she reflects on how the country’s lockdown regulations reinforced an anti-informality bias in government plans and policy. […]

The African Urban Research Initiative (AURI) is co-hosting a methods workshop from 6 to 10 May 2019, in Lusaka, Zambia, focused on the formal/informal interface at the city scale. The Formal-Informal Interface Workshop emerges from ongoing comparative research conducted under the umbrella of AURI which, aims at challenging the dichotomy between informal and formal areas, […]

Government’s lack of support for informal traders, combined with ongoing attacks on foreign food traders – lately also by prominent politicians – is creating a toxic mix that jeopardises not only the food security of the growing numbers of urban poor, but also divests them of important livelihood opportunities and throttles the economy. (more…)

The final report of the United Nations High-Level Panel (UN HLP) on Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) was launched online on 14 March 2017, marking the conclusion of the one-year UN HLP process. The second of two reports delves deeper into the seven drivers of women’s economic empowerment that were identified in the first report, namely: Tackling […]

Food is fundamental not only to well-being, but to our social and economic lives. Despite this, one of the biggest challenges facing many people in cities all over the world today is hunger. As cities rapidly urbanise, different pressures are placed on the food system which has resulted in the least nutritious food being the […]