ESSET HOLD MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT CONSULTATION WITH SADC INFORMAL TRADERS

The Ecumenical Service for Socio Economic Transformation (ESSET) is holding a five days Materials Development Consultation with Informal traders from the SADC countries such as Lesotho, Swaziland, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The objective of the consultation is to pilot the training materials by training 30 leaders of informal traders from the selected countries in the region. The Consultation is being held at Stay City Hotel, 46 High Street, Berea (Johannesburg) South Africa) from the 29^th to 02 November 2012.

The Materials Development Consultation follows a recently completed consultative process, where ESSET facilitated consultations in five different countries in the region between April and June 2012. The consultations took place in a form of public meetings to introduce the project to street and market traders in order to solicit their views on and endorsement of the scope and process. They were followed by focus group discussions to dissect the problems and issues raised in the public meetings. The consultations were part of the participatory research project that seeks to enhance the collective knowledge of traders regarding the policy, organizational and political challenges impeding street and market trade.  

Following the consultations with the traders in the SADC region, critical issues were identified. Amongst these are;

• The prevailing lack of policy aimed at supporting the informal economy is fuelling the exploitation and marginalization of informal workers, especially women, in African countries. For example, it enables big retailers to drop their prices willy-nilly in order to unfairly compete with informal traders in the sale of cheap goods, threatening their income and livelihood.

 

• Government provided enterprise development and business support for the informal trading sector is being undermined by patronage and nepotism, in some countries, and by a lack of financial assistance, in others.  The main beneficiaries are often well established SMMEs, as a result, the needs of very small informal enterprises that lack physical and financial capital are being largely ignored. 

 

• Women informal cross-border traders are often forced to have sexual relations with strange men in order to meet their transport, food and accommodation needs, which put them at risk of HIV infection. Many governments, however, lack HIV and AIDS services for women informal cross-border traders.

 

• In addition, high import duties compromise the earnings of informal cross-border traders, as it force them to sell their goods at higher prices, thus, reducing the number of sales.

• The requirements for accessing finance from private banks are generally exclusionary and insensitive to the economic and cultural conditions of street and market traders, especially women traders.

• Economic and political structural problems within countries have a knock-on effect on organization and mobilization in the informal trading sector. In some countries, street and market traders fear that they will lose their trading spaces, if they embark on collective action to engage their governments on issues such as rental, maintenance, shelter, storage, etc. Municipalities often use divide and rule tactics to demobilize street and market traders.

• Finally, informal traders are often excluded from policy formulation processes, especially at the level of local authorities. And in countries where systems for participatory governance do exist, public participation is often treated merely as a bureaucratic requirement, which promotes tokenistic participation. Meanwhile, informal trading policies generally fail to accommodate the needs of women informal traders.   

The Materials Development Consultation that is attended by representatives of informal traders from various SADC countries that participated in the consultation, ESSET staff and materials developer seeks to address capacity gaps identified in the consultative process. The expected materials to be developed in the consultation include the Facilitator & Learner Guides and Participatory Action Research tool that will be used as part of the learning process and monitoring tools. After the training the, participants will report to their associations and allow them to also reflect on how to use the tools introduced in the training to address their critical issues. The training will be followed up with visits by ESSET to assist associations in different countries to develop country implementation plans.