Name: 【TED】Niti Bhan: The hidden opportunities of the informal economy (The hidden opportunities of the informal economy | Niti Bhan)
Uploaded: 2017-12-11T19:13:57.000Z
Duration: 7 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

The informal markets of Africa are stereotypically seen

The downside of hearing the word "informal"

is this automatic grand association we have,

and it's had significant consequences and economic losses,

easily adding -- or subtracting -- 40 to 60 percent of the profit margin

As part of a task of mapping the informal trade ecosystem,

we've done an extensive literature review

of all the reports and research on cross-border trade in East Africa,

This was to prepare us for fieldwork to understand what was the problem,

what was holding back informal trade in the informal sector.

What we discovered over the last 20 years was,

nobody had distinguished between illicit --

which is like smuggling or contraband in the informal sector --

what in Swahili refers to as "biashara," which is the trade or the commerce,

versus "magendo," which is the smuggling or contraband --

this criminalization of the informal sector,

in English, by not distinguishing between these aspects,

easily can cost each African economy between 60 to 80 percent addition

because we are not recognizing the engine

The informal sector is growing jobs at four times the rate

It offers employment and income generation opportunities

to the most "unskilled" in conventional disciplines.

But can you make a french fry machine out of an old car?

is what so desperately needs to be recognized.

As long as the current assumptions hold that this is criminal,

there will be no attempt at integrating the informal economic ecosystem

I'm going to tell you a story of Teresia,

a trader who overturned all our assumptions,

made us question all the stereotypes that we'd gone in on,

Teresia sells clothes under a tree in a town called Malaba,

We'll go hang up new clothes from the branches,

put out the tarp, settle down, wait for customers,

She was everything we were expecting according to the literature,

right down to she was a single mom driven to trade,

First, Teresia paid the county government market fees

for the privilege of setting up shop under her tree.

vulnerable African woman trader by the side of the road -- no.

We were seeing somebody who's keeping sales records for years;

somebody who had an entire ecosystem of retail that comes in from Uganda

someone who's got handcarts bringing the goods in,

or the mobile money agent who comes to collect cash

Can you guess how much Teresia spends, on average,

stocks of new clothes that she gets from Nairobi?

That's around 20,000 US dollars invested in trade goods and services

And she's only the first rung of the small entrepreneurs,

the micro-businesses that can be found in these market towns.

At least in the larger Malaba border, she's at the first rung.

are easily running three lines of business,

investing 2,500 to 3,000 US dollars every month.

So the problem turned out that it wasn't the criminalization;

you can't really criminalize someone you're charging receipts from.

It's the lack of recognition of their skilled occupations.

The bank systems and structures have no means to recognize them

her tree doesn't have a forwarding address.

She's falling through the cracks of our assumptions.

You know all those microloans to help African women traders?

They're going to loan her 50 dollars or 100 dollars.

She spends 10 times that amount every month