Africa’s Informal Economies: Thirty Years On

Abstract

The opportunity to maintain contact with Kenya’s informal, jua kali sector over almost 50 years has made it possible not only to produce two monographs, The African artisan (1977) and Jua kali Kenya (1996), but also to contribute to major meetings and edited books and journals. One of the more influential of these edited books, during the 1980s, was produced by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and entitled Training for work in the informal sector (ILO, 1989). I wrote a chapter on ‘Training for the urban informal sector in developing countries: Policy issues for practitioners’ (King, 1989). The article reproduced here is from 2001, 30 years after the term ‘informal sector’ had first been used. Over that period, the early focus on the urban informal sector had shifted to acknowledge the very widespread presence of the rural informal sector.