ILPC 2026

Global economy’s prosperity has not trickled down evenly. Evidence shows that around one-sixth of the global population is undernourished, over 250 million people are unemployed, and one-third of the urban population lives in slums, despite decades of United Nations-led market reforms/development programmes (UN 2012). In response, the UN recently set a new (the post-2015) development agenda that is committed to ‘social and economic inclusion and … “leave no one behind”’ (Meagher 2016:836). Current debate is about how the post-2015 agenda can be achieved. Crucially, there is a call to give the informal economy (IE) a prominent attention, as a large proportion of those targeted by the post-2015 agenda operates in the IE (ILO, 2002; Becker, 2004; Meagher 2016). At the same time, state policies in some countries tend to contrasts with the new UN-agenda. This paper focuses on these issues in a case study of Lagos state, Nigeria.

With population around 15 million people, Lagos is one of the fastest growing cities in the world, and the largest commercial centre in Nigeria, Africa. Nigeria is the most populous country and arguably the largest economy in Africa. Lagos contributes a respective 32% and 65% to Nigeria’s GDP and total VAT (A. 2015). This is huge, as Lagos is only one of the 36 states in Nigeria. Contributing to the economy of Lagos is a high number of micro enterprises (ME). The Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) puts the number of ME in Lagos at eleven million, but about 75% of these operate in the IE as street vendors (Onoduga et al 2016). Street vendors are largely women, children and the poor in the society, who engage in the IE to survive (Meagher, 2016). Yet, on 1 July 2016, arguably enthused by the need to reduce traffic congestions caused by street vendors, Lagos state government enacted a law that prohibits street hawking. Opinion polls suggest 33% of Nigerians support the ban, but 67% either totally reject, or see the ban as inconsiderate, incommensurable (NTA 2016). Human rights groups see the ban as inhuman. However, Lagos is not an isolated case. Similar laws, violent evictions and harassment of vendors have been reported in many countries (Roever and Skinner, 2016). In Nigeria, more states may follow Lagos’ footsteps. Anecdotal evidence suggests that policy makers do not, consider the economic impact on, provide accessible alternatives to, those affected by such laws. This paper seeks to investigate these issues empirically.

The paper has three main goals; to explore the: demographics, characteristics of street vendors; impact of street-hawking-ban on participants’ businesses and income, the poor and most vulnerable groups; and to establish if policy makers have made accessible alternative provisions for this vulnerable group. We hope to achieve our goals with a purposive survey of street vendors and random sampling of non-vendors in Lagos state. Potentially, this project makes unique contributions to literature, policy, and the UN post-2015 debate