Informal Economy

The AfCFTA serves as the map for African trade and economic development, its mandate charging the continent toward an economic utopia. Yet its digital protocol, with a core scope built around diversity and vulnerable populations, excludes 90 percent of Africa's economic engine : the informal sector. This exclusion is further compounded by the language exclusion informal enterprises face, where digital platforms and AI systems meant to power digital trade have yet to incorporate indigenous languages, stifled by a data drought that is decades in the making. This paper argues that the interaction of the Digital Trade Protocol and its Rules of Origin Annex leaves informal cross-border traders without a clear, proportionate route to digital trade benefits, and that unequal African-language AI capacity turns the Protocol's promise of legal inclusion into practical exclusion.

Organised in partnership with the Fondation Afric’Avenir, this edition seeks to rethink the divide between the formal and informal economy through a decolonial comparative legal approach. It also aims to contribute to the consolidation of a decolonial comparative law community across the African continent and beyond. The overarching theme of the 2027 edition is decolonial comparative law and the informal/formal economy. The workshop takes the informal economy seriously as a site of legality in its own right, examined through a decolonial and comparative lens attentive to legal pluralism and situated practices.

This paper has adopted a precedential approach by illustrating the approaches used by some developing countries in selected but similar regions with West Africa in solving their tax collection problems. This paper has also recommended some pathways to be walked by West African countries in order to considerably succumb the gravid challenges faced in the collection of taxes and mobilization of revenues. By adopting the recommended techniques, the immense efforts made by the governments of these countries in addressing the practical challenges facing their tax revenue collection can be duly compensated.

The COVID19 pandemic has shown that, while physical presence-based commerce was suffering the consequences of social isolation, with many businesses going into bankruptcy, the e-commerce increased. With millions of new customers - lots of those who had never bought anything on the internet before - the sector experienced unprecedented growth, despite the Pandemic, despite the crisis.

In this short commentary I briefly raise three critical points against the assumptions at the basis of this report. I discuss the temporality of employment in GVCs; the gendered construction of skills and employment disadvantage; and the need to move the debate from individual wages to social wages in order to truly assess the ‘reproductive’ - or more simply, livelihood - implications of GVCs employment on labouring classes.

The question of whether decolonisation stalled in the Global South has been addressed in some form for as long as the concept of decolonisation has been present in our world. As many educational institutions across the world, and especially in the Global North, begin to include ‘decolonising’ in their knowledge transmission agendas, connecting this question with the past, present and future of all aspects of the colonial project has never been more important. This short essay argues firstly that the question itself relies on certain presumptions that should be revisited. Secondly, the essay argues that the answer itself is complex and depends on where our gaze primarily lies – state or people.

In this blog, I continue discussing the broad understanding of informality while briefly touching on informal enterprise. And I hope to, simultaneously, point out a couple of proposed solutions to challenges of the informal economy in Africa. My very strong suggestion, though, is that African countries should embrace informality as a reality on the continent.

The interconnectedness of commercial and other mundane human transactions has never been more reified than it is since the advent of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). However, it bears observing that ICTs have helped in harnessing virtually every human and non-human endeavour into their commercial ramifications

Many mainstream discussions on African regional integration focus on the role of the executive, bureaucrats and state institutions (hereafter referred to as state-actors) in facilitating regional integration. While state-actors play crucial roles in enabling regional integration from a “top-down” perspective, concentration on these state-actors inadvertently means that less focus is paid to the non-state actors involved in the process. This article explains that while state-actors do facilitate regional integration from a top-down perspective, non-state actors have the potential to (and in some cases, already do) facilitate regional integration using a “bottom-up” approach.

Afronomicslaw.org is delighted to welcome Dr. Chris Nshimbi as a Contributing Editor. Dr. Chris Nshimbi is the Director and Department of Science and Technology/National Research Foundation Research Fellow in GovInn at the University of Pretoria.