Posted on March, 6, 2017 at 10:25 am
As the rate of unemployment is rising, rural-urban migration is increasing and the economy is still not all-inclusive, young Tanzanians opt for street vending.
The National Bureau of Statistics paints a gloomy picture: the unemployment rate stands at 10.3 per cent. This translates into 2.3 million people aged 15 and above.
Dar es Salaam has the highest rate of 21.5 per cent, while rural areas have rates averaging 8.4 per cent or 1.2 million people. The World Bank puts the number of youth entering into the labour force every year at around 800,000.
The private sector, which was supposed to absorb many of them, faces a host of challenges.
The problem is that agriculture - that employs 67 per cent of the workforce - has stagnated, grown at below 4 per cent in the last two decades. The sector contributed $13.9 billion or 30 per cent to the gross domestic product in 2014.
Sadly, credit to agriculture has kept falling: from 8.7 per cent in 2013 to 7.8 per cent the following year, down to 7.7 per cent in 2015. Poor investment in the sector has speed up rural-urban migration as thousands of young people flock to urban areas to look for jobs, but end up in petty trading and some in crimes. Many parts of rural areas are underdeveloped. Roads are poor, power supply is problematic, while poor health and education services are wanting. So, youth migration to seek better life has increased.
But urban areas are ill-prepared to cope with such a high number of petty traders. For years, the auxiliary police had been chasing them out
of streets and seizing their wares.
Hawking outlawed since 2003
That was after the Business Licensing Act, 2003 outlawed hawking, which was legalised by the Human Resources Development Act, 1983. Researchers estimate that Dar es Salaam had more than 1 million street vendors in 2014.
So, when President John Magufuli warned the local authorities against harassing hawkers last year, they flooded the streets to sell wares without paying tax and blocking entrances of registered businesses that contribute immensely to government coffers. Since reforms have failed to address fully the needs of street vendors, they will continue flocking to urban areas, aggravating socio-economic and political challenges.
Evicting them will mean losing votes for politicians, while allowing them to operate haphazardly means losing government revenue. Street vending is, therefore, here to stay. If hawking is banned the fear is that crime will spike.
Reducing street vending requires a long-term strategy. Part of the solution is to encourage industrialisation in Tanzania that focuses on agro-processing to boost agriculture and add value to crops to create more jobs and raise incomes in rural areas. Indeed, the government has announced a plan to industrialise Tanzania by 2015.
However, that should fund the sector of agriculture to stop depending on rain-fed farming, which has been hit by weather vagaries. Farm inputs should be made available at reasonable prices. It is also important for growers to acquire modern methods to cope with climate change.
Source: The Citizen