A Daily Maverick Q&A with Professor Claire Benit-Gbaffou:
The Save the Hawkers Campaign, including multiple organisations of informal traders, was launched in the wake of Johannesburg's Operation Clean Sweep, when police evicted 7,000 traders from the streets in 2013. At the Africities Summit, Save the Hawkers launched an informal street trading charter championing more inclusive policies across the continent. GREG NICOLSON asks Professor Claire Benit-Gbaffou from Wits' Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies (CUBES) what it's all about.More here
Why was it necessary to draft such a charter?
The main objective of the charter is to demonstrate, through quite practical and simple steps (based on international ‘best practices’ as well as lessons from Johannesburg street traders practices and experiences in particular), that inclusive street trading management is actually possible. Many officials tend to dismiss any attempt to accommodate and integrate street trading in inner-cities on the basis that street trading management is ‘intractable’. That was the motivation behind Operation Clean Sweep – ‘it is unmanageable', let us ‘clean sweep’ – but also behind policies conducted since the late 1990s: ‘let us clean the streets and put all traders into markets’, which we know from global experience cannot work for all traders. So, the charter is bringing together what we could learn from mistakes, from street traders' own initiatives, from other municipalities’ initiatives, on what are concrete steps that would make street trading management possible, inclusive, sustainable.