As seen on the streets of Accra from Georgia Popplewell on Vimeo.
Like most countries in the developing world, my own included, Ghana has a vast informal economy in which street vendors play an important role. According to a 2003 study done by the Natural Resources Institute in collaboration with the Food Research Institute and the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Ghana, street vending employs over 60,000 people and has an estimated annual turnover of over US$100 million with an annual profit of US$24million. Given the pace at which a city like Accra has been growing in the past decade, I’d imagine you’d have to multiply the ’03 figures by several to arrive at a current estimate.
The video above offers only a minute and relatively uninteresting sampling of the range of items I saw on sale on the streets of Accra. A more complete list would include:
hats, caps, neckties, fans, sponges, clocks, full-length mirrors, volumes of Kwame Nkrumah’s speeches, electric lamps, copies of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, kente-patterned boxes of tissues, briefcases, eyeglasses, world maps, culturally inappropriate colouring books, foodstuff, fruit, including apples neatly packaged in stacks of two and three in long, narrow plastic bags, chewing gum, candy, garden shears, footballs in Ghana colours, dog leashes and muzzles, cufflinks, SIM cards, mobile phone airtime, Livestrong-style wristbands, television antennas, razors, toilet paper, shoe polish, shoe brushes, pens, garments, framed paintings.
Georgia, there’s a whole other class of street vendors focused on long-distance bus trips. When you’re waiting for the bus to fill, the vendors focus mostly on food for the journey (hard-boiled eggs, biscuits, fruit, ice water) and comfort items (handkerchiefs, battery-powered fans). Once the bus is underway, it becomes clear that another set of vendors are aboard to provide entertainment – one sells inexpensive books, another patent medicine. And there’s almost invariably an itinerant preacher, who asks for the bus to be “bathed in the blood of Jesus”, always a nice metaphor when you’re merging onto some of the world’s most dangerous roads. They ride along until the first major bus stop, where they exit and look for another bus coming into the city where they can offer books for the kids and blessings on arrival.
My favorite are the vendors who stop buses as they pass through small towns, selling the local specialty. You may have been waiting for water for hours, but if that town sells black earthenware bowls for crushing tomatoes, that’s what you’re getting… from hundreds of competing vendors.
Some day we’ll be able to make real-time Google map mashups showing precisely how many people in different parts of Accra are selling Fan Ice. That’s a good use of technology, right?
EthanZ – I encountered a number of long-distance bus provisioners while waiting at Kaneshie Market for our Ford van to Cape Coast to fill up, but I guess the on-board variety doesn’t ride the vans.
I remember running into swarms of small-town street vendors in Madagascar during a 9-hour minibus ride from Tamatave to Antananarivo. They time the buses pretty precisely, and the towns the buses pass through around mealtimes are the winners here, since this furnishes an excuse for the buses (obviously in joyous collusion with the whole plan) to stop for 45 minutes or so to allow the passengers to grab lunch or dinner.
I’m fascinated by informal economies, not least because I live in a country where such things have an impact on the overall economy, but it really was the sheer range of items available on the streets of Accra that fascinated me. Trinidadian street entrepreneurs tend to stick with a pretty narrow range of wares, and most of them aren’t all that compelling. Of course it’s also a question of scale, as Trinidad is a fraction of the size of Ghana. But how many steering wheel covers can a person really expect to sell?