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BVTA Executive Director’s Note

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2020 has been a challenging year for workers in the informal economy. It began as a promising year, with plans set and hoping that we will continue advancing the interests of vendors and informal traders. As an organisation we started well by launching our two-year Strategic Plan for 2020-2022 and we developed our Advocacy Strategy in the beginning of the year, it was a bright start for the organization when we thought that everything was in place for us to roll out our programs. Sadly, the COVID-19 induced lockdown derailed all our good plans and we saw ourselves on the back foot, having put so much work at the beginning of the year. The outright lockdown meant that informal traders were not going to be allowed to go to the markets to do their business. This had a serious impact on informal traders because they lost their source of livelihood. Everyone hoped that the lockdown would come to an end in a few weeks but it continued for seven months meaning people’s little income and savings were depleted, as we all know that informal traders do not have savings, they rely on hand to mouth, and they eat what they kill. Informal traders expended the little savings that they had and seven months later, most of them are facing challenges around restocking and some are failing to restart their businesses. During the outright lockdown in April 2020, the government promised a cushioning fund that only came in August 2020, a paltry 600 RTGS that could not add any meaningful impact on the losses faced by informal traders. To date, this means that vendors and informal traders continue to face the heavy impact of COVID-19 lockdown. It is still a very difficult period for vendors and informal traders because they are still trying to find their feet after the government relaxed the lockdown restrictions and opened the markets. The cost of complying with protocols to combat the spread of virus continue to weigh on traders’ shoulders. Informal traders are still burdened with the need to sanitize their clients, this means that they must purchase sanitizers with their little incomes so that they conform to COVID-19 Ministry of Health and Child Health Care (MOHCC) protocols that stipulate that everyone who gets into a market must be sanitized. Informal traders contribute an average of USD10 towards buying of sanitisers monthly, in market places while business has been reduced by the impact of the pandemic. Informal Cross Border Traders (ICBTs) have not been spared after the re-opening of the borders. The re-opening of borders means ICBTs now have to bear the burden of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) certificate that costs an arm and leg, they have to cough USD 60 on average for them to access the certificate that will enable them to cross and is only valid for about 48hours. All this is a burden to people in the informal sector. Our view is that the government must reduce the cost of the PCR certificate and it must ensure that the certificate is accessible because people are already taking advantage of traders who want to go out of the country to buy or sell goods by selling fake certificates. This may also increase the possibility of spreading of the virus because some people will buy the certificate and will not be tested thereby exposing their families, communities and other citizens to the disease. We are also calling on government to ensure that the cushioning fund is reviewed and continues to be available because some people are still struggling to survive. They have lost all what they had saved before lockdown. Some were working in markets that have been reduced in size in terms of carrying capacity, where authorities had to reduce the number of traders in order to conform to COVID-19 protocols and as result some people still do not have places to trade. All this has a serious impact to the livelihoods of people in the sector and we hope that there is going to be a way that ensures that people’s lives are saved and people’s social protection is promoted by ensuring that people have access to medical health services through the provision of a medical scheme and some kind of cushioning from the government. As we look ahead to 2021, we have a cocktail of interventions lined up to continue advancing the interest of informal traders despite operational challenges envisaged in the COVID19 era, we hope our pleas with addressed. We also wish to congratulate Bulawayo City Council for making sure that the Bulawayo Informal Sector By-Law was reviewed and gazetted as Statutory Instrument 181 of 2020 in line with our pleas over the years and our submission of the Informal Sector Model By-Law in 2018. We are in the process of analysing the provisions of the newly gazetted By-law to see if it is in line with what we advocated for. We pray other local authorities take a leaf from this progressive milestone. On behalf of the BVTA family, let me end by thanking all our partners who supported or collaborated with us throughout the year. Without you we wouldn’t have gone this far. We wish you a Merry Christmas and Prosperous New Year. “Stay safe from COVID19 and observe all the protocols”.

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Bulawayo vendors lash out at council’s archaic by-laws, wants city to be like Harare

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by Staff reporter  18 hrs ago | 763 Views Bulawayo vendors and informal traders here have taken aim at Bulawayo city fathers for simply trying to put cosmetic amendments to the existing archaic by-laws. The Bulawayo Vendors and Traders Association (BVTA) has for the past three years been advocating for the modernisation of the council by-laws which they said were enacted in 1976, hence do not sufficiently apply more than four decades later. As part of their advocacy in which they exposed the primitive by-laws, the vendors and informal traders through BVTA in conjunction with the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in April this year launched a research titled “Bulawayo Informal Sector Policy Research” project. Perhaps buckling under pressure, the city fathers last month flighted a notice titled “Notice of proposed amendment to Bulawayo (hawkers and street vendors) By-law 1976”. “Bulawayo City Council hereafter referred to as council proposed to repeal Bulawayo hawkers and street vendors by-laws and replace them with Bulawayo City council (Hawkers, vendors, flea markets, food carts and stall/table holders) by- laws 2018,” reads a notice signed by Town Clerk Christopher Dube. The notice also indicated that copies of the proposed by-law will be open for inspection at council offices and at all council district offices during working hours between 8am to 1645 hours from September to October 2018. “Any objections thereto may be lodged with the town clerk whose offices are located at City Hall, corner Fife Street and L Takawira, Bulawayo on or before November 2018,” he said. However, the vendors and informal traders, who have since managed to engage the city fathers over the matter, have expressed reservations on the new development. “We engaged them, we had a meeting with them and shared the draft. They appeared to support it. In terms of drafting, it’s done by council technocrats who appeared to be putting lipstick on a pig,” Ndiweni said. Ndiweni said they have since completed a document containing by-law amendment proposals which they seek to submit to the city fathers. “We have thus engaged BCC, government, informal sector and decided to propose an Informal Sector Model By-Law that is anchored on a rights-based approach,” Ndiweni said. “We are submitting the proposal next week, reason being that BCC put a public notice that they are amending this by-law on August 31 this year, and deadline for objections is November 4, so we are using this opportunity besides objecting to their amendments but also to propose a law. “Their proposed amendments merely change titles or headings not addressing compelling questions of the informal economy,” he said. Ndiweni said the local authority’s outdated by-laws have been overtaken by events considering that there is an expanded Bill of Rights that guarantees Economic Rights particularly section 24. “These laws also were put in place during the colonial period where the white minority government dehumanised blacks and prohibited them from operating on even city pavements, thus the 2013 Constitution brings a new paradigm, they deal with such archaic and oppressive pieces of legislation,” Ndiweni said. The vendors and informal traders’ director also revealed that research has shown that 59 percent of informal traders were not aware of the by-laws governing them. He added: “We have carried a research working with NUST to understand Institutional Complex governing the informal sector and we discovered these inconsistencies with the Constitution of Zimbabwe, also that there are no meaningful efforts to educate informal traders about these laws, 59 percent of the informal traders in Bulawayo are not aware of these laws.” Ndiweni also said the research has pointed out that about 13 percent of the informal traders are in the sector because they are driven by passion for entrepreneurship and hence laws must be reformed to enable them to conduct their business with minimum hindrances. He further noted that these primitive laws have been increasing rights violations in the sector, with a point in case being in 2016, where 17 percent of rights violations were recorded in the informal sector.  Join Bulawayo24 Online Community Source – dailynews More on: #Hwakers, #City, #Bulawayo 18   12  

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Organisations petition local authority over outdated by-law

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  The Bulawayo Vendors Traders Association (BVTA), in partnership with the Young African leaders Initiative and the Vendors initiative for Socio-Economic Transformation are lobbying Bulawayo City Council to review the 1976 Hawkers and vendors by-law. The petition process, being spearheaded by BVTA, calls for the local authority to immediately review of this primitive piece of legislation citing its out datedness, inconsistency with the Constitution and current situation as it hinders the operations of the informal sector in the city. Section 64 of the Constitution stipulates that “Every person has a Constitutional right to choose and carry on any profession, trade or practice of a profession, trade or occupation may be regulated by law.” The current Hawkers and Vendors by-law stifles freedom of trade or choice of occupation, hence, the decision by organizations to petition the council to scrap this by-law. The government should consider vending as a new reality that requires proper planning and designing of vending sites that are compatible with the current socio-economic situation. Informal sector has provided alternative employment to the many jobless people hence there is need to review these outdated laws that hinder progress on the formalization of the informal sector.

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