Informal Entrepreneurship And Cross Border Trade In Maputo Mozambique

This report presents the results of a SAMP survey of informal entrepreneurs connected to cross-border trade between Johannesburg and Maputou during 2014. The study sought to enhance the evidence base on the links between migration and informal entrepreneur-ship in Southern African cities and to examine the implications for municipal, national and regional policy.

While increasing attention is being paid to the drivers and forms of entrepreneurship in informal economies, much less of this policy and research focus is directed at understanding the links between mobility and informality. This report examines the current state of knowledge about this relationship with particular reference to three countries (Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe) and four cities (Cape Town, Harare, Johannesburg and Maputo), identifying major themes, knowledge gaps, research questions and policy implications.

Zimbabwe has witnessed the rapid expansion of informal cross-border trading (ICBT) with neighbouring countries over the past two decades. Beginning in the mid-1990s when the country embarked on its Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP), a large number of people were forced into informal employment through worsening economic conditions and the decline in formal sector jobs. The countrys post-2000 economic col-lapse resulted in the closure of many industries and created market opportunities for the further expansion of ICBT. This report, part of SAMPs Growing Informal Cities series, sought to provide a current picture of ICBT in Zimbabwe by interviewing a sample of 514 Harare-based informal entrepreneurs involved in cross-border trading with South Africa.

The study demonstrates that informal cross-border is a complex phenomenon and not uniform across the region, or even through border posts of the same country. However, the overall volume of trade, duties paid and VAT foregone, as well as the types of goods and where they are produced, indicate that this sector of regional trade should be given much greater attention and support by governments of the region as well as regional organizations such as the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), SADC and the Southern African Customs Union (SACU).

In the face of a declining and collapsing national economy, this book presents the story of enterprising and entrepreneurial Zimbabwean women, operating as informal cross-border traders in the SADC region. The women are struggling against economic wants and deprivation, and devising their own initiatives to defeat poverty. The study relates their hopes, perceptions and strategies for managing the structural constraints at micro- and macro-levels that at once make their activities necessary, and simultaneously impose limitations on them.

The new edition of Historical Dictionary of Mozambique covers the Bantu expansion; the arrival of the Portuguese navigators and their str competition with local African power centers and coastal Arab-Swahili trading towns; the trade cycles of gold, ivory, and slaves; the establishment of the semi-Africanized prazos along the Zambezi Valley; “pacification” campaigns; and the period of Portuguese weakness in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when vast tracts of land were rented to concessionary companies. In the late colonial period the Salazar dictatorship tried to reassert Portuguese power, but after ten years of armed struggle for national liberation, Mozambique gained its independence in 1975. The book contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Mozambique.

One of the defining characteristics of many large cities in the rapidly urbanizing global South is the high degree of informality of shelter, services and economic livelihoods. It is these dynamic, shifting and dangerous informal urban spaces that refugees often arrive in with few resources other than a will to survive, a few social contacts and a drive to support themselves in the absence of financial support from the host government and international agencies. This report addresses the question of variability in economic opportunity and entrepreneurial activity between urban environments within the same destination country - South Africa - by comparing refugee entrepreneurship in Cape Town, South Africa’s second largest city, and several small towns in the province of Limpopo. The research shows that refugee entrepreneurial activity in Limpopo is a more recent phenomenon and largely a function of refugees moving from large cities such as Johannesburg where their businesses and lives are in greater danger. The refugee populations in both areas are equally diverse and tend to be engaged in the same wide range of activities. This report shows that different urban geographies do shape the local nature of refugee entrepreneurial economies, but there are also remarkable similarities in the manner in which unconnected refugee entrepreneurs establish and grow their businesses in large cities and small provincial towns.

Debates about international migration in South Africa often centre on the role of international migrant entrepreneurs who are seen to be more successful than their South African counterparts, squeezing them out of entrepreneurial spaces, particularly in townships. This report explores and compares the experiences of international and South African migrant entrepreneurs operating informal sector businesses in Johannesburg.