This book analyses how informal economy traders and the marketplace institution dominate the local economy in African cities. According to the World Bank, being an African reduces the probability that an individual is an entrepreneur in the manufacturing sector by more than 95 percent. Exporting unprocessed strategic raw materials and importing large volumes of finished goods stagnate Africa’s informal sector while creating formal jobs overseas. This suggests employment increases in distributive trade and persistence of the marketplace institution in reducing urban unemployment and income inequality. However, there is limited knowledge of the men and women with permanent stalls in large urban marketplaces that function daily as a temporary city within a city, even though they are the major actors in distribute trade. More important their daily out-of-stall contacts resulting from maintaining complex social and economic relationships that determine the financial health of family, business, and the economy are generally unexplored and largely unknown, but have significant unintended consequences on the urban mobility system. Researchers, planners, development practitioners and policymakers have, therefore, not focused their attention and considered the impacts of the powerful economic institution – marketplaces and traders - in framing transport planning processes and urban development policies, and that is the paradox surrounding marketplace trade and urban development in West Africa.

The persistence of indigenous African markets in the context of a hostile or neglectful business and policy environment makes them worthy of analysis. An investigation of Afrocentric business ethics is long overdue. Attempting to understand the actions and efforts of informal traders and artisans from their own points of view, and analysing how they organise and get by, allows for viable approaches to be identified to integrate them into global urban models and cultures. Using the utu-ubuntu model to understand the activities of traders and artisans in Nairobis markets, this book explores how, despite being consistently excluded and disadvantaged, they shape urban spaces in and around the city, and contribute to its development as a whole. With immense resilience, and without discarding their own socio-cultural or economic values, informal traders and artisans have created a territorial complex that can be described as the African metropolis. African Markets and the Utu-buntu Business Model sheds light on the ethics and values that underpin the work of traders and artisans in Nairobi, as well as their resilience and positive impact on urbanisation. This book makes an important contribution to the discourse on urban economics and planning in African cities.

Compilation of conference papers comprising an interdisciplinary research study of commerce and domestic markets in West Africa - covers the development of commerce and trade since the pre-colonialism period, the development of specialized marketing groups and retail marketing centres, etc., and includes recent trends. Bibliography pp. 413 to 432 and map. Conference held in freetown 1969 December 14 to 22.

Study of rural areas and urban areas markets, commerce, marketing and distribution networks within two major areas of West Africa, particularly Nigeria - covers the development of trade and markets in yorubaland and iboland, and includes sociological aspects, the economic functions of periodic and daily markets, the patterns of trade and retail marketing, etc. Diagrams, maps, references and statistical tables.

Trading Places is about urban land markets in African cities. It explores how local practice, land governance and markets interact to shape the ways that people at society's margins access land to build their livelihoods. The authors argue that the problem is not with markets per se, but in the unequal ways in which market access is structured. They make the case for more equal access to urban land markets, not only for ethical reasons, but because it makes economic sense for growing cities and towns. If we are to have any chance of understanding and intervening in predominantly poor and very unequal African cities, we need to see land and markets differently. New migrants to the city and communities living in slums are as much a part of the real estate market as anyone else; they're just not registered or officially recognised. Trading Places highlights the land practices of those living on the city's margins, and explores the nature and character of their participation in the urban land market. It details how the urban poor access, hold and trade land in the city, and how local practices shape the city, and reconfigures how we understand land markets in rapidly urbanising contexts. Rather than developing new policies which aim to supply land and housing formally but with little effect on the scale of the need, it advocates an alternative approach which recognises the local practices that already exist in land access and management. In this way, the agency of the poor is strengthened, and households and communities are better able to integrate into urban economies.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

This book argues that international aid programmes are unsuccessful for indigenous African institutions because it is based on mainstream economic theory which is fundamentally acultural which does not understand their cultural context.