The Sub-Saharan African informal economy is often characterised by underemployment where workers spend countless hours earning bare minimum. This study investigates the impact of microfinance participation on earnings, time spent on market work, household work and leisure among women in the informal economy in Kenya. The findings are that microfinance on average increases earnings and reduces working hours due to a negatively sloping labour supply curve. This can be interpreted as an increase in productivity. As working hours are reduced, it is argued that time spent on the two other activities increase proportionally. If household work and leisure can be interpreted as activities with positive marginal utility, then these changes can be seen as income effects.

’appuyant sur une ethnographie d’environ cinq ans, effectuee entre 2010 et 2015 dans la ville de Tanger, l’enquete presentee ici interroge les formes de mobilité et les pratiques économiques mises en place par des migrants originaires de l'Afrique de l'Ouest et exclus des circuits de la mobilité privilégiée. Je décris ces individus comme des self-made-migrants qui, ne disposant pas des moyens économiques, administratifs et relationnels leur permettant d'accéder aux cir-cuits de la mobilité privilégiée, construisent, par le bas, une mobilité transnationale et subalterne réalisée par étapes et contournements de frontières. Cette mobilité se configure comme un projet et est conçue par les migrants comme un moyen pour “chercher leur vie”, a savoir pour chercher de manière autonome de nouvelles opportunités et une émancipation économique et sociale et s'imposer ainsi comme les acteurs de leur destin. Cette quête est orientée moins par une desti-nation precise que par la volonte de “sortir” et de circuler dans un ailleurs indefini et ouvert qui devient le catalyseur des imaginaires de réussite de ces migrants. Cette mobilité se réalise par étapes, à travers des découvertes, des explorations, des allers-retours : les migrants inventent ainsi étape après étape des parcours singuliers en reformulant constamment leurs itinéraires en fonction des contraintes et des opportunités qui se présentent. À travers mon enquête j'explore la relation existant entre cette forme de mobilité transnationale subalterne et des pratiques économiques de la mobilité et de la débrouille que les migrants in-ventent et développent afin d'alimenter leur trajectoire. Ces pratiques relèvent d'une économie de la pauvreté, caractérisée par des revenus extrêmement modestes et aléatoires et par un manque complet de toute forme de protection. Je montrerai que ces pratiques s'ancrent dans les marges de l'économie régulière et se greffent sur d'autres formes de mobilités qui se croisent et s'imbriquent dans la région tangéroise : des mobilités touristiques et commerciales notamment. Ces pratiques sont en outre transposables et peuvent être déclinées de manière inédite lors des étapes futures des itinéraires de ces self-made-migrants. Ces self-made-migrants sont donc les acteurs d'une mobilité subalterne qui se fonde sur des pratiques économiques de la débrouille qui leur permettent de circuler sur des territoires trans-nationaux et alimenter ainsi leur quête d'émancipation économique et sociale. Mots-clés : self-made-migrants, migration, mobilité transnationale, économie de la mobilité, économie de la débrouille, émancipation économique et sociale, étape, Maroc. / Based on an ethnographic field, made between 2010 and 2015 in the Tangier city, this research seeks to find out how the West African moves excluded of the circuits of the mainstream migration, and the economical practices they use in order to move. I describe these individuals as the self-made-migrants, whom not having access to the economical, administrative and social resources to move, they create by they own means, a transnational and subordinate mobility made by stages and border circumventions. This mobility is understood as a project, and a way to “seek their life”. For them, this expression means to look autonomously new social and economic opportunities to become the main character of their destiny. This quest is not lead by the destination but by the will of “going out” and move in an indefinite elsewhere, which becomes the catalyst of the imaginations of success of these migrants. This mobility is made by stages, through discoveries, explorations, and roundtrips. The migrants create, step by step, singular journeys by constantly reformulating the itinerary, in order to respond to the opportunities and the difficulties they found on their quest. In this research I explore the relationship between this transnational subordinated mobility and the economical practices created by the migrants in order to continue the trip. These economical strategies take part of the economics of poverty, defined by lowest and random incomes, and by a lack of protection. I’ll show that these strategies are link to the regular economy and are related to other forms of mobility found in the Tangier region. These strategies are also easy to transpose and adapt to other contexts in other steps of the journey. The self-made migrants are the actors of a subordinated mobility based on a precarious economy that nonetheless allows them to continue their transnational journey and their pursuit of an economic and social emancipation. Key Words: self-made-migrants, migration, transnational mobility, economics of the mobility, precarious economy, social and economic emancipation, stage, Morocco.

All street hawkers are not the same in many Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) of the global south as often portrayed by the media and documented in extant literature. This perception has created a gap in knowledge as researchers explore street hawking activities in NICs. In this study, I investigated a new informality trend of street hawking is coming into being within the capital city of Accra, Ghana. As governance is increasingly becoming entrepreneurial, informal activities are gradually becoming formal. Formal and registered businesses are increasingly capitalizing on hawking activities to occupy public spaces. The advent of the informality trend, I term corporate street hawking opens up new issues for the political economy, labor, and urban studies. By employing semi-structured interviews with 47 street hawkers in Accra, this paper sought to investigate three broadly interrelated questions. First, how do neoliberal policies impact the production of public space in Accra? Second, is corporate street hawking a form of creative destruction? Finally, how do corporate street hawkers practice agency within Accra?

Magister Commercii - MCom / South Africa is faced with a triple threat of poor economic growth, poverty and unemployment. Concurrently, the production of waste is increasing predominantly among urban areas. If catered for, the informal recycling sector has the potential to create a notable amount of opportunities for improving livelihoods and generating jobs. Street Waste Pickers (SWPs) are identified as individuals who collect recyclable waste material from households or industrial firms with the aim of selling them to recycling firms. This study aims to identify the barriers and challenges for job creation along the value chain of plastic recycling that SWPs face in the urban regions of Cape Town. In the absence of national database on the informal recycling sector, this study utilises primary data collection methods in the form of semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. The findings in this study indicate that the informal recycling economy is predominantly male-dominated. This is particularly due to the labour-intensive nature of the activities in this sector. Furthermore, the informal recycling economy possesses little to no barriers of entry. This is substantiated by the slight difference found in the comparison of earnings by race, age and educational attainment. These results reveal that initiatives to absorb these individuals could potentially curb the large amount of unskilled unemployed citizens of South Africa and simultaneously help decrease the level of unemployment in the country.

Many researchers have investigated the phenomenon of the informal economy and rec-ommended impractical interventions such as controlling the informal economy or formalizing it. However, most research has missed another strategy for helping the informal economy, which involves achieving legitimacy. This study uses unique data from a Jordanian government organi-zation named IRADA designed to help small, home-based businesses. Data on 345 home-based businesses representing a range of poor areas across Jordan provide a case study of IRADA's strategies to help home-based businesses succeed and to contribute to legitimate informal econo-mies in these areas. Logistic regression analysis reveals how marketing and specialized training are important for the success of home-based businesses. Findings suggest that IRADA's unique approach to legitimating home-based businesses in an innovative way represents a set of best practices for the informal economy field. They also suggest that IRADA's approach may be applied in contexts other than Jordan to help enhance the informal economy and make it tractable without formalizing it.

This thesis focuses on the intersection of gender, households, and the non-timber forest product market. Based around the concept of commodity chain analysis, this research examines each stage in two non-timber forest products', straw brooms and coco baskets, life cycles from extraction to final sale. The first objective of this research is to contribute to the literature on NTFPs, and in general gender roles in Latin America, by examining the gendered division of labor within and among the stages of two specific NTFP commodity chains, and the ways in which this division influences how important these products are to household income and conservation. The second objective is look at how commodity chain analysis can be used to examine the above issues, thereby contributing to both NTFP and commodity chain analysis literature. The research shows that the construction of gender in Nicaragua underlies the different roles that men and women perform throughout the two non-timber forest product chains. The two chains represent varying degrees of participation by women and men, and this difference is explained by the prevalence of certain tasks. In the basket commodity chain there were more tasks that are labeled feminine, and in the broom commodity chain there are more tasks labeled male. In addition, the varying participation of men and women influence how income from these products are viewed within the households as well as where men and women stand as conservation stakeholders. Commodity chain analysis served as a useful tool to examine more closely the relationship of gender and households in non-timber forest products, and could be of great assistance to the various development projects using these products as a tool for sustainable development. / Master of Science

This study sought to analyse the role of foreign aid in poverty alleviation and economic development of Ghana from 1957 to 2008. Literature related to the study on foreign aid and economic development was reviewed to get an insight into the views of other writers on the topic under study. The study adopted both primary and secondary sources of data to examine the concept of foreign aid, poverty reduction and economic development in Ghana. The study collected data using qualitative interviews consisting of open- and close-ended questions from the field. Content analysis involving the use of existing materials by researchers and the analyses of data originally collected by others was also relied on as a complement to the primary sources in the study. The study found that donor aid is not well coordinated in Ghana because of the proliferation of donor agencies in the country. Though aid is provided to the Ghanaian economy to address poverty and economic development challenges, the study found that foreign aid did not achieve the set objectives because of poor management of donor resources. This study, therefore, recommends that the informal economy should be promoted with funding from microfinance as an alternative to donor-driven development to effectively harness the natural resources in the country for development. / Development Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (Development Studies)

Qu'apporte la sociologie de l'acteur-réseau à la sociologie du développement? Depuis l’implosion de l’URSS et la division du bassin de la mer d’Aral en cinq républiques indépendantes, l’Asie centrale est le théâtre d’une « guerre de l’eau ». Cette guerre se traduit notamment par la difficulté des républiques à s’entendre sur un accord de partage de la ressource en eau du bassin, dont l’optimum a été démontré par des modèles hydroéconomiques développés par la coopération internationale. Ce travail retrace l'histoire de la guerre de l'eau et montre dans quelle mesure les dispositifs de calculs contribuent à la performer. Nous suivons pour cela l’eau qui circule dans les champs de production, dans les statistiques administratives et dans les travaux des experts internationaux. En mettant les dispositifs techniques au cœur de l'analyse, la sociologie du développement se trouve enrichie par la sociologie de l’acteur réseau / What can bring the Actor-Network Sociology to the Development Sociology ? Since the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the political disintegration of the Aral Sea basin into five independent republics, Central Asia is witnessing a "water war". The republics have difficulties in finding an agreement for sharing the water resources, while international cooperation has many times demonstrated an optimum by producing hydro-economic models.This thesis analyses the history of the water conflict in Central Asia and shows how the experts’ calculation devices contribute to perform the “water war”. The research chases the water flowing in the production field, in the administrative statistics and in the work of international experts. It focuses on technical devices and demonstrates how the Development Sociology gets enriched by the Actor-Network Sociology

Situated on the north-eastern coast of Morocco, the Spanish enclave of Melilla is a paradigmatic case of an unusual yet increasingly common kind of community. These are small, rather isolated communities with no industry or natural resources of their own, which rely heavily on capital and labour drawn from outside. Together with Ceuta, Melilla is one of the two only land borders between Europe and Africa. The enclave’s economic and political set up reflects its geopolitical importance. Across the border from Melilla lies the Moroccan province of Nador, home to one of the largest communities of Moroccan emigrants in Europe and a steady source of unskilled labour on which the Spanish enclave relies. Connections across the border are strong, including kinship links, employment networks and a wide range of both legal and illegal commercial transactions. Based on twelve months of fieldwork conducted on both sides of the border, this thesis departs from prevailing images of the borderland as either an abstract space of ‘creolisation’ and ‘hybridity’ or a locus of resistance to state power, and suggests, instead, that we carefully consider the large-scale political and economic processes through which places like Melilla and Nador are produced, and analyse the ways in which such global structures shape local reality. A fundamental aim of the thesis, therefore, is to elucidate the nature of the relations between space, place and capital at the Spanish-Moroccan frontier, and understand how such relations affect the lives of those who inhabit the region. This involves thinking about the language of a ‘community’ and the discourses and practices of morality that sustain it; analysing discourses of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ in contexts of institutionalised economic inequality; and understanding local conceptions of identity, morality and legitimacy, and how the three interact.

The inhabitants of Kinshasa, who call themselves Kinois, deal with insecurity and violence on a daily basis. Cheating and thefts are commonplace, and pillaging by street gangs and robberies by armed thieves are everyday occurrences. The state infrastructure is so poorly regulated that deaths by accident or medical negligence are also common. This, and much more, contributes to a challenging social milieu within which the Kinois’ best hope is simply to ‘make do’. This thesis, based on extensive fieldwork in Kinshasa, analyses different forms of violence which affect the Kinois on a daily basis. I argue that the Kinois’ concept of violence, mobulu, differs from Western definitions, which define violence as an intrinsically negative and destructive force. Mobulu is for the Kinois a potentially constructive phenomenon, which allows them to build relationships, coping strategies and new social phenomena. Violence is perceived as a transformative force, through which people build meaningful lives in the face of the hardship of everyday life. Broadly speaking, this thesis contributes to the Anthropology of violence which has too often focused on how violence is imposed upon a population, often from a structural level of a state and its institutions. Such an approach fails to account for the nuances of alternate perspectives of what ‘violence’ is, as evidenced in this thesis through the prism of the Kinois term mobulu. The concept of mobulu highlights the creativity of those forced to ‘make do’ on the streets of Kinshasa, to negotiate not only every day physical needs, for food and shelter, but also to navigate the mystical violence of witchcraft. By exploring the coping mechanisms across all sections of society, I analyse how the Kinois not only have built their lives in the wake of the violence of the state, but they have also found means of empowerment within it, using mobulu as a springboard for the development of some social phenomena. Whereas the anthropology of violence has focused mainly on physical and material violence, this thesis also argues that mobulu in Kinshasa is a total social fact that combines state violence with everyday violence, and physical violence with the invisible violence of witchcraft. This thesis seeks to enrich discussions on witchcraft in Kinshasa and in the African context in general, by analysing in depth how the cosmology of Kinshasa has differentiated itself as a result of the politico-economic events of recent decades. As witchcraft and material insecurity go hand in hand, a detailed analysis of the mechanisms of witchcraft is necessary, if we are to grasp the complexity of the concept of mobulu and how material and invisible violence inform each other.