Street Foods: Urban Food and Employment in Developing Countries

THE STREET FOOD Project was coordinated by the Equity Policy Centre (EPOC) in Washington DC and focused on the dual nature of the street food trade as a provider of food and as a micro-enterprise. It began with the aims of assisting food vendors at the local level and of challenging contemporary assumptions about informal sector employment, women’s roles and food safety. Its conclusions offer a critique of prevailing perspectives on small entrepreneurs and suggest several interventions that can be made at the municipal level to enhance the effectiveness and safety of the sector as well as improving the earning potential and working environments of those, predominantly low-income families, who work in it. Fourteen tasty recipes are also included which will make the favourite street foods identified more popular.

This book encompasses 15 years research into street food enterprises in cities in Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. Regional differences in all the countries studied mean that cities a few hundred kilometres apart can have very different numbers and types of street vendors. The intention, therefore, is to present trends and generate innovative development approaches rather than offer a quantitative study.

The first part of the book presents the findings of seven case studies conducted between 1983 and 1992. The information gathered is aggregated and analyzed in the second part (along with data from Jamaica and India), and this is followed by a comprehensive glossary and extensive bibliography. The case studies share a generic approach that was modified at each site to reflect local circumstances, and follow a common method of action-research “…undertaken in collaboration with local research staff and benefiting the people studied.” This entailed the formation in each city of advisory committees comprising local municipal officials, academics, nutritionists, NGO leaders and vendors who assisted, legitimized and empowered the projects – both at inception and conclusion.

Street food is defined as “...any minimally processed food sold on the street for immediate consumption“ and a "street food vendor" as “...one selling ready-to-eat foods from a place having no more than three permanent walls.” Such definitions exclude several other types of informal catering activity (which is why the author argues the need for a total survey of food services to urban residents) but did enable the widely different studies to produce consistent and comparable results.

Each study begins with a short history of the city and a description of the support achieved by the project locally, followed by the results of censuses mapping street food vendors by gender and type (mobile, semi-itinerant and permanent, producer or trader) and identifying the foods they sold. The censuses were repeated at different times of the day and year, in order to consider changing working patterns and seasonal variations. Based on location and type of food sold, a 10 per cent sample of vendors was interviewed, their food-handling practices and environments recorded, and the habits of and socioeconomic information about their customers noted. Food samples were analyzed for nutritional value and for contamination and, in each study, the time-management of 15 vendors was examined.
The analysis has two strands: an exploration of the “...differentials between women and men regarding dominance in the trade, types of enterprises and of food sold, and income derived from street foods;” and an examination of the effect of government attitudes on street food vendors. The findings from each study have stimulated debate in the respective countries and have informed policy changes at the provincial level. Of particular interest to city managers is the scale of the business and the revenues involved – as many as 10 per cent of some populations are employed in the sector providing meals to as many as 80 per cent of urban resi