Street Food, Hard Numbers: What Tanzanian Vendors Reveal About Decent Work

At the bustling Kigamboni Ferry Bus Stand in Dar es Salaam, where commuters stream off ferries and buses in search of a quick meal, a quiet economic engine hums beneath the noise. Here, dozens of informal food vendors fry snacks, pour juices, and serve plates to thousands of passing customers each day, sustaining their families in one of Tanzania’s fastest-growing urban municipalities. A new study published in Discover Global Society has taken a close, quantitative look at these workers, and its findings paint a nuanced portrait of a workforce that is remarkably skilled at the daily craft of vending yet structurally locked out of the protections and services that define what the International Labour Organisation calls decent work. The research, conducted by Sunday Isdory Mkama of the Mwalimu Nyerere Memorial Academy, surveyed 77 informal food vendors and combined the ILO’s Decent Work Framework with economist Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach to ask a deceptively simple question: what actually enables street vendors to achieve fair, safe, and dignified employment?

The answer, according to the data, lies in an uneven landscape of knowledge, skills, and access. Vendors demonstrated moderate awareness of decent work principles, with 55 percent falling into the moderate knowledge category, while 23 percent showed low knowledge and only 22 percent high knowledge. This means that although most vendors have some grasp of concepts such as fair pay, workplace rights, social protection, and safe working conditions, that awareness rarely runs deep enough to be actionable. In practical terms, a vendor may know that labour rights exist without knowing how to claim them, or understand that social protection is important without knowing how to enrol in a programme. The study’s author argues that this shallow but real awareness constrains vendors’ capability to recognise and seize opportunities, leaving them unable to engage effectively with the formal systems that could improve their working lives.

Where the vendors truly shine is in operational competence. A striking 92 percent reported strong practical vending skills, and 87 percent claimed solid customer service abilities, while 66 percent possessed basic financial management skills. These figures reflect a workforce that has learned its trade through experience rather than formal instruction, honing food-handling techniques, market adaptability, and interpersonal finesse through years of daily practice. Yet the skills profile collapses when the focus shifts from the stall to the business. Only 40 percent demonstrated awareness of labour rights, just 38 percent could maintain proper records, and a mere 29 percent reported competence in sustainable business practices. This gap between operational and strategic skills is critical, because record-keeping and regulatory literacy are precisely the capabilities that allow small enterprises to grow, secure credit, and formalise their operations.

Access to enabling services proved to be the weakest link of all. Only 27 percent of vendors had access to formal financial services such as banks or loans, a mere 25 percent had participated in any training or workshops, and just 18 percent were covered by any form of formal social protection. Instead, the dominant source of support was informal: 69 percent of vendors relied on family and friends when they needed help. From the perspective of the Capability Approach, this pattern reveals vendors adapting to inadequate environments by leaning on available social resources rather than formal systems. Such networks provide short-term relief, but they rarely support substantial economic growth, and this reliance can actually extend vulnerability by keeping vendors locked out of scalable financial services and safety nets that could buffer them against illness, theft, weather, or sudden losses of vending space.

The statistical heart of the study lies in its chi-square analyses of the relationships among knowledge, skills, and service access. Two associations emerged as statistically significant. First, knowledge and skills were linked, with a chi-square value of 6.41, a p-value of 0.041, and a small-to-moderate effect size indicated by Cramér’s V of 0.29. Vendors with high knowledge were disproportionately likely to demonstrate high skills: within the high-knowledge group, 10 of 17 vendors showed high skill levels, whereas in the low-knowledge group only 5 of 18 did. Second, skills and access to formal services were significantly associated, with a chi-square value of 3.92, a p-value of 0.048, and Cramér’s V of 0.23. Among vendors with low to moderate skills, only 34.6 percent accessed formal services, compared with 56.0 percent of highly skilled vendors. The interpretation offered is that skills in financial management and documentation likely reduce transaction costs and foster smoother interactions with formal institutions such as banks and municipal offices.

Intriguingly, the relationship between knowledge and service access, while showing a clear gradient, did not reach statistical significance. Access rose from 33.3 percent among low-knowledge vendors to 38.1 percent among those with moderate knowledge and 58.8 percent among the high-knowledge group, yet the association yielded a p-value of 0.087, just above the conventional significance threshold, with Cramér’s V of 0.25. The author reads this as evidence that awareness alone does not guarantee inclusion. Structural barriers such as high costs, bureaucratic hurdles, and a lack of institutional trust can exclude even well-informed vendors from services they know exist. This distinction between internal capabilities, such as knowledge, and external enabling conditions is a core insight of the Capability Approach: recognising an opportunity is not the same as being able to convert it into a real outcome when the surrounding institutional environment is hostile or unresponsive.

The demographic profile of the surveyed vendors adds important context to these findings. Women made up the majority of respondents at 56 percent, and the largest age bracket was 26 to 35 years, accounting for 42 percent of the sample, followed by 36 to 45 years at 27 percent. Nearly half of the vendors, 48 percent, had completed secondary school, while 31 percent had primary education, 12 percent had tertiary education, and 9 percent had no schooling. Most vendors, 52 percent, had between one and five years of experience, suggesting a steady influx of newcomers into the trade. The author interprets this pattern as a symptom of chronic structural unemployment: as formal jobs fail to materialise for Tanzania’s rapidly growing urban population, food vending becomes a default livelihood for people in their prime working years. New entrants often lack the capital and resilience of established vendors, raising concerns about income stability and long-term security.

The study is careful to acknowledge its own limits. It employed a cross-sectional quantitative design, collecting data at a single point in time from a convenience sample of 77 vendors at one location, which means the findings cannot establish causality and may not generalise to vendors in other municipalities or socio-economic contexts. Self-reported questionnaire data are also susceptible to recall and social desirability biases. The author explicitly cautions that the significant associations between knowledge and skills, and between skills and service access, should be viewed as correlations rather than causal relationships. It is plausible that the two constructs influence each other over time, with knowledge enabling better skill development and practical experience deepening understanding, but longitudinal research would be needed to untangle the direction of these effects.

Even with those caveats, the policy implications are concrete and urgent. The study recommends that municipal authorities prioritise inclusive training programmes covering labour rights, financial education, record-keeping, and business skills, precisely the strategic competencies in which vendors showed the greatest deficits. It further calls for cooperation among local government, banks, and other institutions to expand formal assistance, and for authorities to formally recognise the contributions of informal food vendors to urban economies and food security while working to make their working conditions safer and more secure. Within the ILO framework, the findings expose gaps across multiple pillars at once: rights at work are undermined by shallow legal knowledge, productive employment is weakened by missing managerial skills, and social protection is hollowed out by 18 percent coverage rates. Viewed through the lens of the Capability Approach, the vendors of Kigamboni possess the agency and the craft, but the conversion factors that would turn their efforts into genuine freedoms, from credit to insurance to institutional recognition, remain largely out of reach. Closing that gap, the study argues, is not charity but sound economic policy for cities where the informal sector is not the margin of the economy but its beating heart.

Subject of Research: Decent work capabilities of informal street food vendors in Kigamboni Municipality, Tanzania

Article Title: Capabilities of informal food vendors in achieving decent work in Kigamboni Municipality, Tanzania

Article References: Capabilities of informal food vendors in achieving decent work in Kigamboni Municipality, Tanzania. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00569-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00569-2

Keywords: informal economy, decent work, street food vendors, Tanzania, Capability Approach, ILO, social protection, urban livelihoods, financial inclusion, labour rights, Kigamboni, skills training