“We Are Standing on Our Own”: The Informal Economy in Zambia and Zimbabwe
Venue
G.07 Meadows Lecture Theatre, Doorway 4, Medical School Teviot Place, EH8 9AGDescription
The Centre of African Studies is delighted to welcome you to the following seminar:
“We Are Standing on Our Own”: The Informal Economy in Zambia and Zimbabwe
Speaker: Dr Kristina Pikovskaia, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh
Chair: Dr Sara Dorman, Senior Lecturer in African Politics, University of Edinburgh
When: Wednesday 15th January 2025 (3:30pm-5pm)
Where: G.07 Meadows Lecture Theatre, Doorway 4, Medical School Teviot Place, EH8 9AG
Format: In-person only
Both Zambia and Zimbabwe were labour reserve economies and settler colonies with rather small urban informal sector dominated by women who used it to supplement their husbands’ income from wage work in the colonial and early postcolonial period. Postcolonial economies in both countries relied quite heavily on the state, and economic liberalisation led to a rapid decrease in formal employment and, consequently, the rise of the informal economy as the primary source of livelihood. While many developments in Zambia and Zimbabwe were different, some socio-economic processes had similarities. However, people’s perceptions and experiences of informality in urban Zambia and Zimbabwe are vastly different which, in turn, affects their perceptions of work, employment, entrepreneurship, and people’s everyday experiences of citizenship. In Zimbabwe, people with informal livelihoods rarely perceive them as ‘work’ and hardly ever see themselves as ‘entrepreneurs’. They often share the modernist postcolonial ideas of urban development and order that hardly have any space for the informal sector and put their faith in the government to restore the economy to the pre-crisis 1980s state. In Zambia, people often identify as entrepreneurs whenever they have any small-scale business. They also rely on the state, but to secure contracts and funding rather than to create employment for them. Such a striking difference in experiences and perceptions of economic informality affects people’s political and economic subjectivity and their everyday experiences of citizenship in informal economic spaces. In this talk, I look deeper into the similarities and differences in experiences of informality in urban Zambia and Zimbabwe, discuss the reasons behind these distinctions, and implications for state-society relations drawing upon my rich interview data collected in Harare, Lusaka, and Kitwe between 2016 and 2024.
Speaker Biography:
Kristina Pikovskaia (kristina.pikovskaia@ed.ac.uk) is the Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She does interdisciplinary research in Political Economy and Social Anthropology. Kristina is especially interested in the informal economy in Africa, and her current research focus is on people’s experiences of lived citizenship in the informal sector in southern Africa. Her previous research has been published in journals, such as The Journal of Southern African Studies, Nations and Nationalism, and The International Development Planning Review.