This TED Talk features multidisciplinary design thinker Niddy Bonn, recorded live at TED Global 2017.

The informal markets of Africa are stereotypically seen as chaotic and lackadaisical.

The downside of hearing the word informal is this automatic brand association we have, which is very negative,

and it's had significant consequences and economic losses, easily adding or subtracting 40 to 60

percent of the profit margin for the informal markets alone. As part of a task of mapping the informal trade ecosystem,

we've done an extensive literature review

of all the reports and research on cross-border trade in East Africa

going back 20 years.

This was to prepare us for field work

to understand what was the problem,

what was holding back informal trade in the informal sector.

What we discovered over the last 20 years

was nobody had distinguished between illicit,

which is like smuggling or contraband in the informal sector

from the legal but unrecorded,

such as tomatoes, oranges, fruit. This criminalization, what in Swahili refers to as Biashara,

which is the trade or the commerce, versus Magendo, which is the smuggling or contraband, this criminalization of the

informal sector in English by not distinguishing between these aspects easily can cost each

African economy between 60 to 80 percent addition on the annual GDP growth rate because we are not recognizing the engine of what keeps the economy is running.

The informal sector is growing jobs at four times the rate of the traditional formal economy, or modern economy, as many call it.

It offers employment and income generation opportunities

to the most unskilled in conventional disciplines.

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