Welcome to this thirtieth issue of Pop Transport, the fortnightly newsletter of the Global Partnership for Informal Transportation.
Informal transportation is very, very popular (widespread, and for the people).
It overwhelmingly dominates shared transportation in the rapidly growing towns and cities of the Global South. It moves billions and employs millions of people around the world.
That’s why we call this newsletter “Pop Transport.”
In this issue:
Andrea San Gil León shares why informal transportation needs to be at the table and on the agenda (video from the ITF Conference in Leipzig)
Benjie de la Peña shares cautionary notes on digitizing informal transportation at the International Mobility Data Summit
Daniel Agbinoa helps us rethink the frames of transportation via The Subversive Economy of the Lagos Danfo.
Michael Stasik examines the “popular economy” of a Ghanaian bus station
South Africa consortium sets out to pilot electric minibus taxis
IFC partners with Gozem to provide loans for motorcycle taxis in Francophone Africa
Poverty and mobility
Our colleague, Andrea San Gil León, was at International Transport Forum in Leipzig (May 2022) to speak on the panel: “Everyone included: tackling the digital gap.”
She was featured in a short interview on why the mobility that informal transportation provides is so critical to addressing poverty.
Information, power, and mobility
GPIT Chair, Benjie de la Peña, was a virtual panelist at the International Mobility Data Summit in Montreal (June 2022). He presented framing remarks for the panel on “Digital Transport for the World: GTFS and Informal Transportation.”
In his framing remarks, he posed three questions technologists should seriously consider as they work on digitizing mobility data from informal transportation.
Whose goals? Whose good? Whose problem?
Whose words? Whose eyes?
Daniel Agbiboa’s recent piece ‘We Move’ The Subversive Economy of the Lagos Danfo in April’s The Republic is required reading.
Using the “slogans” written on danfos, the ubiquitous minibuses of Lagos, Prof. Agbiboa asks us to reframe how we think of informal transportation:
Urban megaprojects and megacity planning across Africa today threatens to injuriously exclude or predatorily include hundreds of thousands of informal workers, provoking shock, anger, and resistance from below. Such large-scale projects—generally couched in the Manichean dualism of Euro-American modernity—reproduce the DuBoisean double consciousness of colonized subjects: always looking at African cities through the eyes of the West. But what if we looked at African cities through their own eyes? Through the eyes of the danfo?
…danfos, and particularly their subculture of slogans, offer an acute window into the political economy of everyday life in Lagos, especially the order and chaos that mark this megalopolis as simultaneously familiar and strange. To encounter the danfo slogan is to encounter how Lagosians turn the real—that is, their daily struggles to get by and get ahead—into semiotic. By reading Lagos through danfos, we reclaim new ‘pedagogies of presence’ that dispose us to seeing public transport as a lively archive of popular culture—that unofficial, expressive politics of, as Tom Dumm writes, ‘ordinary life, the life-world, the everyday, the quotidian, the low, the common, the private, the personal.’
Whose economy?
In this paper from 2018, Michael Stasik conducts an “ethnographic study of a major bus station in Ghana’s capital Accra, focused on how West African urbanites make use of, and thereby reshape, infrastructures of mobility and exchange.” He takes an anthropologist’s view of the organization of informal transportation.
In, The popular niche economy of a Ghanaian bus station: departure from informality, Prof. Stasik both questions the framing of the informal sector, especially with “the simplified binary classification such models project onto a wide range of economic activities and relations and, even more so, to the range of negative qualifiers such as “marginal,” “residual,” “unregulated,” or “shadowy,” particularly as used by development specialists and political analysts.”
He opts for the substantivist frame of the “popular economy.” (Indeed, how can informal transportation be a “shadowy” sector when it dominates mobility in the cities of the Global South?)
In terms of the country’s overall public transport provisions, the transport services of small-scale road entrepreneurs in fact constitute the dominant economy. Rather than being determined by state-made economic structures, the sector’s non-state economic actors actively negotiate the effects that economic changes – on both micro and macro scales – bring to bear on their ventures, often in quite opportunistic manners. And while those actors’ activities are largely positioned outside the control of state (or formal) regulation, their economic interrelations are nevertheless structured by a plurality of non-formal forms of regulation, despite their organisation being integrative of many conflicting ends (Beck, Klaeger, and Stasik 2017; Stasik 2016). Conceived in these more refined terms, Ghana’s transport sector begs the question of the applicability of the notion of informality. Ultimately, this ties in with wider debates about the validity and utility of the informality paradigm (see Gërxhani 2004; Hill 2010: ch. 2).
…To be sure, positing crude dichotomies between informal and formal spheres of economy risks ignoring the often-multifarious networks that people draw on across different degrees of institutional formalisation and regulation. Furthermore, the dichotomy associated with the label “informality” readily lends itself to normative perspectives commonly taken up in development policy, in turn becoming a justification to either formalise or eliminate “informal” economic activities.
…My argument is that while the group economic activities taking place in the station are of a local, collective, collaborative, popular, and informal character, the practices by which they are created and sustained are rife with rivalry and competition. Propelled by continuously high demand for public transport services, these processes of cooperation and competition facilitate an ongoing reworking of existing arrangements for accommodating the results of growth they precipitate. I will qualify this assertion by focusing on the commercial practices and entrepreneurial bearings of several groups of transport workers, some of which have been successful, others less so. I show that within the socially embedded economic activities of the station workers, which do encompass forms of collaboration, support, and solidarity, entrepreneurial opportunity nevertheless routinely takes precedence over mutuality.
Electrifying SA’s minibuses
First Electric Minibus Taxi Coming to South Africa Aims to Accelerate Green Mobility Adoption
A project team of companies and research institutions today announced a research partnership to investigate and advance the feasibility of an electric minibus taxi in South African conditions by testing production vehicles in South Africa in 2023.
The project team, consisting of GoMetro, MiX Telematics, HSW, ACDC Dynamics, and various entities within Stellenbosch University’s Faculty of Engineering, will conduct rigorous and extensive testing in and around the town of Stellenbosch, as well as putting the electrification of the minibus taxi sector firmly on the national agenda by means of an educational roadshow in all nine provinces in the course of 2023.
Hand signs for hailing
Btw, if you want to learn how to hail a minibus taxi in Joburg, you have to know the hand gestures. (Caveat for the “problematizing” frame in the narrative.)
IFC gets in on the lease-to-own business
Ride-hailing start-up Gozem signs $10m deal with IFC (International Finance Corporation)
Six thousand moto-taxi drivers in Togo and Benin can now access vehicle financing after the West African super app Gozem and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) signed a $10-million partnership. [Note: IFC is part of the World Bank]
…This enables moto-taxi drivers to purchase or rent electric bikes with the ultimate goal of increasing their take-home income. In this region, petrol motorcycles are the main mode of transport…According to a media release issued by Gozem, there are about 12 million moto-taxi drivers in West and Central Africa’s informal economy. Most of the drivers do not have access to traditional banks and micro-finance institutions to finance their vehicles. Instead, they rely on money lenders that charge higher interest rates, often above 70% annually…
Through the new partnership, Gozem and IFC will finance new vehicles for a further 6 000 drivers with “millions more” said to be in the pipeline. Over the next year, Gozem and IFC will also test electric bikes in moto-taxi operating conditions and build a green battery-swapping station network in Togo and Benin to demonstrate electric bikes can save drivers money.
All for this week.
Pop Transport is a fortnightly newsletter of the Global Partnership for Informal Transportation. The Partnership works hand-in-hand with informal urban transportation systems of the Global South to advance innovation, improve services, and change business models. By leveraging new technology and innovative policies, we believe these informal networks can confront climate change and make our cities work for everyone.
The Global Partnership for Informal Transportation is a project of NewCities, initiated by Agile City Partners and supported by CoMotion Inc.
Our Strategic Partners include WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities and the Shared-Use Mobility Center.