 Okay, well good afternoon everyone And I think I think this presentation has a nice kind of natural progression from the previous two one because James provided this quite Kind of macro perspective of what's going on across the region and these macro trends and Luke's kind of then focused it on six countries And then I'm gonna delve even deeper into one country specifically in Nigeria Which I think is a nice follow-through given Luke shown that's that's shown the fastest exit from agriculture And then secondly this progression from you know talking about agriculture and the role of youth there to thinking more broadly about the role of youth and the broader food system So this work is something I usually don't do it's basically providing some early descriptive Analysis of a survey that we've just recently completed in Nigeria not specifically focused on the youth It was focused more generally on the informal food sector, but as we looked more into the data We did see some interesting youth patterns that that I'll talk to about in just a minute. I just first want to take a step back and contextualize why looking specifically at urban informal food trade So first why looking at informal trade overall? And I think this is when we hear a lot about structural change in Africa and particularly work of Danny Rodrick and Maggie McMillan recently There's this talk about you must must much of the structural change has been out of agriculture into this kind of low productivity informal economy And so this is a bit of a concern that though we have some structural change It's not necessarily in high productivity jobs is in the informal sector And why we looking at the urban area? Well youth are seen to be because of life-cycle effects that that Luke was talking about There seem to be disproportionately more likely to migrate to urban areas looking for new opportunities And finding them predominantly in the informal economy. We know the most recent ILO reports tells us within urban Africa the within the non non ag sector the informal economy is the predominant source of employment and Food is the major share of employment within informal Trade it's one of the largest segments of the informal economy. So I think we have You know a good justification for looking at well, what are kind of the livelihoods of? those working in this sector and Finding out if it is disproportionately a sector in which the youth are concentrated in I Also just want to justify a little bit why we're looking at Nigeria Well, I think James started out with this graphic You know showing this this large population growth in sub-Saharan Africa Nigeria's undoubtedly playing a huge role in some of that population growth given its size We know for policymakers in Nigeria that urban youth on and underemployment is a huge issue Particularly this rhetoric of around underemployed young men You know being mobilized for Boko Haram in the northeast and also in the southeast into the Niger Delta gangs So it's certainly an important policy issue in Nigeria of Those in the informal sector the labor force survey for Nigeria shows that about 41% are in Retail tree in and then this kind of informal food sector is really the source of Food security for about two-thirds of the population So despite a lot of the excitement about supermarkets that we saw about 15 years ago about the growth of supermarkets in Africa We're still seeing quite a large share about two-thirds of the population in Nigeria But we're seeing about equivalent rates throughout Africa still sourcing from informal secateurs And so when I'm talking about the informal food sector, I'm talking about street hawkers I'm talking about those in informal markets often trading with relatively poor drainage Relatively poor sanitation facilities and so you also have huge food safety concerns as well In Nigeria you see that and actually this is quite true across the region But in Nigeria because it's a federal system you see a lot of variation Within states in terms of their policies towards informal vending most have quite harsh policies towards vending It's seen as being, you know, it's often deemed illegal to be trading on the streets You have a lot of low-level extortion and bribes from police officers of traders trying to make a living In Niger State, there's been repeated demolitions of market stalls that are seen to be unfit or on land That was demarcated for other property development But you do have a little bit of variation So in cross river state, they recently implemented this hawkers rights bill giving greater protection to those who are trading on the street So in terms of methodology My colleagues and I at IFPRI we surveyed 1100 traders in two of Nigeria's secondary cities Mina, which is in Niger State and in kind of the Northwest And Calabar, which is in the southeast and cross river state And we wanted to really focus on these two cities because a lot of the work on Nigeria is primarily focused on Lagos There's hardly much work outside of Abuja on secondary cities So of course in Nigeria, you know a secondary city is is huge comparatively I mean we're talking about 350,000 or 400,000 people, which is quite large comparatively But when you're comparing to a Lagos of 10 million people, it's definitely seen these are definitely seen as secondary cities And we chose these two cities in particular because of so much variation between them When we talk about kind of African youth We we have these broad generalizations And I think and then Luke's starting to show some of the variation across country now We're just trying to even see sub-nationally what type of variation we have amongst the youth And so I mean two key issues here is that we have strong variation in terms of kind of sociocultural background Mina is a heavily Muslim city and Calabar is a heavily Christian city These are also two very different political strongholds in terms of votes Mina is very supportive of the ruling party and Calabar is very supportive of the the PDP that may have some implications for policies and trust in government and then the regulatory setting is quite different as I just mentioned in cross river state Or Calabar is they had this hawkers bill that was recently implemented But in Niger state, they're kind of known for large-scale demolitions of stalls What we did is we tried to stratify between those who are located in Established markets and those who are just trading on pavements and streets and we did that because those who are usually on the pavements and streets typically are not Don't have enough money to kind of pay that kind of local government taxes that they need to be in the markets They often can't afford a stall in the formal markets and therefore they're typically based on kind of our theoretical understanding Typically more exposed to harassment by the government So we wanted to stratify by that characteristic to see if we actually get that variation in our sample We focused on traders in three Types of food groups. We have those focused on fresh food. So, you know, fresh fruits and vegetables Those focused on prepared foods. So these are kind of, you know, street food snacks And then we have packaged foods. These are more kind of manufactured often imported food goods that they're selling and again, this was to see if there's some type of variation particularly if there's some type of variation in terms of harassment or socioeconomic status in terms of what people are selling Okay, so we're asking just four questions pretty simple questions from the data again It's just some broad descriptive work To kind of motivate some further analysis. So the first is just looking from a demographic perspective Are traders disproportionately young? And when I look at the youth in Africa, I typically like to break it up into two age categories One is 18 to 24 24 is the cutoff that the UN uses for the youth They use 15 to 24 but for ethical reasons We're only allowed to survey from 18 to 24 and then the African Union uses 34 years old As the cutoff for youth. So I often like to see if there's any any variation. That's 18 to 34 is a huge age group So I like to kind of see if there's any variation between those and when we're looking at traders in particular, we do see That when we're talking about youth being in this informal food trade sector We're not really talking about the youngest here are 18 to 24 year olds But it does tend to be about a third of our traders in both cities are in this this 25 to 34 group So this kind of older of the youth group. I think what's really important is the gender dimension here When we talk about youth, there does seem to be this implicit Emphasis on men male youth and I think that's because of policy concerns about what it means to have underemployed or unemployed male youth But you know the food sector in general in Africa tends to be the livelihood predominantly of women And we find this in our in Calabar in our San Juan Calabar about 70% of our young traders in our 18 to 34 year old group Are disproportionately women But we find only 23% in Mina and so we think that there's something particularly with the religious dimension That's motivating that Also in terms of migration when we look at other types of demographics and we think about this issue are people moving to the city Are young people moving to the city? And again, we find this really interesting Differentiation at the subnational level approximately half of our youth group Youth traders and in Calabar are migrants Most are coming from a neighboring state And we have less than a quarter of the youth are actually migrants in Mina Our second question is trading is it seen as a stepping stone or is it the status quo? And I think in some of the literature and some of our colleagues at ifpre, you know Talk about people moving out of agriculture into kind of the informal trade sector is kind of a stepping stone moving along this process of structural transformation I think one of our most interesting results is in both both cities that we looked at Approximately 80% of our youth group had at least one parent who was also a trader So this is more of a family tradition rather than kind of seen as okay, my parents did agriculture I'm moving into trade. There's there's definitely a continuity in terms of this career choice Following up on Luke's point about education. We're seeing the same The same dynamic in our sample where we have relatively relatively well educated traders Compared to their older counterparts. So we have a much higher share in this Secondary completed this this dark orange Component you see our older group. It's a bit smaller gets larger as you go down The age group here and also larger with some having some secondary education as well And this is consistent with what we found in some other countries as well because of Basically kind of free primary education now free secondary education in some of these countries You are seeing an increase in people accessing school. Of course the quality is questionable as Luke mentioned Again another interesting subnational dynamic is those who are seeing this as You know, this is going to be their job versus. They're just looking they're temporarily in this Position looking for another job. Again, we see a big difference between Calabar. We have our youth particularly our youngest cohort Saying that you know, they're looking for another job. They don't see this is really their their main occupation I'm gonna just move quickly through the last two slides here. The third question. Are they disproportionately vulnerable and when we're talking about vulnerability? one thing we're thinking about is Are they working more disproportionately as street hawkers are on Outside on the pavements in the streets versus being able to come into an actual established market Again, we have these different different Subnational dimensions here. So if you're in Mina, which is kind of highlighted in yellow here You really don't really see the youth being disproportionately on the streets You only have about twenty six point nine percent and twenty six point five percent of our two-age cohort Yeah, youth age cohorts being on the street By contrast in Calabar, for example, you have fifty nine percent of our youngest cohort Being trading on the streets rather in an established market in both cities The youth really cannot afford their own market stall compared to older cohorts And most of them are actually just able to rent a stall They can actually afford to own a stall No real significant difference in terms of the number of customers they have or the amount of turnover The amount of sales that they have per day and interestingly compared to the what I said earlier about the policy environment Actually our youth in Calabar Are actually experiencing higher levels of government harassment So this is despite the fact that this hawkers bill was instituted there and what many of them told us was well Now we were allowed to trade but we're facing a lot more kind of low-level Extortion by by police officers, so we're not being forced off the street, but we're being asked to pay bribes and then finally The last question are young traders disproportionately mobilized in the book James and I edited five years ago Which I think kind of motivated the the panel a little bit I looked about youth political participation and are the youth disproportionately engaged in protest And we did find some some evidence for that And we are actually finding a little bit of that as well in this survey. We're seeing that Youth and Mina they're significantly more likely to be participating in rallies Political rallies demonstrations and protests than their older counterparts. So a big difference across cohorts there same level of participation in Calabar But no difference across age groups and overall kind of affirming what we find in the broader literature about the informal economy That there's very low levels of associational engagement very few or any in any type of informal sector organization So just to conclude quickly You know going back to James's original questions I guess I can address the first question. It's really I think a lot from looking at the informal traders We do see some interesting You know youth versus older cohort patterns But in general, I think what we're beginning to see from this survey is that employment in Nigeria? It seems to be more of a structural issue rather than a youth challenge in particular And a lot of these traders are actually following in a family tradition rather than you know progressing from the farm to trade We're fine. We found the exact same thing in Ghana where we did exact same survey And I think the overall big takeaway message is that our discussion about policy responses Just needs to be so much more nuanced than I think we've seen and heard thus far in a lot of the broader Policy discourse not just across different youth groups, but obviously even sub-nationally as well So I'll leave it there. Thank you