Understanding the plight of informal economies within City Development Plan: a case study of street vendors and hawkers in Fort Portal City

This study aimed at examining urban safe space for informal businesses, specifically street vendors and hawkers in the context of city development agenda within the newly created Fort Portal city in Uganda. As the Uganda government concentrates on urbanization, with the creation of more regional and strategic cities under the decentralization system of governance, where local development is shaped and organized by local governments within their specific jurisdiction. The elevation of Fort Portal from a municipality to a city status, means it gives it much power as a top independent local government unit to set and drive its own local development agenda. However, these development within local governments’ development agendas most times have been found to miss out on key issues and challenges that affect the locals, hence failure to respond to local development realities and lack of community participation to shape them. As means to respond to these, the study understands the social-economic development challenges faced by local entrepreneurs within the informal sector industry (street vendors and hawkers), when it comes to urban space and safety within the city context and how they are or can inform Fort Portal city’s development agenda/plan and or future development agendas of Fort Portal city. Applying one of the core principles of decentralization that aims at bringing services near to the people and giving local communities opportunities to decide and shape their development agenda within their specific communities. This study therefore, while making an in-depth analysis of Fort Portal city’s five-year development plan and by engaging a specific category of stakeholders, that is, street vendors and hawkers and the city leaders seeks to understand the notion of urban safe space and local’s level of participation in shaping development agendas supposed to create an urban safe space for economic operation and growth within the city in the context of a developing country like Uganda. Given the fact that the form of work these vendors and hawkers is informally and they operate in a city under a decentralized system of governance, the theoretical concepts of; informal sector, urbanization, and decentralization supports by literature review will form a critical part in understanding and analysing my research findings for this study.