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Cameroonian child build bulldozer from recycled materials

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Cameroonian child build bulldozer from recycled materials

Mumbere Peter - May 19, 2019

CAMEROON A 16-year-old engineering apprentice, Awa Bless Chi, who fled the violent English-speaking Cameroon, finds home in Douala and...

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sky news africa A hundred refugees attend the TotalEnergies AFCON opening in Yaoundé

A hundred refugees attend the TotalEnergies AFCON opening in Yaoundé

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sky news africa “Wages are now useless because of inflation,” he said. “Everyone is crying.” Selling from cars is also prevalent in other parts of Africa. Joseph Chege used to be an electronics dealer on the outskirts of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, but anti-COVID-19 restrictions forced him to close his business. Faced with payments for loans he had taken to expand his now-shut business, Chege says he had to come up with a quick alternative to meet his financial obligations. He realized that demand for food had remained the same but there was a shortfall in supply in Nairobi because of movement restrictions. He also realized that the farmers in his community were not able to sell their produce because the local market had been closed by a ban on crowded places. Chege went around farms and bought the best produce at the cheapest price and then drove to the populated neighborhoods in Nairobi, parked his car, and opened the trunk to display the fresh produce. “It did not take long and before lunch-time I was out of stock, so I drove back and got more produce,” he said. Chege says that the profit from selling vegetables and fruits is significantly less than what he used to make but he is grateful to be able to meet some of his financial obligations when many people are losing their livelihoods. Although Kenya has now lifted travel restrictions, Chege says the economic downturn will prevent him from returning to his electronics business for a while yet. In Zimbabwe, selling items from the back of car trunks to beat economic hardships is not completely new, but it was mainly limited to those selling second-hand clothes. Now, newly unemployed people clog roadsides and street corners in both rich and poor suburbs in Harare to sell from their cars. Many said the items for sale are smuggled from neighboring South Africa, which has closed its border posts with Zimbabwe as part of lockdown measures. Zimbabwe’s economy had already shifted from full-time, salaried jobs to self-employed trading due to a steady trend of de-industrialization over the past two decades, and the coronavirus has just worsened the situation, said some economists. “We have seen the closure of companies, the closure of industries. We have seen more and more people actually eking out a living in the informal sector,” said Prosper Chitambara, a Harare-based economist. For Marshall Chinyani, who abandoned work as a schoolteacher three years ago to focus on a small import business that closed due to the coronavirus, selling from his car is the new normal. “I am here because of the coronavirus pandemic that forced some of us to leave our jobs (and go) into the streets to sell these,” he said, standing next to his car packed with vegetables on the side of a busy road in Belgravia, a Harare suburb with many embassies, U.N agencies and international aid organizations. “We were never used to this,” he said. “But we were forced to leave our offices and our shops.”

Many Zimbabweans sell goods from their cars in hard times

July 15, 2020

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