In the heart of Cairo, where the noisy sounds of the city mix with the cries of street vendors, a daily scene full of challenges and conflicts unfolds. The streets turn into a cat-and-mouse arena between street vendors and police forces, in an attempt to impose order and control the chaos. At the same time, other vendors continue to spread out on pavements and roads, around markets, metro stations and car parks, obstructing pedestrians and tightening the noose on the pulse of life in the city’s arteries. This crisis, visible on every corner, raises questions about the balance between the need to earn a living and the right to a more organised and humane city.
Between the two scenes lies a mournful story of the Egyptian street, which is no longer a public amenity every citizen has the right to use, as there is no longer any breathing space after vendors in their thousands crowded Cairo’s streets.
We found no recent official statistics on estimates of street vendors in Egypt or Cairo, as they are part of the informal/parallel marginal economy that is one of the survival mechanisms of the poor, which makes monitoring it difficult. But according to a statistic issued by the Central Auditing Organisation in 2014, Egypt has about five million street vendors (their trade was estimated at about EGP 80 billion a year), 1.5 million of them in Greater Cairo alone (an administrative designation covering Cairo, Giza and Qalyubia governorates), while official estimates in 2017 indicated that the number of street vendors in the Downtown, Mousky and Bab El-Shaariya districts alone had reached about 13,000.
A Changing System in the Heart of Cairo’s Streets
Helwan district lies in the southern sector of the capital, Cairo, and has been classified as an industrial city since the 1960s, with a population of more than half a million, according to Egypt’s official 2017 census, issued by the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics.
The area around Helwan metro station and the main car park has turned into crowded marginal markets, where vendors display various kinds of goods, above all fruit, vegetables and low-cost clothes. Meanwhile, most of the district’s residents complain of the heavy crowding and their inability to reach the metro easily, and at times they may face harassment or quarrels with vendors who have begun imposing their control over the street, despite a permanent force of traffic and utilities police a few metres from the metro, which does not intervene.
Shaaban, a fruit and vegetable seller occupying a space in front of Helwan metro station, says that everyone who stands in the market pays rent for the space they occupy. The rent is calculated according to the area and location, differing depending on whether the space is on the pedestrian walkway or in the forecourt of the station gate.
Shaaban did not clarify or disclose who the landlord is, or whether it belongs to the Helwan district administration, which manages these spaces in its official capacity, the utilities authority or the police station, but he described how they rent their spaces through one of the vendors who has everyone’s trust and performs this task as an intermediary between the renting party and the tenants. Each market in Helwan has a number of intermediaries who run it, organising work in a customary way and receiving payment for it.
Abdo, a taxi driver in Helwan, adds that it is the mafia that controls the street and allocates each person their share of space according to their financial ability. He did not want to give an explicit explanation of what he means by “mafia”, but he points to some police secretaries and assistants as, in his words, the linchpin of the whole matter, without whom chaos would spread in the informal market.
According to a number of vendors who spoke to Zawia3, some police officers facilitate vendors’ takeover of pavements and streets, receiving sums of money in exchange for turning a blind eye to road encroachments, while in previous years the matter reached the point where the police officer himself ran these businesses (they may receive more than EGP 50 a day from each vendor).
Every now and then, security forces, in cooperation with Helwan district employees, launch campaigns to remove street vendors’ encroachments from the main streets, especially Station Square, but the vendors quickly return, even though the district has organised a market in the Ain Helwan area next to the official car park. The vendors nonetheless prefer not to join the market, because the district imposes additional fees for rented spaces.
In Roxy, Heliopolis, residents of El-Selehdar Street complain of the build-up of street vendors, who have occupied the pavements and the entrances of residential buildings. Yasser, one of the vendors, says he has worked on the street for two years and knows that there is a person they have taken to calling “the Doctor”, whom he has never met, but who is responsible for running the entire area and all the shops and street vendors. Everyone deals with him through his men and assistants spread everywhere, who collect daily levies that vary according to the dollar rate and the value of the local currency, in exchange for allowing them to stay without obstruction or objection from the owners of the shops along the street. No new vendor can join the system without first getting the Doctor’s approval.
In the Ataba area of central Cairo, things seem clearer: Ali, a shoe seller, did not hesitate to talk about influential vendors who collect daily levies from their colleagues and then hand them over to the police station. Ahmed, a vendor, confirms that everyone pays the daily fee, whether shop owners or those with “goods spread on the ground”, and that in most cases the street vendor who occupies a space in the street is affiliated with the shop next to or opposite him. He adds: “Even the woman selling tissues who sits there to beg has to pay her daily fee or she is prevented from sitting”.
Zawia3 sought the opinions and impressions of a number of citizens about the phenomenon. Sami Abu El-Sheikh, from Alexandria Governorate, says that the authorities, which have imposed exorbitant taxes and added fees on citizens, decided to “sell us chaos” by letting the phenomenon spread, then deciding to fight it and earn more money, either through levies or through regularisation.
Samir El-Amir, a citizen from Cairo, points out that occupying a piece of the street and pavements has become a profitable trade, as the vendor avoids renting a shop and drops the costs of rent, electricity, workers’ wages and taxes, which means that the profit is shared purely between the vendor and the supplier. He adds: “Street vendors have also become a ticking time bomb, as they are used for thuggery, whether by the authorities themselves, as happens on election days, or by other parties. They have spread widely and feel safe from punishment, and there is no solution to their problem except the intervention of the executive authorities, because the street has been occupied by them, and the bribed employees who facilitate their trade and their breaking of the law must be punished”.
Galal, from the Moharram Bey area of Alexandria, says there is a charity in the area with four branches, which breaks the law by operating a number of kiosks in “Al-Rassafa Square”, below the pavement and in the roadway. But they justify this by saying they have licences, or they get around it by placing some patriotic slogans on the kiosk, or the name of a well-known government initiative, which gives them a semi-official character.
He adds: They also steal electricity. Last month, citizens witnessed an incident when the deputy governor was on an inspection tour and noticed the rows of kiosks, so she asked about their legal status. One of the district employees hurried to say they had a permit, to which the official replied: a permit is temporary and is issued for an occasion such as holding a funeral or a wedding, but these kiosks are permanent, which means they must have a licence. Despite this, the responsible authorities took no action to remove them.
On the other hand, a number of citizens we spoke to support the spread of street vendors. As they put it, they can overlook the road encroachments that cause traffic congestion, but they cannot keep up with the soaring prices resulting from the deteriorating economic conditions and the collapse of the local currency against the US dollar.
Commenting, Mahmoud El-Askalany, head of the Citizens Against High Prices association, a civil society organisation concerned with economic conditions, says that the street no longer belongs to ordinary Egyptians, as shops and cafés have occupied the pavements with their products and tables, leaving citizens struggling to find an alternative route to reach their destination on a nearly blocked road.
He adds: The phenomenon of street vendors has become rampant, and we see it on every corner of urban cities, as they occupy streets by paying bribes and levies to an official to protect them, and the official behaves as if the street were his personal property, without regard for the interests of citizens. The mafia thus controls Egypt’s streets and profits from it by hundreds of millions of pounds, pumped in every month by every itinerant or stationary vendor.
El-Askalany explains how the executive authority in the past was very strict: as soon as a violation by a shop was detected and it exceeded its allotted space, this required a closure report or a large fine, but now shops and their activity expand into large spaces, governed by the value of the bribe paid to the official from the bodies responsible for discipline in the street.
He continues: There are certain police stations where police secretaries refuse to take leave, because they earn thousands of pounds a day by facilitating the work of street vendors, to the point that some of them sometimes look for connections to be transferred to a commercial district where vendors are more numerous and active. He points to the difficulty of proving these incidents with conclusive evidence, even though everyone knows about them, because of the legal protection police officers enjoy, and predicts that the phenomenon will worsen in the coming years.
Attempts at Regularisation
The authorities are trying to combat the phenomenon of street vendors by issuing a number of regulatory laws or establishing and developing markets to absorb them. In 2020, a map of civilised markets was published to solve the problem of street vendors in the governorates. The establishment of these markets is part of the state’s plan to develop informal markets, which are periodically exposed to fires that cause heavy losses to traders and the state and endanger citizens’ lives. At the time, the authorities succeeded in developing 13 markets nationwide, began implementing 27 markets and prepared to develop 23 others, at a total cost of about EGP 457 million.
In 2022, President El-Sisi, in his speech at a ceremony at the Police Academy, referred to the phenomenon of street vendors, directing the establishment of two million shops to include vendors and eliminate the problem. According to him, they bring the problems of poverty and unemployment to the fore, which the authorities refuse to show.
In the same context, MP Hala Abu El-Saad, deputy head of the House Committee on Medium, Small and Micro Enterprises, submitted a proposed bill to regulate the work of street vendors. This is the third time the proposal has been submitted since 2019: it was submitted twice in the first legislative term of the House of Representatives, and for the first time in the current session of the second legislative term. The bill includes a specific definition of a street vendor, under which a street vendor is “anyone who sells goods or merchandise or offers them for sale, or practises a craft or trade on any road or public place without having a fixed shop, and anyone who moves from place to place, or goes to homes to sell goods or merchandise or offer them for sale, or practises a craft or trade by roaming”.
Under the bill, the profession of street vendor may not be practised without obtaining a licence from the local unit or the competent district in the governorate, and the licence applicant is issued a special distinctive badge after meeting the conditions. The licence is valid for one year and may be renewed; the renewal application must be submitted before the end of the last month of the licence period, otherwise the licence is considered void on its expiry.
The bill provides for punishing violators with a fine of no less than EGP 500 and imprisonment for no less than a week and no more than 60 days, or one of these two penalties. Its proposed articles also prohibit pursuing the public to offer goods or practise their craft, or standing in streets and squares specified by a decision of the competent authority, or near schools, or in places where the police prohibit them from standing for reasons required by traffic, public order, public security or public health. It also prohibits standing near shops that trade in or practise the same profession for which the licence is requested, and the distance between the licence applicant for a given good and those who trade in it must be no less than 100 metres.
Abu El-Saad had submitted the bill to regulate the issue of street vendors, which she described as necessary given that the poverty line in Egypt has reached 48% of the population, as she put it, stressing that “since 2000 this group has included holders of higher qualifications, and the structure of street vendors has become completely different from what it was”. She pointed to the decline in living standards and rising poverty rates in Egypt, as the poor now make up about 48%, “so the presence of street vendors is important and necessary to provide goods or some services to broad segments of the people, as the cost of the goods or services sold is lower, in line with the means of the poor classes”.
According to rights activist Fatma Ramadan, the law governing street vendors is Law No. 33 of 1957, which “has not been touched except to toughen penalties and fines, as happened twice before, once under former President Mubarak in 1981 and again in 2012 under former President Morsi”. She attributes the spread of the street vendor crisis to rising unemployment and the lack of regular job opportunities, especially for new generations.
Although officials, led by the President himself, have repeatedly made statements affirming the authorities’ efforts to solve the street vendor crisis, none of them has commented on or answered how to integrate these groups into the state’s formal economy in a way that guarantees their daily bread and guarantees citizens access to their low-cost services. Questions remain open as to whether the authorities see these marginalised groups as deserving inclusion in their economic reform programmes.
