informal sector. It starts with a description of the distribution of employment across a formality-employment type continuum in the 26 countries and finds that approximately 56 percent of urban jobs are informal, though this statistic rises to 70 percent if we exclude the two countries with the largest urban populations: Nigeria and South Africa. It then profiles urban workers within each formality-employment type category. The paper turns to firms, using data from three countries to unpack informal sector firm characteristics and heterogeneity therein. The next section focuses on the relationship between the urban environment and different types of informal and formal jobs. It starts with a profile of urban infrastructure and services for each employment type, using data from household surveys and the IES. It then uses geospatial data and a Census extract in one country to understand the role played by urban variables that are not measurable in surveys. Finally, it shares policy-related reflections that emerge from the descriptive analysis.

The paper makes three main contributions to the existing descriptive literature on informality in SSA. First, it limits its analysis to informality in the urban space. Second, the analysis considers heterogeneity within the urban labor market by exploring different categories of employment (i.e. self-employed, employer, or wage employee) in the informal and formal sectors. This is in line with recent literature that differentiates by employment categories within the informal sector to explore questions of dualism, differential job quality, transitions between employment types,<sup>10</sup> and heterogeneity within informal enterprises.<sup>11</sup> Third, the paper jointly considers employment types and urban variables, such as access to public services and urban density.

The analysis presents five main results. First, the urban informal sector is large and persistent in SSA. More than half of urban SSA workers can be considered informal, reaching 70 percent if we drop the two most populous countries in the sample. Of these, 52 percent are self-employed, while the others are informal paid (33 percent) or unpaid wage employees. Analysis of a sample of five countries find no clear sign that informality is declining in the short-run or that greater levels of short-term economic growth are associated with declines in informality. Second, there is heterogeneity among African informal sector workers. Women are over-represented in informal self-employment, men are informal employees, and youth are disproportionately in unpaid employment. Third, while the urban informal are, on average, poorer and in less-skilled occupations than formal sector workers, the majority are not extreme poor and work in mid-skilled occupations. Fourth, informal enterprises are small (in terms of workers and earnings) and the informal

> 10 For the purposes of this paper, employment “categories” are groups of jobs that have the same employeremployee relationship, namely self-employed, employers and employees. Employment “types” adds formality-variables to the definitions, leading to a greater number of groups including formal and informal self-employed, formal or informal employers, and employees who may be formal, informal, or unpaid (where “unpaid” is a subset of “informal employees”).

> 11 See for example Fox and Sohnesen (2012), De Vreyer and Roubaud (2013), Gindling and Newhouse (2014), Danquah et al (2019), Grimm et al (2012), and Adoho et al (2018) for Africa and Ulyssea (2020) for a global review.

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