percent of urban jobs are in the informal sector. ILO (2018) estimates that 76.3 percent of Africa’s urban jobs are in the informal sector.

Empirical literature supports the low-productivity and small-scale conceptualization of informal enterprises in Africa. Informal sector enterprises are mostly small operations that employ family members. Many do not operate out of a fixed location and oftentimes they are not a full-time business, while co-mingling household and business finances (Loening, Rijkers, and Söderbom, 2008; Fox and Sohnesen, 2012; La Porta and Schleifer, 2014). Compared to larger enterprises, their capital stock is minimal, and their productivity is low (La Porta and Schleifer, 2014), while the owners have limited management skills compared to formal and larger firms’ owners. A small minority of African self-employed register with local authorities (Fox and Sohnesen, 2012) or grow and create jobs.

A growing literature characterizes informal sector workers in SSA, highlighting factors consistent with loosely organized forms of work. Workers in the informal sector are younger,<sup>6</sup> more female,<sup>7</sup> less educated, and earn lower income, on average than formal sector workers (Danquah et al 2019, ILO 2018, Basu et al. 2018). Informal jobs are generally characterized by low-income levels in comparison to formal sector jobs (see, inter alia, Grimm et al 2012, De Vreyer and Roubaud 2013, Nguimkeu 2014, Fox and Sohnesen 2012).<sup>8</sup> The high rate of informal employment in Africa goes hand in hand with the high levels of poverty in the region (ILO 2018).

If thriving urban jobs are to contribute to economic and social development in SubSaharan Africa, it will be crucial for policy makers to have a better understanding of the size, characteristics and nature of urban labor markets and, especially, urban informality. The existing literature explores urban workers, formal-informal workers, and household enterprises but has yet to pull them together into a single picture of urban labor markets in SSA. The sheer magnitude of the urban informal sector calls for a deeper understanding of the heterogeneity within to enable effective policy making.

This paper provides a detailed description of the magnitude of and heterogeneity within urban SSA labor markets, with an emphasis on informality, to encourage policy makers to design more nuanced interventions to serve the different segments within. It uses data from 26 harmonized household surveys, representing 61 percent of the SSA population,<sup>9</sup> and three Informal Enterprises Surveys (IES) to sketch a profile of the urban

> 6 ILO (2018) also finds that informal sector workers are not prime-aged adults, namely they are youth and older workers.

> 7Danquah et al (2019) find that in a four-country, national sample, women are over-represented among informal wage workers but under-represented among the self-employed. 8 Similar patterns are found in Perry et al (2008) for Latin America, and in Kanbur et al (2017) and ILO (2018) globally.

> 9 While there are 1.1 billion Sub-Saharan Africans, only 31 percent are working. The urban workforce is 36 percent of the national workforce. Thus, there are roughly 125 million urban workers in the region. We have data for 85 million urban workers in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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