Welcome to our workshop on ‘Tax and Informal Economies in Africa: Charting Ways Forward’, hosted by the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD), in collaboration with the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) and Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising (WIEGO).
This page contains relevant information about the event — including the format, agenda, and relevant reserach — and is intended for participants only.
Rationale
The taxation of informal economies is one of the key challenges for tax professionals and policymakers in Africa. Across a range of country contexts, current methods are often disappointing from a revenue standpoint and can have sensitive equity implications. At the same time, pressures on revenue authorities to collect more taxes from unregistered firms are substantial.
Over the past few years, ICTD has conducted research and policy dialogues on taxation and informal economies in Africa. We believe that now is a critical time to have a new conversation on the topic, bringing together both researchers and key stakeholders for a dedicated retreat.
Format
The workshop will include both presentations on current research and policy practice and extensive breakout groups that focus on learning between revenue authorities as well as mapping out promising areas of policy development and best practice. Key themes will be tax registration, presumptive taxation, targeting and equity implications and working with informal workers. The participants include research and civil society organisations alongside representatives from over a dozen revenue authorities.
While the workshop will be held under the Chatham House rule in order to ensure confidential and constructive conversations, we will publish key findings alongside blogs from participants on this website in the coming weeks.
Agenda & Session Notes
ICTD Workshop – Agenda 07.02.25
See below for more details about each session:
- Session 2: State of the Research
- Session 3: Revenue Authority Goals and Challenges
- Session 4: Presumptive Taxation
- Session 5: Distributional Dynamics and the Need for Better Targeting
- Session 6: Registration
- Session 7: to be uploaded
- Session 8: Politics of Implementation and Subnational Dynamics
Logistics Note
ICTD Workshop Feb 2025 Logistics Note
Relevant research
On top of long-standing partnerships with revenue authorities, WIEGO, and ATAF, the workshop also draws on ICTD research on tax and informality in the past few years. See below for a selection of relevant research sorted according to the key themes to be discussed in various sessions, which will also feature additional work by partners. Physical copies for select publications will also be available.
On the state of research on taxing informality:
- Rethinking Formalisation: A Conceptual Critique and Research Agenda
- Co-Financing Community-Driven Development Through Informal Taxation: Experimental Evidence from South-Central Somalia
- Explaining Informal Taxationand Revenue Generation: Evidence from south-central Somalia
- Informal Taxation in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone: Taxpayers’ Experiences and Perceptions
- Strengthening Tax-Accountability Links: Fiscal Transparency and Taxpayer Engagement in Ghana and Sierra Leone
- Tax and Governance in the Context of Scarce Revenues: Inefficient Tax Collection and its Implications in Rural West Africa
- Taxing Informal Economies: Practices, Challenges, and Ways Forward (ATAF-ICTD Policy Paper)
- Taxing the Informal Economy is Not a Silver Bullet for Financing Development – or the Covid-19 Recovery
- Taxing the Informal Economy: Challenges, Possibilities, and Remaining Questions
- The Efficient Taxation of the Informal Sector in Africa (ATAF Guidebook)
On distributional dynamics:
- Engendering Taxation: a Research and Policy Agenda
- Gender and the Formal and Informal Systems of Local Public Finance in Sierra Leone
- Norms, Power and the Socially Embedded Realities of Market Taxation in Northern Ghana
- Mobile Money Taxation and Informal Workers: Evidence from Ghana’s E-Levy
- The Price of Simplicity: SKewed and Regressive Taxation in Accra’s Informal Sector
- Tight Tax Net, Loose Safety Net: Taxation and Social Protection in Accra’s Informal Sector (WIEGO Working Paper 45)
- Toilet Not Taxes: Gender Inequality in Dar es Salaam’s City Markets
On tax registration:
- Catch Them If You Can: the Politics and Practice of a Taxpayer Registration Exercise
- Why Mass Tax Registration Campaigns Do Not Work
On presumptive taxation:
- Simplified Taxation in Africa: What We Know — and Need to Know
- Presumptive Tax on Small and Microenterprises with a Gender Lens in Ethiopia (World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 10707)
- Presumptive Taxation and Equity: Evidence from the Ethiopian Informal Sector
- Trade-Offs in the Design of Simplified Tax Regimes: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank Policy Research Paper 10909)