Bright Simons, Honorary Vice President of IMANI Africa, has highlighted the untapped potential of street hawkers as a powerful yet undervalued marketing and distribution channel.

In a recent post on X, Simons emphasized that street hawkers have emerged as a cost-effective advertising medium for new brands navigating highly competitive markets.

He stated, "I once wrote about why I feel that itinerant traders (aka hawkers) are a seriously underrated & underutilised marketing & distribution channel. Now, they've become a low-cost advertising channel for new brands in competitive cutthroat markets like insurance too."

Mr Simons referred to an article titled "Profit-making Idea: Converting Street Hawkers into Powerful Marketing Activators." He was asked by How we made it in Africa, to identify an untapped business opportunity in Africa and responded with his vision for leveraging street hawkers.

“Someone has to build a solution that turns hawkers into a far more productive activation force for businesses. Such a solution shall blend micro-incentives, biometrics, peer-to-peer meshes and similar tools to create a much more generalised agency platform, than is the case with the various [multi-level marketing] schemes milling about in urban Africa,” Simons suggested.

He elaborated on the challenges faced by African business models that rely on large teams for door-to-door activations, noting that these approaches are often costly and inefficient. Simons proposed that companies could benefit from collaborating with an extensive network of experienced micro-entrepreneurs, such as street hawkers, to reduce costs and share risks.

“The best way out is for companies to share the costs and risks by using an organically formed network of micro-entrepreneurs hardened by experience and relatively skilled in customer interfacing. Converting the teeming hawkers on the streets of Accra, Nairobi, and Lagos into powerful brigades of marketing activators can seriously disrupt many industries, including banking, private health/education, hospitality, insurance, and more, that are currently struggling for their next infusion of animal spirits,” he concluded.