The impact of Islamist terrorism on Africa's informal economy: Kenya, compared with Ghana and Senegal

Kohnert, Dirk Preprint The impact of Islamist terrorism on Africa's informal economy: Kenya, compared with Ghana and Senegal Suggested Citation: Kohnert, Dirk (2022) : The impact of Islamist terrorism on Africa's informal economy: Kenya, compared with Ghana and Senegal, Zenodo, Genève, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6757444 , https://zenodo.org/records/6757444 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/301057 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 1 The impact of Islamist terrorism on Africa’s informal economy: Kenya, compared with Ghana and Senegal Dirk Kohnert 1 ‘Terrorists and COVID-19’ ‘We welcome suggestions … and this is not suggesting a cure !!’ Source: Gado,2, The Elephant, Nairobi, 3 September 2020 Abstract: Sub-Saharan Africa emerged in the past years as a global epicentre of Islamist terrorism. The impact of terrorism on the economy has a negative bearing on the formal and a positive effect on the informal sector. Among other things, this is due to the poorly diversified development economies of African countries and the class-specific impact of terrorism on welfare. This concerns not only a drop in sales, income and employment and rising transaction costs in the affected sectors but also increasing poverty, hunger and hardship for the poor and needy. Transnational terrorism amplifies both the negative and the positive effects. African countries that have suffered severely from these attacks include Somalia, Kenya, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, South Sudan, Libya and Egypt. But even West African countries such as Ghana and Senegal which have been spared so far from terrorist attacks, the menace is growing, and economic effects are already tangible. Since the informal sector, i.e. the shadow economy with all its ambivalent facets, including cross-border crime, is still dominant in many African countries, especially in West Africa, this sector is of particular importance. It is still one of the largest in the world. The fight against Islamist terrorism is not just a military issue. In the economic sphere too it should be fought at its roots. Since most of the African poor live in and from the informal sector, which is also a breeding ground for criminal activities such as human trafficking of all kinds, money laundering and terrorists, they suffer the most from the negative consequences. Terrorists' sources of funding often derive from the proceeds of illegal trade. The close ties between criminal and terrorist groups can undermine the very foundations of the republican state and weaken democratic institutions. Keywords: Ghana. Kenya, Senegal, Sub-Sahara Africa, West Africa, Islamist terrorism, Islamism, organized crime, informal economy, shadow economy, fragile state, poverty in Africa, extremism, ISIS, arms deals, arms industry, trafficking, Nigeria, Benin, Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia, South Sudan, Postcolonialism, African Studies JEL-Code: E26, F13, F35, F52, F54, H56, N17, N47, O17, P16, P26, Z13 1 Dirk Kohnert, associated expert, GIGA-Institute for African Affairs, Hamburg, Germany. Draft : 26 June 2022. 2 Gado cartoons on twitter, © (all rights reserved); ‘Godfrey Mwampembwa, pen name Gado (1969) is a Tanzanian-born political cartoonist, animator and comics artist. He is the most syndicated political cartoonist in East and Central Africa’, Gado comics, Wikipedia. 2 1. Introduction Sub-Saharan Africa emerged in the past years as a global epicentre of Islamist terrorism, whereas global deaths declined (Global Terrorism Index (GTI), 2022). Whereas terrorism in Western industrialized states declined substantially, with attacks falling by 68 %, Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 48 % of death caused by global terrorism. The West African Sahel zone harboured the world's fastest-growing and most-deadly terrorist groups. The Islamic State (IS) replaced the Taliban as the world’s deadliest terror group in 2021, with 15 deaths per attack in Niger (Global Terrorism Index, 2022). The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic still increased the terrorist threat. Activities of violent extremist and terrorist groups in West Africa augmented. Since January 2021, high-profile attacks by groups affiliated with the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda have been recorded in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger (Aubyn, 2021). Generally, the impact of Islamist terrorism on the economy of the African countries attacked has a negative bearing on the formal and a positive effect on the informal sector (Sekrafi & Abid &Assidi, 2020). Nevertheless, a comprehensive in-depth study of the UNDP, published in 2019, found that the decline of informal trade in the focus countries of terrorism since the surge in extremist activity was greater than the average decline in Africa. This may have a serious impact on taxes, security and other public goods, and the monitoring of the flow of goods and services (UNDP, 2019). The UNDP report estimated that 16 of the 18 focus countries lost on average US$ 97 bn per year in informal economic activity since 2007. Although terrorism can increase informal economic activity by pushing formal sector activities into the informal sphere, e. g. because regulations become harder to enforce and markets become disrupted. Yet, although the informal sector is usually more resilient to disruptions and violence than the formal sector, it too suffers (UNDP, 2019). Moreover, the UNDP study found that African countries suffering terrorism spill-over effects from neighboring states and those at risk of being attacked saw a substantial decline in the activities of the informal sector (UNDP, 2019). Graph 1: Average size of informal sector in African focus countries: pre-terrorism and post-terrorism upswing 3 Source: UNDP, 2019 3 Countries making up the spill-over and at-risk group, have seen the largest declines in average size of informal economic activity (UNDP, 2019). 3 Graph 2: Actual and predicted value of the informal economy in African focus countries of terrorism, 2007-2015 4 Source: UNDP, 2019 Graph 3: Lost value-added of informal economic activity as % of GDP, 2007-2015 5 Source: UNDP, 2019 4 Epicentre countries, which have been worst affected by terrorism, suffered the largest lost potential valueadded from the informal economy (UNDP, 2019): 5 The lost value of economic activity between 2007 and 2015 in the African focus countries ranged from 4.6 % of GDP in Libya to 15 % in Nigeria. In Kenya it accounted for 8.9 % and in Senegal, yet not directly attacked, 7.8 %. 4 Trade, including transnational and informal cross-border trading, may be pushed underground, either as the direct effect of terrorist attacks or because of the government's tightened regulations and security in response to terrorism. According to UNDP estimates, informal cross-border trade constitutes up to 43 % of African countries’ GDP. In many cases, it equalled almost 90 % of official trade flows (UNDP, 2019). Among others, this may be due to little diversified developing economies in the countries affected and the class-specific impact of terrorism on welfare with persisting effects. The latter may include a decline in sales, revenue and employment, mounting transaction costs in the sectors concerned as well as increased poverty, hunger and distress for the African poor. Transnational terrorism is said to reinforce both the negative and positive effects even more (Sekrafi & Abid &Assidi, 2020). For a better understanding of Islamist terrorism, it is important to consider its roots, its inherent logic and lines of action. In addition to Al-Qaeda, the IS, the ‘Islamic State's West Africa Province’ (ISWAP) and Boko Haram, several other extremist Islamist organizations executed terrorist attacks in Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA). For example, an Al-Qaeda branch in Mali escalated attacks in the Sahel, including a series of explosive attacks aimed at French and UN security personnel (Bayrakdar & Kocan & Estelle, 2021). Central questions in this context are, why, and since when, did these groups claim Islam to legitimate their cruel actions? How do they act exactly, what are their strategies and methods and how are they financed? (Guidère, 2017; Namaïwa, 2017). Since the terrorist attacks on American embassies in Dar es Salaam, (Tanzania) and Nairobi (Kenya) in 1998, Islamist terrorism spread in SSA. Among the countries that suffered severely from these attacks were Somalia, Kenya, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, South Sudan, Libya and Egypt (Gyamfi, 2018). In the latest attacks in Burkina Faso on 11 June 2022 at least 79 people were killed during the assault of Islamist terrorists in Seytenga, a town 15 km from the border with Niger, with some media reporting the death toll at up to 200. It was the deadliest single incident in Burkina Faso since more than 130 people had been killed in a massacre close to Solhan in June 2021 (Saltmarsh, 2022). Islamist terrorist attacks in the country started in 2015 when militants launched cross-border raids from Mali (ZamWild, 2022). Since 12 June, almost 16,000 Burkinabe, mostly women and children, fled after the attack to Dori, the capital of the Séno province in eastern Burkina Faso. Consecutive waves of displacement, made the population of Dori grow fivefold with almost 76,000 displaced Burkinabe, as well as some 20,000 refugees from Mali. Moreover, armed groups attacked water supplies and infrastructure in the region, including a recent attack on the main water supply to Dori (Saltmarsh, 2022). Villagers who had fled Seytenga accused the army of abandoning the town as the terrorists attacked. The latter allegedly moved unhampered through the village shooting, burning, and looting (ZamWild, 2022). Paradoxically, rebel leader, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, a Burkinabé military officer who had overthrown President Kaboré in a coup d'état only on 24 January 2022, had justified the coup with the incompetence of the country’s political elite to protect the population and to confront Islamist insurgents (ZamWild, 2022). But even in West African states that so far have been spared by terrorist attacks, like Ghana and Senegal, the menace is growing, and economic effects, for example on security expenditure, are already noticeable (Aubyn, 2021; Bamba, 2014; Meservey, 2021). The close historical, cultural, trading, and political ties between the Sahel states, where terrorists are already active, and the coastal West African countries largely spared up to now, expose also the latter to violent aggression beyond the terrorist’s save heaven in the Sahel 5 desert. The regular employment of seasonal migrant laborers from Sahel countries like Burkina Faso and Niger, notably to Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Ghana, and the related ageold conflicts between local settlers and migrants aggravate the problem. Thus, the presence of migrant laborers from Burkina Faso in the Ivory Coast and Ghana aggravated local violence concerning land tenure and chieftaincy conflicts (Aubyn, 2021). The same holds for the supposed terrorist participation in the mostly illegal artisanal gold mining in Ghana and Togo (Akoda, 2018) that tends to exacerbate local grievances over the government's offensive operations against illegal miners, known locally as galamseyers or orpailleurs in neighboring Francophone states. The terrorist attack by Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) gunmen on an Ivorian beach resort in Grand-Bassam in 2016 was an example. Moreover, terrorist presence has already been reported in the northern regions of bordering coastal states Benin, Togo, and Ghana (Aubyn, 2021). Thus, terrorist assaults in northern Benin between late November 2021 and January 2022 led to several deaths. Also, neighboring Togo suffered its first-ever jihadist attack on Togolese soil when assailants attacked a security post in the northern border village of Sanloaga in the Tône Prefecture, Région des Savanes, Togo, on 9 November 2021 (Kwarkye, 2022). Shortly afterwards, in February and April, 2022 about a dozen people were killed and several injured in two different attacks by terrorists in the Pendjari National Park, in Northern Benin (2022 in Benin, Wikipedia). The response of the government of coastal states focused mainly on military operations. They created a joint combat group assisted by the French within the framework of the Accra Initiative, launched in September 2017 (Kwarkye &Abatan & Matongbada, 2019). This defence force that comprised troops of Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Togo hit back in Operation Koudanlgou 4 Zone 2, conducted in November 2021. About 6 000 soldiers were reportedly deployed and 300 suspected extremists were arrested. French Barkhane and Takuba forces, withdrawn from Mali on demand of the military government in Bamako, were redeployed to Niger and the Gulf of Guinea in February 2022 as announced by French President Emmanuel Macron on 17 February (Kwarkye, 2022). In the following, the comparison of Kenya, a severely attacked East African country, with hitherto not yet directly attacked West African countries, Ghana and Senegal, serves to analyze the relative impact of Islamist terrorism on the informal sector which still constitutes the livelihood of most Africans. The informal sector, i.e. the shadow economy with all its ambivalent facets, including transnational crime, is still dominant in many African countries, notably in West Africa. Therefore, this sector is of special concern. It still counts among the largest in the world, although its share gradually declines. Its intraand inter-country heterogeneity is remarkable, with informality ranging from a low of 20 % to 25 % of informal sector output (GDP) in South Africa and Namibia up to 65 % in Benin, Tanzania and Nigeria (Medina & Jonelis & Cangul, 2017; Kohnert, 2000). Due to its strong articulation with the most diverse structures at all levels of business, politics and society, the informal sector is highly hierarchical and diversified according to social strata. Its individual walks of life can even stand in an antagonistic relationship with one another. Both productivity and the income earned in the sector vary strongly, depending on the socio-political framework and class (Kohnert, 2000). Moreover, fighting Islamist terrorism is not just a military question. Its roots are to be tackled also within the economic realm, at least in the medium and long term. Because most African poor live in and from the informal economy, which is also said to be a breeding ground for trafficking of all sorts (including drugs, arms and children), money-laundering and terrorists 6 (Soto, 1989; De Koker, 2006), they suffer most of the negative consequences. Available evidence suggests that also low education and its socio-economic consequences promote domestic terrorism (Brockhoff & Krieger, 2015). Yet, the boundary between legal and illegal actions is fluid, at least from the perspective of the local population. Often, the categorization is created and exploited by those in power who apply the law for their own benefit. Also, local state representatives and so-called traffickers are frequently in a more symbiotic than oppositional relationship. Informal and illegal activities strive especially in certain niches, such as borderlands (Bennafla, 2014). Moreover, common systems of informal value transfer following Islamic traditions, such as hawala, based on the trust of a huge network of money brokers (known as hawaladars), originally meant for regions and populations without established formal banking structures, came under suspicion to finance terrorism (Cooper & Walker, 2016). Finally, there is a close relationship between the informal economy, terrorism and an increase in public debt and the consequent destabilization of the formal economy as well as the political legitimation of the government. A large informal economy reduces potential income taxes and thereby often increases public debt. The increase in public spending tends also to reinforce the effects of terrorism on public debt by the necessity to prevent or counteract terrorism with considerable additional public spending e. g. on security and poverty alleviation (Abidn& Sekrafi, 2020). Therefore, the variances in illicit financial flows largely explain the differences in tax burden (Thiao & Ouonogo, 2021). Graph 4: Terrorism and poverty as pull factors of macroeconomic performance Source: Ilyas, S. & B. Mehmood & R Aslam, 2017 Fragile and failed states are especially prone to breed terrorists. Weak governance structures and poverty are said to be major drivers of terrorism in Sub-Saharan Africa. The lack of rule of law, widespread corruption and nepotism are likely to lower investor confidence, increase the already high cost of doing business, and lead to more stringent cross-border security checks which could obstruct transnational trade (Omenma & Nwaogaidu & Okwueze, 2020). Both poverty and terrorism have a long-run negative impact the macroeconomic performance (Ilyas & Mehmood & Aslam, 2017). Therefore, political instability, a high unemployment rate and a large informal sector correspond positively and significantly with the growth of terrorism (Nurunnabi & Sghaier, 2018). 7 Under these conditions, power grabs by the military got significant popular support, because the electorate was tired of the failure of democratically–elected governments. Just West Africa faced six coup attempts over the past two years. Four of these attempted coups succeeded in ousting presidents in Mali (twice), Guinea, and Burkina Faso. The coup attempts in Niger in March 2021 and Guinea-Bissau in February 2022 were thwarted. Yet, Africa has experienced more than eighty successful coups since 1952, and given the doubtful rule of corrupt governments the military, for example in Nigeria (five military coup d'états since independence in 1960) and Guinea Bissau (four military coups and more than a dozen attempted military takeovers since its independence from Portugal in 1974), often played an outsized political role (Depagne, 2022). The international donor community, as well as the African Union, or regional economic communities like ECOWAS, had to choose between an insistence on internationally recognized principles and pragmatism in order not to foment further unrest (Depagne, 2022). Yet, international sanctions against the corrupt state elite may be a double-edged sword. They may induce disturbances and hardships in the target economies and drive businesses as well as citizens to move to clandestine activities in the shadow zone (Early & Peksen, 2019). So far, international efforts to control ‘risk capital’ potentially meant to finance terrorism have been of little success (Levi, 2010). 2. The bearing of Islamist terrorism on Kenya’s informal economy Islamist extremism in East Africa in recent decades was mostly associated with Al Shabaab and other militant groups from Somalia, imported from the Arab world challenging the Western way of life and traditional religious tolerance prevailing in that region (Abdisaid, 2016). The growing radicalization of Islamist politics in Kenya, and elsewhere, since the early 1990s was mainly due to local histories such as the growth of Pentecostalism and its aggressive hostility to Islam, but also to the global Muslim ‘victimization’ narrative (Ngala, 2019). Muslim activists increasingly felt victimized by the controversial Kenyan debate on counterterrorism and got the impression that their interests would no longer be advocated by the political process. Therefore, they took to digital media that supported extremist Islamist ideologies and violence (Ngala, 2019). Graph 5 : Trends of size of informal sector in Kenya, 1970–2018 Source: Murunga, et al, 2021 Source of the data: Republic of Kenya; Various Issues of Economic Survey 8 Kenya was an SSA country especially hard hit by Islamist terrorists. Since the bombings of the United States embassy in 1998, of the Israeli-owned Paradise hotel in 2002 in Mombasa, and the attack at Nairobi's Westgate Shopping Mall in 2013, followed the attacks in and near Mpeketoni, Lamu County on June 2014. Again hardly one year later, on 2 April 2015, AlShabaab terrorists stormed the Garissa University College killing 148 people. The gunmen also took about 700 students as hostages. They freed Muslims and killed persons identified as Christians. This attack was the deadliest in Kenya since the 1998 United States embassy bombings (Garissa University College attack, Wikipedia). In general, the impact of Islamist terrorism on the informal sector is dependent on the relative importance of both terrorism and the shadow economy and its history and articulation in a certain country or region in case of transnational terrorist attacks. Graph 6 : Proportion of formal and informal employment in Kenya, 1974-2019 Source: ILO (2021): The Informal Economy in Kenya, Federation of Kenya Employers. March 2021 In Kenya, the informal economy has so far been little researched. Therefore, notably quantitative data are to be interpreted with caution. According to available evidence, the sector is quite large and has grown since the 1970s to about 32 % of the country’s GDP. It employs about 77 % of the total workforce, whereof 60 % are youth between the age of 18 and 35 years, equally distributed between men and women (Murunga, et al., 2021). The shadow economy started to flourish in the 1970s with the boom in coffee smuggling along the Kenya-Uganda border following the trade embargo on Ugandan coffee by the USA. Subsequently, the liberalization and privatization policies imposed by IMF and World Bank’s structural adjustment programs led to reduced job opportunities in the formal public sector. Additional factors, like poor governance, high levels of corruption and nepotism in the public sector, as well as rising taxes provoked producers and traders, mostly self-employed such as petty traders, second-hand clothes dealers, hawkers, dressmakers, housekeepers, security guards and carpenters, to escape into the informal sector (Murunga, et al., 2021). One important axis of evil between terrorism and the informal sector in Kenya was related to the social, economic and political exclusion of young actors in the informal sector. Normally ignored by decision-making processes affecting them, they were easy prey to extremist groups. Their narratives followed topics like the mistreatment by law enforcement agencies, denial of services, exploitation by the formal sector and the government etc. (Ndirangu, 2020). Unemployed and underemployed youth, for example, were especially vulnerable to recruitment into criminal gangs used by corrupt politicians and business rivals in Kenya. 15 However, the 2019 presidential elections changed this perception. Former President Abdoulaye Wade directly linked his government to the Muridiyya Sufi order (Hamid & Lebovich, 2017): 'Political transhumance’, which had been elevated to the rank of religion at the expense of morality, threatened this stability. Social Islamic networks, dominated by young militants engaged in civil society, developed a plea to the local electorate centred on good governance and democracy. They proposed a break with a political system that they referred to as neo-colonial, including a judiciary accused of being biased and a constitutional council committed to the government. Their new paradigm represented a globalized and connected generation which reactivated the liberation theories of Frantz Fanon and Thomas Sankara (Kohnert & Marfaing, 2019). The Senegalese reformist movement Jama’at Ibad al-Rahman which proliferated in the mid1990s advocating the purification of Islamic practice through strict adherence to the 'Sunna', eventually reached out to other Muslim organizations, even participating in Sufi celebrations. In Senegal, a single Salafi organization financed by Arabian Middle Eastern donors built hundreds of mosques all over the country (Meservey, 2021). Moreover, the recent intrusion of other ‚reformist’ Islam of Salafist or Wahhabi sects endangered the established order. One of them has been represented by Imam Alioune Badara Ndao in his stronghold Kaolack, located about 200 kilometres southeast of Dakar. Allegedly, he had recruited fighters for the Nigerian Boko Haram and attempted to establish a terrorist cell in Senegal. Yet, he got acquitted by the Senegalese courts in July 2018 of having led a jihadist network (Laplace, 2018; Châtelot, 2021). It was also suspected that young Senegalese migrants travelled to Maghreb countries to be trained in terrorist training camps and to return inconspicuously without anyone suspecting them, after having been purposely ‘prepared’ while waiting for a favourable moment to strike CHEDS (2018). Graph 12 : transnational flows of cocaine through West Africa Source : ONUDC, 2013 The sources of funding for terrorists often come from the rents of crime (Diariso, 2019), notably from trafficking drugs, but also from income from human traffickers who smuggle migrants to Europe by sea (Canary Islands) or through the Sahara. Senegal and neighboring 16 Guinea-Bissau are drug trafficking hubs. In public opinion, a strong correlation between specific Muslim persuasions and violent extremism is often assumed. For example, Salafism is often equalled with intolerance and violence and Sufism with tolerance. Yet, scholarly analysis of the history and actual forms of Islamist terrorism in Southeast Asia and West Africa showed no significant correlation between theological orientation and violent tendencies (Seck, 2018). Also, the rate at which known Senegalese traffickers are getting rich as well as their sophisticated camouflage techniques gave rise to suspicions that the financial proceeds from this trafficking are being laundered in the informal sector from which they have been derived (GIABA, 2017). According to an ILO-diagnosis of the informal economy in Senegal published in 2020, nine out of ten workers are in informal employment, and 97 % of enterprises are active in the informal sector. Employment within these companies represents nearly 70 % of nonagricultural informal, and 45 % of total informal employment in Senegal (Guerin & Bonnet, 2020). Graph 13 : traffic routes of West African migrants to Europe Source : ONUDC, 2013 Trade represents more than half of the informal economic units (51.8 %). Sewing and tailoring activities account for 11.6 % of all units in the informal sector among the activities covered by the census. The carpentry/wood, catering and food processing families represent between 3.6 % and 5.0 % each. Other employments are in the trade with hides and skins, automotive mechanics and fishing (post-harvest) (Guerin & Bonnet, 2020). More than two thirds of employers in Senegal’s informal sector are male and one third female, against 81 % male and 19 % female in the formal sector. Almost three quarters had no employment contract in the informal sector whereas only one quarter had been employed in the formal sector without contract. About 65 % were only temporarily employed in the informal against 19 % in the formal sector (Guerin & Bonnet, 2020). 17 Graph 14: Informal and formal economic units according to sex of entrepreneur, Senegal, 2016 Source : Guerin & Bonnet, 2020 Graph 15: Existence of an employment contract, Senegalese informal & formal sector, 2016 Source : Guerin & Bonnet, 2020 Graph 16: Permanent or temporary character of labour, Senegal 2016 Source : Guerin & Bonnet, 2020 18 Graph 17 : Distribution of Senegal’s informal and formal economic units covered by the 2016 census Source : Guerin & Bonnet, 2020 Senegal’s informal economy is mostly composed of small businesses and self-employed workers often acting themselves again as employers. Principal motives for investing in the informal sector are the low cost of entry, the possibility to escape taxation as well as administrative hassles (Simen, 2018). It is crucial to differentiate between different groups of actors in the informal economy. Those, who invest out of strategic motives, including rather shadowy reasons, and those who are rooted in the informal because they have no other options to survive (Marfaing & Sow, 1999). As said before, the undifferentiated consideration of the informal sector, with implicit assumptions about its amorphous structure or homogeneity, is risky. It may lead to inappropriate solutions. If the promotion of informal activities and their gradual integration into the formal sector is propagated, for example, as a measure to combat poverty, then, as case studies from West Africa show, this can easily have the opposite effect. In this case, regional and personal imbalances in income distribution with all the other negative side effects may increase. Also, it might promote the rural exodus, undermine village solidarity, and overstrain the urban and ethnic networks of migrants with the consequence of increasing ethnic, and religious conflicts, xenophobia and violent extremism (Kohnert, 2000). There are three ideal-typical types of the informal economy in SSA: survival of the poor, preservation of vested interests of the middle class, and profit maximization and risk diversification, including illegal investments, by the affluent class. Depending on which class one belongs to, concerns and impact are extremely different and often even diametrically opposed (Kohnert, 2000). This holds also for the Senegalese informal economy. Meanwhile, the sector is increasingly getting organized. Although actors involved in the sector have quite diverse interests as business owners, employers and dependent employees, they created the Confédération Générale des Travailleurs de l’Économie Informelle au Sénégal (CGTIS; Senegalese Confederation of Informal Economy Workers) to ensure social protection (Greven, 2017). The administration, both at the country and local level, often shows reservations vis-à-vis the informal sector. Thus, some may try to tax its actors while others request to ban informal traders from the city centres. Yet, the inherent logic of informal actors working in a market 19 economy, and the poverty implications of the resulting evictions have rarely been understood (Brown & Msoka & Dankoco, 2015). For example, formal and informal traders are closely interconnected by trade, outsourcing and competition (Mbaye & Benjamin & Gueye, 2017). Also, collective public property rights, including land, have often been contested and the urban poor criminalized. In the capital Dakar, for example, collective action with political support enabled a dialogue that allowed for a balance between public and private gain and to create a hybrid space of the ‘street’ as a ‘collective pool resource’ (Brown, 2015). 5. Conclusion The spread of Islamist terrorism in Africa was heated up by a combination of localized grievances and transnational jihadism. The tactical and strategic flexibility of terrorist groups increased their resilience (Faleg & Mustasilta, 2021). In the past decade, terrorism in Africa spread beyond its traditional hotspots in the Sahel, Lake Chad Basin and the Horn of Africa to West Africa’s coastal states like Nigeria and Ivory Coast. But also hitherto ‘safe havens’ like Ghana and Senegal have been increasingly threatened and they have to bear already now heavy social and economic spill-over cost. Sub-Saharan Africa was the second most affected region in the world marked by deadly terrorism in 2019 according to the Global Terrorism Index (Faleg & Mustasilta, 2021). The global economic impact of terrorism increased by two-thirds from 2008 to 2017 to US$ 52 bn. Africa’s share of the global economic cost of terrorism mounted from 4.2 % in 2007 to 20.3 % in 2016. In the same year, the economic cost of terrorism in Africa was estimated at US$ 15.5 billion. This represents a more than ten-fold increase since 2007. However, there is a huge variation in the cost among the focus countries attacked (UNDP, 2019). The impact of terrorism on the economy has a negative bearing on the formal and a positive effect on the informal sector (Sekrafi & Abid &Assidi, 2020). The shadow economy with all its ambivalent facets, including transnational crime, is still dominant in many African countries, notably in West Africa. Therefore, this sector is of special concern. The widely held belief that poverty produces terrorists and that the elimination of poverty would eliminate terrorism is an oversimplification. Poverty does not correlate with a higher incidence of terrorist attacks. Also, anti-poverty programs are not the most effective use of limited resources to combat terrorism (Shinn, 2016). However, scholarly international literature confirms that poor, weak and failed states are more vulnerable to violent extremism. 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