This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Walk through almost any city or town in a low-income or middle-income country and you'll pass them: the woman selling deep-fried fish from a cart, the mobile vendor with a bicycle full of vegetables, the kiosk operator who's the only source of a hot meal within walking distance. Food systems employ an estimated 1.23 billion people globally, and a majority of those jobs are informal—unlicensed, unregistered or otherwise outside the reach of formal regulation.
In low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) especially, informal vendors are not a marginal feature of how people eat; they are a linchpin of food security and livelihoods for over a billion people. And yet, as a new systematic scoping review published in Food Policy shows, research on this workforce is scattered, inconsistently defined and full of gaps that matter for policy. The study, by a team spanning the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, Cornell University, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), Purdue University, Kula Vyema Center of Food Economics and collaborators across several other institutions, screened 23,250 records and analyzed 327 studies published since 2000 across 64 countries.
The team asked three questions: First, the field can't agree on what "informal" even means. Fewer than a quarter of the studies reviewed clearly specified a definition, and among those that did, definitions varied wildly—some based on location, some on licensing, some on whether a vendor has a physical stall. These differences have a big impact on local policies: A location-based definition leads to place-based policy, an infrastructure-based one leads to market upgrades, and a licensing-based one leads to formalization drives that have mostly failed in practice because the costs of registration and compliance are rarely designed around how informal work actually functions.
Second, gender runs through everything. Women make up the majority of informal food vendors, and the review found gender-specific patterns in who sells what, where and under what constraints, from spatial segregation in fish markets to outright exclusion from public space and credit. In Dhaka, researchers documented vendors using "quiet encroachment" tactics: Male vendors would duck under tea tables when police approached while their wives took over because officers were reluctant to arrest women.
It's a small, telling example of how informal actors navigate, and are shaped by, the sociopolitical realities around them. Third, informal food environments run on relationships, not just transactions. Researchers call this "social infrastructure": the informal ties that stabilize supply chains, share risk and confer legitimacy on work that has none on paper.
Finally, and most concretely for policymakers, among the 214 studies that offered policy recommendations across more than 40 countries, the clearest and most consistent message was to move beyond the formal/informal binary altogether. Basic infrastructure (water, electricity, designated vending zones, cold storage) was the single most common recommendation. Gender-responsive financial inclusion and social protections for informal workers followed.
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