Performance of Evening Street Markets of Agri-Food Products in Morogoro Municipality, Tanzania

The street food trade is a growing sector in many developing countries today. Street foods have recently begun to attract the attention of governments and various international agencies because one of the features of urbanization in developing countries has been a proliferation of the street food trade. For long, there was a lacuna in the studies of urban street food. Street food was considered as snacks offered by family enterprises to survive and, no further attention was paid to it. The present study showed that the market structure for both snack-meals and fresh fruits were competitive, with high concentration indices. In addition, gender product diversification and type of product had a significant (P<0.05) positive effect on the sellers’ profit. Snack-meals and fresh fruit sellers in the town centre earned more profit per day compared to sellers in the periphery. In this study, street evening marketing in Morogoro municipality was found to be profitable and competitive, with limited barriers to market entry. We recommend enhancing the operational efficiency of evening street agri-food markets and formalisation of the operations by the municipal council through allocation of hygienic premises, provision of business permits and facilitation of formation of sellers’ associations to promote growth and credit worthiness of the evening agri-food street markets.