Taming the hawking menace in Nairobi requires a disruptive approach. The approach calls for the county to manage hawkers and create a self regulating Hawking community. The goal is to bring order, revenue and dignity as Nairobi seeks to regain its glory.

Here’s how it’ll be done.

Registration
All potential and practicing hawkers will have to get registered to practice. The registration is for bio data information and in order to have sufficient information on the industry. The process needs to be simplified, affordable and open. Registration should be open to all and charge a fee, and is renewable annually on 1st of the year.

Chip
Now that we have all hawkers registered the next process would be to create a smart card that they’d need to have with them every time they are practicing. It’d be the unique identifier and would assist in fee collection, hawker identification and geographical jurisdiction assignment. The card would be easily accessible for inspection.

Uniforms
Uniformity is crucial for such a sector. There would be two colors of uniform. All the hawkers would be required to wear this uniform when trading and should be kept in good order. Uniforms should be sourced from defined outlets preferably made by the hawkers Sacco which I’ll mention later.
The first uniform would be yellow. This is the uniform granted to hawkers who are allowed to trade during daytime hours on selected lanes.
The other uniform would be luminous green. This is uniform for after hours hawkers.

Daily fee
The smardcard I mentioned earlier would also be a prepaid debit card that would have to be swiped for daily rate payments. The payments would be 200 for yellow and 100 for luminous green.
The total fee collectable monthly based on conservative estimates of hawker numbers would be about 30 million.

Enforcement
Non hawkers or un uniformed hawkers would be easily seen and penalized.