Bloggings by boz

Nearly four years ago, discussing the impact of free trade on a family of garbage collectors in Bogota, I wrote:

Can this family create capital? They can't exactly put a price on their "small business" to sell or use as collateral for a loan. There are limited chances for upward mobility in the garbage collection business.

According to an article in this week's Economist, Colombia is now trying to prove me wrong.

...Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled that she and tens of thousands of her fellow wastepickers should be officially recognised as “entrepreneurs”.

The ruling has a practical effect. The court ordered Cali’s city government to suspend the tender for a waste-management concession to give co-operatives of recicladores, as they are known, time to organise themselves and bid for the contract....

...The court ruled that future waste-disposal contracts “should favour and try to preserve the status of wastepickers as self-employed entrepreneurs”. The judges also suspended the fines levied by Cali’s municipal government for sorting rubbish in public. The ruling reaches far beyond Cali. In Bogotá wastepickers will rely on the ruling to bid for waste-disposal contracts to be awarded next year.

I realize this doesn't reduce the day to day misery that comes with collecting and sorting garbage for only a few dollars per day. However, granting legal recognition and status to the entrepreneurs, giving them protection under the law and ordering government contracts to favor their established informal businesses provide some level of hope.