Vendor capacity and incentives to supply safer food: a perspective from urban Ethiopia

Foodborne disease is a major challenge for food systems worldwide, particularly in lower-income countries. In the absence of developed, enforced regulation and inspection systems, informal actors like market food vendors play a critical role in ensuring the safety of food. Understanding their perspective is thus essential for reducing the burden of foodborne disease. This study examines this topic among traditional market vendors in Hawassa, Ethiopia using in-depth qualitative interviews and cognitive mapping techniques. We synthesize the data to consider vendors’ capacity to provide safer food and their incentives to do so. The results show that vendors’ food safety actions were limited, and they saw considerable barriers to enacting recommended practices, particularly due to the limited infrastructure available in the market. Capacity is limited by the fact that, while vendors have some understanding of key concepts related to food safety, there are also large gaps in their knowledge. Generally, vendors face few regulatory incentives: they have limited interactions with authority figures, including for food safety. Social incentives are also limited: food safety was not a top concern for vendors nor was it prominent in their interactions with consumers, who focused mostly on price. Results are interpreted to discuss the way forward for improving food safety in traditional markets in Ethiopia, taking into account these constraints.