2.3.1.2Employment and income generation
The rate at which cities in Africa are urbanizing leaves no room for employment. Urban agriculture is increasingly becoming an important source of employment for the urban poor who are incompetent for jobs in the formal sector. It is estimated that 40% of the urban dwellers in African countries are involved in agricultural sectors (Zezza and Tasciotti, 2010). In Dar es Salaam, urban agriculture was the second largest employer in 1988 was 20% of the working adults participated in urban agriculture (Smit & Nasr, 1992). A 2011 survey in Malawi showed that 17 per cent of all households interviewed had worked for a wage on some sort of urban agriculture enterprise in during 2004/2005 agricultural year. This makes urban agriculture the second most important source of income of all households surveyed after formal employment.
Urban agriculture also, provides opportunities for unskilled youth, homebound mothers and the elderly to participate in communal activities. For example, in Lusaka, urban
Most of the land which is used for urban agriculture besides backyard gardens is either privately owned or state land for the government (Drechsel, 2006). In most cases this land will be vacant and formal acquisition of the land for urban farming becomes problematic as it is already entitled to someone except for few cities such as Mbabane in Swaziland where important policy shifts in support of urban agriculture have been made at both national and local levels (Arku et al, 2012). So in the end urban farmers end up using the vacant land informally without any title deeds to it. However, urban farmers under this informal land ownership end up facing threats of land repossession, crop destruction and violence from state officials (Mbiba, 1994). A good example is from Harare, Zimbabwe where a number of cases of crop slashing in the city were