Blocking Human Potential: How Formal Policies Block the Informal Sector in the Maputo Corridor

This paper focuses on one of the most interesting cross-border regions in Africa, the so-called Maputo corridor. For more than a century the Maputo corridor has been an informal crossbordermicro-region, constructed by millions of migrants, extensive informal trading as wellas dense socio-ethnic interactions. Since the mid-1990s there is a formal project, officiallyknown as the Maputo Development Corridor (MDC), which seeks to reconstruct andrevitalize this rather informal cross-border relationship, which effectively has existed for morethan a century...