Dear Sisters and Brothers, Friends and Supporters!

My sincere greetings and appreciation to all of you for your constant dedication, support, contribution and belief in the cause and mission of StreetNet International.

As we are about to say goodbye to 2025 and are welcoming the New Year, on behalf of StreetNet International, I would like to reach out to you with warmth and solidarity to emphasize how united we are across countries and continents by our daily work — and by our shared hope for dignity, justice, and better livelihoods for all informal traders.

Over the past year, together we strengthened our organizations, won new spaces for vendors to be heard at local and global forums, built leadership among women and young traders, and advanced policies that recognize street and market vendors as social actors for change and essential contributors to our economies and communities.

I am proudly saying, that, step by step, we are gradually strengthening our movement while empowering ourselves with new capacity and skills, advancing our internal policies and strategies, evolving new initiatives to amplify our voice and make ourselves more visible at important platforms. We clearly understand that where systems are excluding us or trying to silence us, we have to speak louder, clearer, and in unity.

It was a very fruitful and encouraging year as, in addition to our regular and ordinary institutional leadership and management meetings, we succeeded to hold a lot of trainings and educational activities, field visits, campaigns and advocacy actions with the participation of all our 62 affiliated organizations in both virtual and face-to-face events which brought us to great outcomes.

We built stronger national and local organizations; promoted social protection, fair regulation, and decent work for informal traders through social dialogue with local and national governments and institutions; amplified the voices of street and market vendors in regional and global policy spaces, ensuring our realities are not ignored.

We are happy to celebrate a great success of a newly implemented Barometer Project which proved to serve as a great tool for our affiliates in data collection process.

We also tested a newly developed Monitoring, Learning and Evaluation System to make sure that StreetNet is moving in the right direction.

Youth continue to be one of the core priorities for the StreetNet strategic and educational agenda, thus, in 2025, the global Youth in Action project was extended to the African region and it is demonstrating great progress in its implementation.

To be more efficient and meaningful for the affiliated organizations, we always ensure a direct communication with our members through different channels and in different ways. That’s why expending media work and media team was crucial innovation for StreetNet to create more visibility, bringing real stories from the grassroot level to the world.

We deepened solidarity with trade unions and workers of different sectors, especially in our joint struggle for social protection extension, a fair formalization process, digitalization and climate change.

We highly appreciate all the permanent cooperation and support from our great Sisters and Brothers from WIEGO and ITUC Global as well as its regional structures, in promoting our position on a smooth formalization, especially during the discussion of the Tripartite Committee on Promoting transitions towards Formalization at the 113^th Session of the ILO Conference.

I believe we will join our efforts in more broader aspects, including while dealing with platform economy.

Important to mention our internally developed materials such as an Advocacy Toolkit – a practical guide for the advocacy campaigns and a Toolkit on Social and Solidarity Economy, to further promote SSE as an approach to the economy that puts people over profit at the center of its goal.

Politically, this year also showed us something essential: policies are not written only in government offices. They are shaped in markets, in streets, in negotiations, in collective voices that refuse to disappear because we are many and we are a powerful force for change.

Thus, while advocating for legal recognition, dignity, systemic change with fair rules and gender justice, we continue to prove that street and market vendors are not a problem, who needs to be “managed,” but – the workers who need to be respected and enjoy their legal workers’ rights.

This journey is never easy or simple, as still so many street and market vendors face brutal evictions from their working spaces, which led to loss of their incomes, domestic violence and fear. Yet, our brave leaders and members continue organizing, negotiating, educating and caring for their communities.

This is exactly the courage and persistence which are our greatest achievements.

We definitely did a lot of remarkable work and my huge gratitude also goes to all our leaders, staff, partners and funders who help us implementing the dreams of millions of street and market vendors, but who still fight for recognition, protection, and justice.

Let us continue lighting small fires of solidarity wherever we are, until together they become a bright and undeniable flame.

Thank you for your resilience and trust in StreetNet International.

May the coming year bring peace to our families, strength to our organizations, and new victories for our shared struggle as we have a big plan to implement and, for sure, we carry strong belief, hope and commitment.

Wishing you all a peaceful holiday season and a prosperous New Year!

Nothing for Us without Us!

Oksana Abboud, StreetNet International Coordinator