Consolidating knowledge on the impact of COVID-19 on informal workers to drive policy and action

 

This project seeks to harness and synthesize IDRC-supported data and research on the impact of COVID-19 on informal workers to inform inclusive recovery policies and responses to future economic crises.

Some two billion workers globally are informally employed. In developing countries, informal work accounts for 90% of workers, with women occupying the most vulnerable and least lucrative forms of employment. As a result, women informal workers have been hit the hardest by the social and economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. With support from IDRC as part of its COVID-19 Responses for Equity (CORE) initiative, the global research-advocacy network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) collected data about the impacts of the pandemic from informal workers in 2020 and 2021 in 11 cities across Africa, Latin America and Asia. The data captured the varied lived experiences of home-based workers, domestic workers, street vendors, market traders and waste pickers across regions. This project will support a deeper analysis of this data to unearth sectoral impacts and responses, facilitate cross-city learnings around advocacy strategies in a context of deepening punitive enforcement against informal workers, and share sector-based worker demands and bottom-up solutions with key policy audiences.

The knowledge synthesized under this project will contribute to global policy discourse on economic recovery and challenge conventional narratives, which exclude informal workers, their needs, and their contributions. By engaging workers’ organizations, the project will also strengthen the voice of informal workers in local, national and international dialogues on economic recovery and will foster evidence-informed recovery responses.