WIEGO: 15 Years of Achievements

1.

The Informal Economy

In collaboration with the ILO Statistics Bureau and the UN Statistical Commission’s International Expert Group on Informal Sector Statistics (the Delhi Group), WIEGO advocated for a statistical definition of informal employment that includes informal wage employment outside informal enterprises, as well as informal employment inside informal enterprises. WIEGO’s Statistics Programme also works at national and international levels to encourage countries to develop statistics on the informal economy as an essential component of mainstream official statistics.

2.

WIEGO has developed and tested a multi-segmented model of informal labour markets and has analyzed data from developing countries that revealed strikingly common patterns, suggesting a marked hierarchy of average earnings and significant segmentation by sex across these categories. See Informality, Poverty & Gender: Summary of WIEGO Findings and Hierarchies of Earnings & Poverty Risk.  

3.

Visibility of Informal Workers

A key research contribution of WIEGO’s has been the incorporation of a focus on workers, including home-based workers, in global value chain analysis. This has involved analyses in the garment and horticulture sectors that looked at average earnings and social protection coverage up and down the chains. See the accomplishments of WIEGO’s Global Trade Programme.

4.

In 2002, WIEGO compiled and analyzed available recent national data on informal employment for an ILO publication called Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture. That publication is seen as the pre-eminent source of statistics on informal employment. An update, jointly prepared by the ILO and WIEGO, will be published in 2012.

5.

WIEGO has advanced efforts to assess the average earnings and poverty risk of different employment statuses, both formal and informal, by sex, and has prepared flagship publications for UNIFEM – Progress of the World’s Women 2005: Women, Work and Poverty– and for the Commonwealth Secretariat – Mainstreaming Informal Employment and Gender in Poverty Reduction – on the links between informal employment, poverty and gender.

6.

Voice of Informal Workers

WIEGO has worked to shine a spotlight on the most invisible of informal workers: home-based workers, supporting regional networks (HomeNet South and HomeNet South East Asia) and producing materials like Making Home-Based Work Visible: A Review of Evidence from South Asia.

7.

WIEGO undertook studies on street vendors and urban policies in several countries, and we supported the growth of networks of street vendor organizations in India and Kenya and a global alliance of street vendor organizations, StreetNet International.

8.

WIEGO provided technical support to the creation of a global alliance of organizations of waste pickers. The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers has helped waste pickers to be heard at climate change negotiations. 

9.

WIEGO played a vital support role in the formation of the International Domestic Workers’ Network and the campaign for a Domestic Workers’ Convention.

10.

Validity of Informal Workers

WIEGO had an important role in the General Discussion on the Informal Economy at the 2002 International Labour Conference (ILC), where we organized a coalition to advocate for a platform of demands that had been developed during a series of preceding regional workshops. These efforts were successful in getting the ILO to adopt a Resolution Concerning Decent Work and the Informal Economy.

11.

WIEGO is a partner in the Inclusive Cities project, together with member-based organizations of urban informal workers, which seeks to promote more urban planning, policies, and practices that are inclusive of the livelihoods of the urban working poor. 

12.

WIEGO coordinated, with its Inclusive Cities partners, two rounds of a study on the impact of global economic crisis on urban informal workers. Inclusive Cities plans to continue studying the state of the urban informal economy in 12 cities.

13.

WIEGO piloted an Informal Economy Budget Analysis tool that examines how government budgets address informal workers and how they can participate in budget processes.

14.

WIEGO has initiated an Occupational Health & Safety Project designed to rethink and reform OHS to recognize the unique conditions and locations of informal work.

15.

WIEGO today is both a registered charity and a growing global network with over 30 team members in 11 countries, 168 Members (29 Institutional and 139 Individual Members) from 28 countries, and activities in more than 60 countries in any given year. For more, see Who We Are. and How We Are Structured. WIEGO has organized General Assemblies of our members in Ottawa, Canada (1999); Cambridge, USA (2000); Ahmedabad, India (2002); Durban, South Africa (2006); and Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2010).