 interpretation a few times. So for those who are coming in, all participants need to go ahead and choose a language. So to do that, we'll see icon on the bottom of the screen, and you choose the globe icon to be able to select an interpretation channel. If you don't see a globe, you'll see the interpretation option under the three dots. And from there, you're going to select your language. So this webinar offers interpretation in three languages, English, Spanish, and French. So for our Spanish speakers, I'll go over that in Spanish. Esta reunión ofrece interpretación en tres idiomas en inglés, español y francés. Todos los participantes tienen que elegir un idioma para hacer eso. Vas a mirar los íconos en la parte inferior de la pantalla y hacer clic en el globo o el mundo para elegir un canal. Si no ves un globo, vas a encontrar la opción para interpretación abajo de los tres puntos. Y de ahí puedes elegir tu idioma. Kendra, could you do this in French? Perfect. Gracias. Merci, Jenna. Bonjour tout le monde. Nous allons faire ce webinar en anglais, les panellistes en français. Mais il y a l'interprétation en espagnol et en français. Pour écouter français, vous devez se mettre au menu, où vous voyez interprétation, et vous devez sélectionner français. Si vous pouvez nous confirmer que vous écoutez le français dans le chat, ça nous aidera beaucoup. Merci encore. Okay, so welcome everyone who's coming in. We're going to go through interpretation instruction one more time. And I will also explain our Q&A, and then we'll get started. So for those just coming in, welcome to our webinar toward a better deal for informal workers, a paradigm shift post COVID. We have interpretation in three languages, English, Spanish, and French. All participants need to choose a language. To do so, you'll look at the icons at the bottom of your zoom screen and click the globe to choose a channel. If you don't see the globe, you'll find interpretation under the three dots. And from there, you can select your language. So for English speakers, select English. Now I'll explain for Spanish speakers. Este evento of recent interpretation in three languages, English, Spanish, and French. Todos los participantes tienen que elegir un. Para hacer eso, vas a mirar los iconos en la parte inferior de la pantalla y hacer click en el globo o el mundo para el canal. Si no es un globo, vas a encontrar la opción para la interpretación debajo de los tres puntos y de ahí puedes elegir tu idioma. Monteno. Bonjour tout le monde. Bienvenue a notre webinar. Nous allons vous raccorder que nous offresons ce webinar en anglais, en français, et en espagnol. Les panellistes vont parler anglais donc pour écouter en français, vous devez sélectionner le boton où ça dit interpretation et sélecter votre langue French. Si vous êtes sur un mobile, vous verrez il y a trois points. Et là, ça dit langue, interpretation, langue, langue interpretation. Vous devez sélectionner français ou French. Merci beaucoup. Perfect. Thank you everyone. Just one more housekeeping item before we get started. We're going to be taking questions throughout the webinar. We have a dedicated session for Q&A. And but we'll be taking questions throughout to then answer during the Q&A session. Please ask your questions in the Q&A rather than the general chat. So you'll see there's a Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. Just type your question there and we'll be capturing them throughout the webinar to address during our Q&A session. Thank you everyone. So I'll put the interpretation instructions and the Q&A instructions in the chat for everyone to refer to throughout the webinar if you have any questions. And with that, I will pass over to Francois so we can go ahead and get started. Thank you. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, everyone. And welcome to this webinar. Towards a better deal for informal workers. Paradigm shift post COVID. My name is Francois Carré. I'm the statistics program director for WeGo. And WeGo stands for Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing. It's the global network research and action network on informal work informal workers and their organizations. So today's event is co-sponsored with the Ford Foundation and UNU wider which stands for United Nations Universities World Institute for Development Economics Research. This event is an opportunity to hear from researchers and policy thinkers about the need for a paradigm shift on understanding the informal economy and on shaping policies that support informal workers worldwide. It's also an occasion to formally launch the recent WeGo research volume co-edited by Marty Chen and myself entitled the Informal Economy Revisited, Examining the Past and Visioning the Future. And it is also an opportunity to hear the reflections of some of the contributors to the book and you'll hear about them today. I'm going to do a quick overview of the agenda which is on your screen. Marty Chen, Martha Chen will next introduce our co-sponsors as well as share the goals and highlights of the book. Our two speakers in addition to Marty will be Martin Abregu of the Ford Foundation and Kunal Sen of UNU wider. Then I will introduce four panelists who are contributors to the book and will share the reflections. We will then hear discussant comments from Kunal Sen. We will have time for question and answers. And finally, Marty Chen will close with thoughts and reaction to what has been said today. And I want to say at this point that Sally Rover, the international coordinator for WeGo is unfortunately unable to attend and participate today because of a family emergency. But Marty has thought very hard about all of this. So without further ado, let me just introduce Marty Chen, Martha Chen. She is lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-founder, emeritus international coordinator and senior advisor to WeGo. Marty, over to you. Thanks so much, Francoise. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever each of you might be. We are deeply grateful to the Ford Foundation and UNU wider for co-hosting this event. And it is my great pleasure to introduce Martin Abrehu from Ford Foundation and Kunal Sen who will give some welcome remarks. And then I will introduce the volume. Martin Abrehu is the vice president for international programs at the Ford Foundation. And I wish to add that the Ford Foundation has been a core funder and valued partner of WeGo for over two decades. Kunal Sen is the director of UNU wider, the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research and also a professor of Development Economics at the University of Manchester in the UK. Under Kunal's leadership, wider has developed a program of research on the informal economy and is partnering with WeGo on an edited volume on COVID and the future of the informal economy. So it's a great pleasure to now turn to Martin for his welcome remarks followed by Kunal. Over to you, Martin. Hello everyone and good morning, good evening, good afternoon, good morning, good afternoon. As Martin said, my name is Martin Abrehu and I am the vice president for international programs at the Ford Foundation. And it is a real pleasure to be here today co-hosting this event together with WeGo and UNU wider. And also thank all of you, thank you to all of you for joining this very important and timely conversation. A few years ago, the Ford Foundation decided that all of our work should aim at tackling inequality and it is within that framework that we believe all working people are essential to building a just global economy. If we are going to design a more just global economy, it is critical to build the power of working people to define and shape their own future and to experience economic security, dignity and opportunity for themselves and for the next generation. It is essential that workers have both economic and political power to shape economic policies and models and that informal workers are represented and can influence political process. And we at Ford, we are focused especially on those who our economies marginalize the most. Workers in the informal economy, racial and ethnic minorities, indigenous people, women, immigrants and those with disabilities, many of whom are informally employed. Needless to say, COVID-19 made it all worse. COVID has been a dual health and economic crisis with informal workers experiencing the brunt of impact. As they represent the majority of global workforce around 61% and the vast majority of workforce in developing countries, 90%, they are facing an unprecedented crisis. According to the ILO, 80, 80% of the global informal workforce 1.6 billion workers stand in immediate danger of having their livelihoods destroyed. The pandemic and its lockdown have undermined the income and assets of informal workers as well as their economic future, causing a risk of falling deeper into extreme poverty as emergency policies have mostly neglected that. COVID recovery policies and stimulus packages should be built addressing the perspectives, challenges and demands of informal workers. But there is a real risk and a lot of evidence actually that recovery policies may work against or at least neglect informal workers. So the question is, can this be an opportunity? A moment that prompts reflection and reckoning regarding the conditions facing informal workers. If such an opportunity exists, it has to do with the fact that the pandemic has shined a light on the pre-existing injustices and inequalities faced by informal workers, including huge gaps in our global social protection systems and racial and gender disparities anywhere in our labor and social policies. But at the same time and at the same time, it has made it visible the essential goods and services provided by informal work. In this context, we must seize this window of disruption to address the structural injustices and inequalities faced by informal workers. What last year has made clear is the ways we are all connected and how worker power and voice are necessary to ensure public health and unequitable economic recovery. This must begin with the recovery schemes and stimulus packages targeted at the working poor in the informal economy and through the introduction of policy and legal reforms to address the inherent biases against informal workers and their livelihood activities. At fourth, we know that those closest to the problems are closest to the solution. This means supporting the work of informal workers networks in ways that position them to shape future global labor and social policies that ensure an equitable recovery. The WEECO Network, which has been a four foundation partner since 1998, has played a major role in strengthening the voice of informal workers in their struggle for dignity and justice. Building and strengthening national, regional and informal networks of domestic workers, home-based workers, street vendors, waste speakers, improving a statistic on informal employment, including groundbreaking work with the ILO, the statistical commission and national statistical offices to generate the first ever global estimates of informal employment, promoting and documenting innovative good policies and programs in support of informal workers and their livelihood, and opening policy space for informal workers to negotiate with city governments, national governments and with the global community to advocate for support of their economic activity. And throughout the pandemic, the WEECO Network has played a critical role in making visible the impact of COVID on informal workers, including conducting rapid assessment to understand how public health measures are impacting informal workers, sharing best practices among grassroots and sector-based networks to address challenges of virus transmission in the workplace and in communities to keep workers, consumers and public spaces safe, and has provided technical support, guidance and information sharing in support of innovating and inclusive safety net measures on the design of social protection system. This moment has been charged with unbelievable hardship and unprecedented opportunity. In a moment like this, the WEECO Network's efforts supporting the worker poor in the informal economy has never been more crucial. A better deal for informal workers will require an alternative economic paradigm and powerful advocacy and we at Ford are proud to support work that elevates the needs, demands and experiences of informal workers. It's really, I'm really glad to be here. Thank you. Thank you so much Martin and thank you for the understanding and the support. And Kunal, please your welcome remarks. Thank you Mati. First of all as director of WEECO, I'm really pleased that we could co-host this particular event which is so important with WEECO and Ford Foundation. Really delighted that we can do so. For those of you who are less familiar with our institute, the United Nations University World Institute for Developmental Research, UNIWIDER, was established about 35 years ago to provide economic analysis and policy advice that aim of promoting sustainable and equitable development for all. Today UNIWIDER serves as a unique blend of a think tank, a research institute and a UN agency based in Helsinki Finland. In our current work program, an important focus of our work is to better understand the patterns and drivers of informality through a project transforming informal work and livelihoods. More information about this project is placed on our website. This project will provide knowledge for better policy making with respect to the informal sector and understanding the causes and consequences of informality. I mean not that in most developing countries the informal sector remains a persistent phenomenon in spite of rapid economic growth in recent decades especially as you observe in Latin America, South Asia, and Southern Africa. With premature industrialization and the growth of the informal service sector, it seems likely that the trajectory towards informalization in low and middle income countries may be intensified in the future. Much of the working poor reside in the informal sector, working in their own enterprises or employed as casual wage labor and poorly paid jobs. In addition, women are more likely to be in the informal sector, either working as unpaid workers in enterprises headed by the males in their households or poorly paid casual jobs in the informal sector. So the challenge for policy makers and the plan challenge that Unibody has taken on in this particular research project is to find ways to encourage the movement of workers from the informal sector to the more productive formal sector and concurrently provide opportunities for the more dynamic informal enterprise to grow and for those working in this enterprises to achieve decent and rheumatism work. UNIWD's research centrally addresses this policy concerns and as we now are in a juncture where with the pandemic we can see the effect of the pandemic on the informal economy. So clearly this particular work that we're doing is perhaps of more policy relevance. So to conclude I'm delighted that UNIWD is partnering with Ford Foundation and VEGO in this launch event of the book in formal economy revisited examining the past and visioning the future. There were exciting set of presentations based on the book ahead that look forward to the discussion in the panel. Thank you. Thank you Kanal. We value your co-hosting this event and then more importantly partnering with you on the issues around informal employment. It is now my pleasure to say a few words about the volume that we're sort of celebrating today. It was published last year mid-year but that did not seem like a time to celebrate. We're not exactly in the post-COVID time but it seems more appropriate to be doing it now. So let me say a few words. We now know that well over half of all workers and the vast majority of workers in developing countries are informally employed and we know that new forms of informal employment are emerging around the world. Yet the informal workforce is not well understood. It remains undervalued and is widely stigmatized. The volume that's being launched today and this webinar seek to promote better understanding of the informal economy and to challenge many of the dominant negative narratives about it. In November 2017 now quite a long time ago as part of WeGo's 20th anniversary celebrations the WeGo research team organized a research conference at Harvard University and we invited three dozen leading scholars on the informal economy to reflect on recent conceptual shifts, research findings and policy debates on the informal economy within their respective disciplines and also to reflect on the future research and policy towards the informal economy. The scholars came from a wide range of disciplines and were asked to reflect on different domains of policy research, economic development, urban planning, social protection and the role of the state. In doing so they drew on research and experience in some 20 countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and North America and also to provide grounded insights to the disciplinary reflections and debates. We invited a subset of these scholars to speak about the working conditions and policy demands of three groups of informal workers, home-based workers, street vendors and waste pickers. All of the scholars agreed to write up their reflections including insights from the conference as chapters of this edited volume we called the informal economy revisited examining the past, envisioning the future. In addition to evaluating prevailing views of the informal economy there are several distinct features of the volume. It's multidisciplinary as I suggested. It's multi-country, multi-regional but importantly it reflects collective engagement as well as individual reflections regarding the past, present and future theory, research and policy responses to the informal economy. And several cross-cutting themes emerged in the volume and I would like to share a few of these with you. First the importance of data on the informal economy, aggregate data on its size and contribution to capture the attention of policymakers and then disaggregated data on different segments of the informal economy to inform policy making. This brings me to the second theme which is the heterogeneity of the informal economy and key indicators for disaggregating the phenomenon which came through branch of industry, sub-sectors or occupations, status and employment, place of work and gender. A third was the predominance of self-employment. Globally nearly half of all workers and two-thirds of informal workers are self-employed. If we move to developing countries, 72 percent of all workers and 79 percent of informal workers are self-employed and self-employment challenges the neoclassical model of labor, supply and demand. It challenges the entrepreneurial model of the self-employed as most self-employed work in single person or family units without hired labor as own account workers and contributing family workers who invest more labor than capital in their livelihood activities and it challenges standard models of organizing and collective bargaining as the bargaining counterpart is not an employer but other owners of capital or often the state itself. A fourth theme was the inappropriate application of models from the global north to the global south including the legacy of the colonial past and some of these models include the presumed pathway of industrial development from traditional informal economies to modern industrialized economies. The presumed dominance of wage employment again presumed to be formal wage employment in labor markets and the divide between the planned formal city and the unplanned formal city to use the terminology of the colonials the unplanned informal city of the so called native population and this concept this assumption has continued and informal activities continue to be treated with suspicion and condemnation. A fifth theme was the dominance of the negative narratives regarding the informal economy and some counter narratives so the assumption that they're illegal there is the counter narrative that most dealing most deal in legal goods and services but have to operate in semi-legal ways because the regulatory environment is hostile inappropriate or simply non-existence. The notion that they are non-compliant most informal workers do not earn enough to be liable for personal income or corporate income tax but many pay different operating fees many pay value-added tax on their inputs and most are not evading or avoiding regulations. The regulations simply are hostile inappropriate or non-existent as I suggested and then there's a notion that they're non-productive with little or no attention to the demand side and institutional constraints to their productivity. A sixth theme is the role of the state in either driving or undermining informality and this is because the state stance is often uncertain and erratic turning a blind eye tolerating getting rid of supporting often criminalizing informal activities depending on what is politically expedient at the moment. Also in collusion with owners of capital the state often privatizes public space and public services often with negative impacts on informal workers. A seventh theme an important one was the desirability and feasibility of integrating informal workers and their livelihood activities into different domains of policy and law economic policies and planning labor law and worker rights, urban planning and development, social protection and social policy more generally. And finally an important key theme was the role of organizations of informal workers in demanding and negotiating integration or inclusion on fair terms. Kendra will you project the first slide about the volume? Ultimately the volume calls for a paradigm shift to in how the informal economy is perceived to reflect the realities of informal work in the global south. It calls for a focus on the informal practices of the state and capital not just labor and calls for placing informal workers at the center of policies that directly affect them. In sum the informal economy revisited captures 20 years of pioneering engagement by wego in theoretical, empirical and policy debates on the informal economy. Next slide Kendra. Our hope is that researchers, practitioners, policymakers and advocates will all find this book an invaluable guide to the significance and realities of the informal economy as this quote from Diane Ellison suggests. So I hereby officially launch the volume the informal economy revisited examining the past envisioning the future. And now I turn it over back to Francoise to moderate the panel of speakers. Thank you so much. Yes thank you to all of our speakers so far. I will now turn to set a contribution of presentations from contributors to the volume to the book volume. I'm going to introduce all four of them in in the order in which they will be speaking. So first Caroline Skinner is the Urban Policy's Research Director for Wego and a senior researcher at the African Center for Cities at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Gautam Bonn is Senior Lead for Academics and Research at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. Laura Alfers is Director of Wego's Social Protection Program and is a Research Fellow at Rhodes University in South Africa. Kate Maher is Associate Professor in Development Studies at the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics. All four of them were asked to address the following questions. What were your reflections on the informal economy in in the chapter that you wrote for this volume? Have your views and the views you presented then changed given what has happened to informal workers during the pandemic come lockdowns and lockdowns. And now what do you think will happen and what do you think should happen to informal work going forward? So before we start I just want to give a reminder that I will be doing the time keeping to all of you. I will give you a two-minute heads up and then tell you when your time is up and I will do that verbally because I think that's probably the easiest way in this format. So without further ado I will turn it over to Caroline Skinner. Right thank you very much. Looking forward to it. So Kendra if you could share the slides. So I am reflecting on a joint contribution with Vanessa Watson in which we looked at the informal economy and and planning. Both praxis and theory and particularly picking up on urban African realities. So next slide. What we argue is that in many ways the realities of the predominance of informality both of work and settlement is a profound challenge to the planning discipline. And I think Anna Tabadouka who at the time of saying this was the executive director of UN Habitat captured this very aptly by saying the plant city sweeps the poor away. And this is really counterposed by the realities that on this continent over 80% of all informal workers are informally employed and six in every 10 urban Africans live in Islam. And these you know I've heard on there's many estimates out there and I've heard on the side of the more conservative estimates and this really shows that informality is the norm. So if we go to the next slide we frame a series of what we call conventional wisdoms in planning and I highlight just four of them. The first is this issue of the monofunctionality of homes and the role of public space. So in many contexts planners approach particularly zoning to assume that there is single a single use either a home or an industrial area or a public space that's not used for livelihoods activities. So this is counterposed by the reality that we know that homes are workplaces as our streets and public spaces. The second picks up on this issue that in the minds of many many planners informally distributed foods are really perceived as essentially a threat to consumer health. And again counterposed by some some really rich evidence that conclusively shows how informal systems are central to urban food security. This is an issue that has been spotlighted in the COVID era and in some of the contexts in which we go works informal food distributors were declared essential service workers and this is a key gain that in this this period we need to build on. The fourth kind of the third sorry conventional wisdom is this issue about informal workers being seen as peripheral to climate change mitigation and urban service delivery. And again and this is an area that we go has worked both very practically and in doing research waste pickers and other informal workers are shown to contribute to climate change mitigation but also improved services. So we think for example informal transport is the way in which most citizens of the global south get around our urban areas. And then finally this issue of informal work as predominantly being perceived as a poverty alleviation rather than an economic issue. And we argue that this is there's a real need for the disciplines of planning economics and development studies to really cross pollinate each other with many with ideas. And the argument here is that informal workers as many panelists and rather participants well know fit into a range of value chains and understanding this positionality is key to more progressive interesting livelihood support that could shift things. If we go to the next slide what this suggests around you know how planners should be approaching this issue is a fundamental a fundamentally different approach which is bottom up incremental so it uses pilots flexible it doesn't have an end point that it's it's fixed to economically conversant but also acutely aware and informed by the specific context and power dynamics. We move to the next slide just reflecting on what we are seeing in the world before we think about the implications for planning practice in the context in which we work we actually tend to see much more of the conventional master planning top down where the planner is seen as the expert and at best does gestures to to hearing the voices of informal workers. So we go into a lot of detail about what we think this implies for planning practice but just to hone in on what we on what we think this suggests is a new cohort of urban planners who understand the highly specific and differentiated locational and service requirements of informal workers. I'm mindful of the many hours the urban practitioners who do this spend just sitting on the streets observing but much more importantly engaging with informal workers and their leaders again where informal worker informal activities fit into value chains but also have participatory planning skills consensus building, conflict resolution and are willing to experiment with new forms of infrastructure provision and particularly new regulations. And then just a final slide reflecting on the on COVID as of Martin you very beautifully articulated COVID-19 has had a devastating impact or measures to to prevent the spread of COVID-19 has had a particularly devastating impact on informal workers. The ILO showed that very early on in the crisis and our 12 city study which we are currently distributing the findings have confirmed this. While we've seen policy innovations that have been introduced at national level and Laura will pick up particularly on social protection interventions across most of the context that we work local authority harassment and exclusion has been amplified and interestingly echoing what planners have done and local authorities over the last few centuries this has been used the public health concerns have been used as a kind of core justification. So while we've seen innovative practices that have been introduced by informal workers themselves which we've documented and our partners like street net international have overall I would argue the risks of building back worse are particularly high. So I'm now going to turn to Eric Garten who will hone in on the COVID moment in particular. Thank you. Thanks Caroline. So folks you know I'm not going to repeat a lot of what Caroline said in our chapters are very much in consonance with one another highlighting the dominance of informality in many cities of the global south and I think just to emphasize one part of my chapter in the book but also our our collective contribution is how much we need to continue to hold both spatial informality which is the informality in the conditions of infrastructure and housing with economic informality which is about the quality and conditions of work and I think that the one thing that COVID has really shown us is that dividing the worker between the conditions of her work and the ease of living of her everyday life is an unstable distinction and I think in many places in the book the questions that I asked were actually questions of what can we learn from the mobilization and research on spatial informality informal housing informal access to infrastructure and take that between economic informality about conditions of work and regulation and I think much more work needs to be done to bring those two forms of inequality together you know the image you're seeing on the screen right now is you know the image that was seared on to many of our minds in the lockdowns in India which was the image of thousands of workers leaving our cities walking on foot because of the mobility restrictions on mass transportation because of the lockdown walking hundreds of kilometers and I think that it is important to recognize that the pandemic has made visible multiple forms of understanding the deep structural vulnerabilities that are intertwined with informality but not reducible to it alone in our urbanism in different parts of the world including in the global north and the global south and I think in India this image of migrants walking on highways has sort of reminded us on that next slide please Kendra and I wanted to pick up from what Caroline said and focus actually on not just the fact that planning of a certain kind misrecognizes the everyday life of workers in our cities but there is a specific geography to this misrecognition and that geography is actually about dominant imaginations of planning that come from histories of the global north and then are applied in context of the global south and I think this is a really important thing to understand I mean in many ways the experience of the pandemic and this is a framing that many of us have been writing about when you look at it from informality is that the crisis was experienced and is experienced of a welfare crisis to livelihood as much as an epidemiological or disease based crisis to help on a rapid survey that we did with 500 domestic workers in a north Indian city of Jaipur health was their fourth concern on the day the lockdowns in India were announced it was income and food that were the top concerns that came and in many cases violating lockdown conditions came precisely from folks whose livelihood required daily or weekly income and did not have a social protection or safety net to draw on and therefore the first articulation I want to offer for our consideration is that covid for many places in the global south but universally but particularly in the global south was equally a crisis of livelihood as of health and I think that we have misunderstood it if we don't recognize that many workers faced the trade-offs between health and livelihood that mortality or death due to non-covid livelihood shocks was equally serious as mortality or death due to covid health shocks makes us reframe the pandemic as a livelihood shock as much as an epidemiological health shock and I think this is pivotal because it shapes how we respond to the crisis because the crisis is not just covid but the crisis is also the lockdowns and the livelihood shocks that follow in many cases the specificity of the mantra of stay at home work at home for all the reasons caroline outlined was an impossibility in the urban conditions of many cases of the global south where density of lived environments for example 60 percent of urban India lives in habitations that have less than one room that have one room or one and a half room so there is no option to isolate or stay outside within the house when you think about work from home precisely again to pick up on what caroline is outlining if 80 percent or so of workers in India work in the informal economy half of those work in public space and therefore the notion of work from home that imagines a formal workforce an urban structure where workers live in one place and work in the other place thereby ignoring home-based work on one end of the spectrum and work in public spaces the second end of the spectrum misrecognizes the connections between employment infrastructure and urbanism in cities of the south and stay at home work from home is a fundamental misrecognition of the urban conditions of the south I want to offer one reframing of this for example that we saw as communities in dense informal settlements responded to the pandemic and said we can't isolate at the home but we can isolate at the street we can isolate at the mouth of the narrow street within dense urban settlements therefore controlling a certain semi-private space at the street level what in North Indian languages is called the gully as opposed to the home level so therefore there are solutions that would have come from urban conditions that had grappled before for example had we learned from the experiences of African countries that had dealt with Ebola in similar contexts of poverty inequality and urban housing where we would have seen the experiments of community isolation and quarantine instead of centralized isolation and quarantine but I think it really matters the pandemic has shown us that misrecognizing the poor foundational conditions of our urbanism leads to solutions that are unimplementable however well intentioned next slide please and I think that what's important is then to also see not just that we keep insisting on the correct understanding of the way our cities actually work the employment that actually exists the bill form that actually exists but a provocation to all of us to also learn from the ways in which relief work during covid required our governments in many parts of the world to innovate and experiment with new ways of working I want to draw this example from relief work in the Indian state sorry go time two minutes yes I'll be done so the the first part is on the left side what you're seeing is you know categories in which our social protection system already works on food systems on public distribution on pension but also that during the work lockdown multiple new categories were created by our governments that talked about contracted workers outsourced workers migrant workers you'll see on the right a language in which the state doesn't normally use and so therefore the provocation is that relief from the lockdowns offers an archive and a possible diagnostic that could offer lessons for addressing informality and inequality better in a post-covid world as long as we hang on to some of the lessons we have learned not just from the crisis but the response to the crisis and in my final minute on my last slide I just want to suggest that one of the lessons we hold on to is to recognize that the covid experience is not universal across the world that particular forms of urbanism shape lockdowns and we need to understand that that lockdowns can tell us both lessons of crisis that preceded covid but how we responded and give us new questions and to really understand how informality confound the delivery of social protection not just in crisis but also in the everyday and so I think that there are both moments here to understand the impact and the misrecognition of informality but also to learn lessons from relief and hold on to them so that everyday post-covid social protection can be strengthened now stop there Thank you Kaolan and Gautam for terrific presentation that fit very well together Laura Alphonse next Thanks Gautam and Caroline and so our sort of section of the book really focused on social protection so picking up from Gautam's last point and I think there were two issues raised in the chapter I wrote which was to pick that by several of the other authors in the section on social policy and I think which continue to underpin discussions on social protection and informality and the first of those is what we often call the delinking debate the delinking of social protection from employment the idea that because informality is so dominant and that self-employment within informality is so dominant that the only fair social protection system we can think about is one way benefits are delinked from employment status and financed by general taxation and this is you know one version of this argument for example seen in the World Development Report in 2019 in theory sounds like a good idea but I still could start this chapter in the book points out the devil is always in the detail are we talking about a delinking which increasingly allows employers and owners of capital off the hook for contributing to the welfare of those from whose labour they profit and replaces that with very low level benefits provided to the general purse or even not at all and I think Kamala Sankaran's chapter on India really brings up that issue where she looks at the replacement of industry specific face taxes in India used to finance welfare benefits across formalities data and the replacement of that with a general system of taxation where it is really not clear when how benefits for those workers are going to be going to be financed or as as focal points after new chapter are we talking about a universal comprehensive and redistributive system of social protection which covers people irrespective of their employment status and how these systems are designed the financing options which are selected the linkages they establish with other policy areas and the wider policy and regulatory context in which they operate or critical to to what the outcome is and it's in those details where where the devil lies I think also raised as a as a second key point is the issue of the contradiction we often see between an increasing emphasis on the provision of social protection whilst working conditions in the informal economy continue to erode and I think this was brought up most clearly in Francie Lund's chapter where she states quite simply that we can't see social protection as as wholly responsible for remediating the inequalities created by economic labour trade policies which are unfair to informal workers and importantly urban policies too so linking back to Gartmann and Caroline's point that continue to undermine livelihoods and reinforce inequalities and Francie illustrates for the vignettes from a 2009 Uighur engagement between the European Union and and African Caribbean and Pacific states where the EC was was implementing very unfair trade agreements with these states which was undermining working conditions while at the same time providing training on decent work and social protection and that is the way that these contradictions often work so thinking about how how these reflections relate to COVID I would say it's particularly the second point that has stood out perhaps in the immediate term and perhaps the first point we will think more about as we move into the economic recovery phase but the second point in particular should be emphasised extending social protection to informal workers is a really important part of the economic recovery we know from all sorts of Keynesian economic theory that social spending can grease the wheels of the economy as sticky as the base and that's incredibly important but we can't expect social protection to do all that much if it doesn't come in a passage which includes very working conditions for the working poor and I think the COVID-19 impact survey that we go and partners conducted in response to the crisis shows us up very clearly especially in relation perhaps to urban policies yes we saw a record number of attempts to extend social protection to previously sort of ignored groups like informal workers but at the same time we saw a huge amount of bias against several forms of informal employment during lockdown for example waste pickers we're not allowed to operate even when formal waste collection firms were allowed to operate in some context as well as endless accounts of violence and harassment particularly from the local state against informal workers continuing to work and this was to the point where there was a general sentiment from the respondents to the wego survey that the social protection was helpful but no way could make up the distractions of livelihoods that had occurred under the lockdown and I think that that kind of contradiction is really important to consider as we as we move into into the economic recovery looking forward though I think you know it's important to say that 2020 was a year where social protection for informal workers really hit the spotlight and as Gotham said that's something to hold on to something that is important and something to build on because social protection is important and hopefully we'll feed better coverage in the longer term I think some of the key issues that we're going to have to think about to ensure that these systems are fairer systems and not the unfair kind of low grade social protection linked to poor working conditions kind of scenario that that potentially could happen as well I think some of the key issues up are financing so how do we finance social protection systems in a way that doesn't download costs on to poor individual workers and download risks on to poor informal workers I think the issue of building integrated social protection systems which include non-contributory contributory benefits and benefit social protection which is integrated with the kinds of social services that are needed to ensure incomes are protected such as health and child care services I think one of the areas we need to think about much more closely is how to make contributory social protection systems fairer for informal workers in some parts of the world you know although the emphasis during the crisis is very much on non-contributory social protection systems a lot of the relief packages were built with non-contributory systems actually in some parts of the world such as in Sub-Saharan Africa governments prioritized the expansion of social protection to informal workers through contributory systems and I imagine that's moving forward that they will go back to that so I think there's a real need to think about how do we make those fairer and perhaps also how we integrate non-contributory benefits into those systems I think one thing we have to think about is grappling with the rise of what's being called the digital welfare state the rise of digital systems I mean before that was over as well many of the benefits and the relief efforts were underpinned by digital systems and there are many opportunities in that but that also has the potential to entrench the sort of digital divide on which many informal workers are on the other side of that so big questions about how we make make those systems fairer and more accessible as well as how we resource organizations of informal workers as well as private companies who are making a lot of money or the digitization of the state how some of those resources are also directed to supporting the organizations who have to be the bridge between those on the other side of the digital divide and the state and then finally one of the things that really came out of COVID was the active participation of organizations of informal workers in the relief efforts either it was through their own solidarity organizations the provision of benefits through their mutuals and bureaucrats or it was creating the links between workers on the state through provision of information and active linking or it was participation in social dialogue spaces and ensuring that you know benefits were raised and they were there was negotiations so I think you know there needs to be a shift from seeing informal workers as the beneficiary of aid to being active participants in the creation and delivery of social protection and to ensure that that's those basis of use thank you Laura for leaving us as an agenda to think about and now call on Kate Maher please thank you very much and good morning afternoon and evening everyone I'm going to be speaking to a chapter that I wrote for the book that was looking at how we could better understand how if we better understood the differences among African informal economies this may contribute to better policy or addressing the needs of informal workers and informal entrepreneurs next slide please so what we can see from this map reinforces what many people know which is that Africa is the most informalized continent in the world that informal livelihoods make up about 70 72 percent of worker of the non-agricultural labor force across the entire continent of Africa and about 78 percent of the non-agricultural labor force in sub-Saharan Africa and you can see from this this map not only that Africa is highly informalized but that there are important differences that Southern Africa for example seems to be considerably less informalized than North Africa I'm sorry then the main body of Africa and then North Africa it's worth noting that in Southern Africa less than 50 percent of the labor forces working informally whereas in West Africa it's about 82 percent of livelihoods are informal could I have the next slide please so I want to emphasize the differences between Southern Africa and West Africa because this is where they're most stark and think a little bit about the ways in which differences are not just a feature of poverty or of lawlessness but about important variations in pre-colonial history the nature of the colonial and post-colonial states and contemporary relations with the global economy and as shown here in West Africa there was a long history of pre-colonial centralized states as well as a long history of engagement in Islamic systems which nurtured complex manufacturing systems long-distance trade credit and entrepreneurship systems which have given rise to quite strong informal economies that colonial cash crop economies which were predominant in West Africa were not really focused on population management but developed bureaucracies that were much more focused on controlling trade rather than controlling populations and this has given rise to informal economies in which informal small enterprise predominates and informal wage labor is only about 20% of informal employment in West Africa in Southern Africa you have a very different situation settlement was much slower and there were later sparser elements of pre-colonial state formation and the level of complex economic activity in pre-colonial Southern Africa was considerably lower colonial states were mostly settler or labor reserve economies which tended to criminalize or smash any forms of local economic activity that drew labor away from the large-scale farms and the mines and this gave rise to informal economies that were much more focused on informal wage labor much more dominated by informal wage labor which makes up about 60% of informal employment in Southern Africa relative to informal small enterprise which is much weaker and sparser and this focus on the role of the state really comes out of the work of Tandikam Kandawari who did some really interesting work on the role of the state in developing and shaping African informal economies but despite this recognition of really important differences the corporate gaze which has become increasingly interested in the informal economy particularly in African and South Asian informal economies has really tended to homogenize what the informal economy is and to focus very much on the ways in which the informal economy feeds into corporate interests in informal labor at the bottom of global value chains informal labor as a part of kind of last mile bottom of the pyramid labor or informal labor as it can be attached to the gig economy so the corporate gaze really looks more to homogenizing the weakest informal employment informal wage labor end of the informal economy and tends to gloss over everything else and that creates a situation in which policy for varieties of African informal economies really tends to default more to a one size fits all approach next slide please so if we go back to African informal economies and remember that African informal economies are much bigger than elsewhere in the world if you can do three more clicks now and look at the way that COVID has affected Africa it is quite clear that COVID although it has exacerbated some issues of vulnerability with regard to informal labor it has also exacerbated the tendency to a one size fits all approach not just to informal economies but to the health risks of COVID and what we can see from this map is that COVID has also affected African countries quite differently from the rest of the world well Africa is the most informalized continent in the world it has been the least affected by coronavirus it has been affected differentially as well by coronavirus and certainly there are issues of lack of testing and underreporting but the fact is people have used excess deaths and oral autopsies to determine that in fact COVID has affected Africa much less than other parts of the world and this has been written about in the Lancet and another number of other health journals which have pointed out that for a variety of reasons demography, strong tracing epidemic tracing and quarantining systems climate co-immunities that Africa has simply been less affected by coronavirus but we can also see the kinds of differences in reverse that I've mentioned that southern Africa which has smaller informal economies has been much more badly affected by coronavirus and north Africa as well and the rest of Africa which has large informal economies has been less seriously affected by coronavirus if you can click one more time and then next slide please okay and that has led to very different two minutes okay very different effects on the informal economy as you can see in southern Africa informal economies which are highly dependent on informal labor have really had very little in the way of alternative incomes and have been hit by very heavy lockdowns and very strong state enforcement but in other parts of Africa and we have two slides here from Nigeria and from Kenya where informal economies are larger lockdowns have been less severe and the informal economy has been less interrupted by COVID heavy lockdowns have been less plausible less possible in other parts of Africa simply because livelihoods are so much more dependent on informality and the effect of the disease has been less serious and what has happened is a lot of informal livelihoods have continued although incomes have been badly hit but also that there's been a lot of innovation about ways in which informal actors can go online and adopt kind of remote operation through social media through digital payments through hiring motorcycles to deliver to households both open markets and small enterprises have developed all sorts of innovative forms of operating under COVID and next slide please also the ability of the state to respond to COVID is very different between Southern Africa and West Africa direct cash transfers have been proposed as a solution to vulnerability and in Southern Africa where former settler economies have fairly strong social welfare capacities within the state cash transfers have been more plausible but if you could click again twice in West Africa the capacity to carry out effective population targeted cash transfers has been very weak and this is a picture of cash transfers in Nigeria which were really a one-off physical transfer of cash to people the gearing up of heavy cash transfers is simply not plausible next slide please and we have a situation in which the tendency to homogenize really looks at a one-size-fits-all that's very much focused on cash transfers, digital payments and the gig economy to replace a damaged livelihoods in the informal economy but this is an agenda that's been heavily promoted by IFIs and major donors as a solution for the way that COVID has affected the informal economy and really glosses over important differences in bureaucratic capacity in financial systems and in the needs and aspirations of the informal economy itself and is very much driven by the needs of the corporate sector rather than the needs of the informal economy next slide please this is the last one so we have talk of a new social contract which is focused on small cash transfers as Laura mentioned UNICEF report has pointed out that the cash transfers in response to COVID have been barely 20% of basic needs small cash transfers and precarious informal digital livelihoods which lead to what looks more like a precarious social contract to stabilize precarity rather than to end precarity and lead to decent work can you click three times please whereas what we're glossing over what we're failing to look at is the need for social for labor protection rather than social protection or rather than just social protection or micro and small enterprise credit rather than just social welfare payments often very small ones and for technical support in the informal economy to improve quality to expand employment and to develop their own systems of going online which puts the needs and aspirations of informal actors at the center rather than transforming informal actors into misclassified digital workers at the bottom of value chains or as last mile workers for corporate platforms and bottom of the pyramid initiatives and I'll stop there thank you thank you very much Kate and I want to thank all of four of you for your provocative thoughts so now I'm going to hand over to Marty to chair the next segments thank you François and thank you to the four speakers I thought those were just wonderful informative and provocative and they complemented each other extremely well and gave us a rich agenda for thinking and doing and we now have the pleasure Konal Sen will be the discussant and I also want to thank the speakers and François we're very much on time so Konal will present as a discussant and then we will open up for questions and discussion from the audience which Jenna Harvey will kindly has curated the questions and she will kindly field the questions so Konal please thank you Marty thank you for inviting me to be a discussant for the book I'm going to essentially focus on three what I think are the cross cutting themes of the book which are in my view my three main takeaways but let me first start to say that I thought the book is perhaps the most important book I've read on the inform economy and it has three features so I think it makes it a very important contribution first it is comprehensive in its coverage covering topics ranging from statistics economy labor laws urban planning types of informal workers social policy the role of the state and many other topics that's quite remarkable in its coverage second the contributors themselves are some of the world leading scholars and practitioners on the informal economy and that's again gives a book remarkable richness of insights third is a disciplinary breadth of the book it covers so many different contributions from economics law urban planning sociology and geography among other disciplines now what I would like to do is focus on what I think are the in from my point of view the three important cross cutting themes and I'll explain what they are the first team I think is self-employment as an important category for research and policy analysis the book makes a very important and compelling argument that why we should take self-employment very seriously as we know self-employment is a dominant mode of employment in the informal economy especially low-income countries but understanding informity through the lens of self-employment makes one challenge on the conventional thinking about labor in developing countries for example in economics the dominant model of the labor market that we have is wage employment not self-employment the demand and supply of labor determine the market wage and the volume of employment so how should we view a model of the labor market where the poor are on both sides of the labor market both and demanding labor at the same time the nearest model we might have is the model of the peasant hustle in a substance agriculture but there's one crucial difference the difference is that most of the same employed in the informal economy are producing producing for someone else and not necessarily for themselves self-employment also challenges how we also should look at organization that represent workers the conventional view often think of trade unions trade unions or brebs and workers engaging collective bargaining with employers but with self-employment we should think of other associations that are equally important for example associations that are membership-based groups that are membership that are membership-based groups that do not directly engage in collective bargaining with employees so we need to look at a variety of organizations when we think of self-employment as an important category for analysis and following self-employment we need to think of how the state views its workers and how laws and regulations state and acts may be a serious constraint on the livelihoods of self-employed workers and particularly striking examples is of street vendors that has been already explained very well in the presentations we heard today that street vendors often exclude if the city plans the urban plan assembly and that's a huge failing of the way urban planning works and how the state interacts with self-employed workers the second cross-cutting team of the book which I took from the book was interaction between the state and its agents and informal workers and the conventional view that we often get is that informal workers exist outside the state's reach and the very fact that that these workers do not fall within the ambit of state regulation is its self-definition informality but as the book makes very clear that the state interacts with informal workers in many complex ways take taxation informal enterprises are often seen as those who evade taxes but for many enterprises the tax pressure is at a distance and this enterprise are not those which evade taxes so using taxation as a mechanism to define informality is simply wrong and informal enterprises again as the book makes very clear is all sorts of informal taxes to the state and also are often more disadvantaged by the tax system than formal enterprises as in the case of that the other avenue which we see the state interacting with the informal economy and is very well discussed by Laura first in her presentation is that this is often social policies are themselves are not necessarily pro-worker especially the informal sector so contributory social security policies often leave informal workers out and expanding social protection that is more independent of labor market trajectory is critical and yet we see few examples of that in the developing world and again as an example how the state in its interaction with the informal work with the formal economy simply might get it wrong the third cross cutting team that I took from the book is the heterogeneity of informal employment several employment is different than wage employment and within several employment we might have employers we also might have own account enterprises within which employment we might have automating family workers we may also have informal workers working in form enterprises and I think the book makes a very strong case that we need to move away from previous research as it often tended to blur this important distinctions between wages of employment what we might call upper tier informal employment loyalty informal employment and we need to have a navigated view and the nuances that we have in the informal economy that's really important and a one-size-fits-all approach shouldn't does not take into account this complexity that we see in informal economy that's very relevant for research and policy analysis now I may just end by just making three observational pandemic and informal economy if I may and I think it's based on work that we're doing in wider and in fact the work that we hopefully together we'll put together Vigo in a joint book volume on COVID and informality first point we already seen the pandemic having effects that simply accentuate what we already saw pre-pandemic the work we have doing in Ghana with the partner in Ghana shows that the pandemic had several employed workers more than which employed workers and two it had women workers more than male workers so in already these are the things we've seen which we had seen pre-pandemic but simply we're seeing it in a much more sharper relief second the work that we've done we're doing on Bangladesh where we're using the financial diaries of the poor shows that pandemic is actually even when we think about the economic crisis and informal workers have seen has gone through many many economic crisis in the past the pandemic is remarkable in the way it has affected the informal economy why not only did it allow not only did with corporate the government lockdowns stopped livelihoods workers to go and earn the livelihoods it also led to a situation where it simply stopped them from borrowing from friends and family from going to microfinance institutions and borrowing from them they joined their savings because there was no movement allowed during the government lockdowns so in Bangladesh for example what what informal workers do simply relied on cash that they had saved at home and pretty much they were running it down to the very minimum level at the time the lockdown had finally ended so again the pandemic shows the way it's affected in the informal economy is far more striking in the way it has had compared to previous economic crisis and I think we need to understand that and the final point of the pandemic is that we again saw in the pandemic in the state response when the state got it wrong in the case of India where we had this massive national lockdown and then we saw this remarkably various this site of migrant workers returning back to villages in extremely difficult conditions so again there was an example of how the state got it wrong probably from creating sometimes how such policies that they enacted on on lockdown might affect migrant informal workers let me stop here and I look forward to the discussion ahead thanks thanks so much Kunal that was a really wonderful summary of key themes and key issues and then the conclusion on COVID and its implications we now have an opportunity to have an engagement with the audience the participants and Jenna Harvey will curate that and I just want to tell the speakers that at the end of that Q&A session at around 1045 or 1042 let's say I would like each of the speakers to come in with just one set of concluding thoughts from this broader discussion so Jenna may I turn over to you to field the questions that have come in which you have kindly curated and grouped into groups of questions or the different speakers or perhaps for all speakers and we have until as I said 1042 1043 yeah great thanks Marty and thanks everyone for the wonderful questions we're going to start with a question around formalization so I would direct this perhaps to Marty so the question is do policies to drive formalization ever really work to what extent should policymakers focus political efforts and resources on supporting the absorption of workers into the formal economy versus improving working conditions within the informal economy itself so let me know if you'd like me to read that again I can take a stab but I think we should also ask Kate because she's very much involved in just to say that because formalization is sort of the most common response to informality and nobody quite knows what we're talking about when we say that we go has spent a lot of time trying to parse out what formalization should mean and the perspective of the workers on it so the narrow definition of formalization as either shifting people out of what they're doing informally into formal jobs which is not happening it's not going to happen for many or the other narrow definition which is to register, regulate and tax in formal enterprises without the benefits that would come with formalization both of those I mean the second one is particularly narrow so we have spent a lot of time saying that formalization needs to be thought of as an incremental process addressing to use the ILO words the decent work deficits that informal workers face so increasing opportunities and resources increasing rights at work increasing social protection and increasing voice and social dialogue it should be seen as a more incremental process over time but when it's narrowly defined especially when it's narrowly defined it can have some very contradictory effects so we have a a lens of you know whose interests are being served what is being formalized who gains and who are the winners and losers very important set of questions to apply to all formalization schemes but over to Kate thank you thanks very much I would only add to that that I do agree with the thrust of the question but it's important also to look at a variety of ways that other places have related to informal economies and if you look at East Asia one of the things they focused on is upgrading their informal economy plus the infrastructure and the linkages through which informal actors could improve their capacity to supply to the state to export etc but there is value in strengthening the informal economy improving their technical capacity and improving their ability to employ workers and there are a lot of informal actors that actually are better able to expand and employ more people than some formal firms so encouraging upgrading good quality upgrading not just stabilizing precarity in the informal economy Judith Tendler has some excellent work in that area as well but also improving the extent to which formal sector employment is regulated because one of the great drivers of contemporary informality is the gig economy which relies on evading labor regulations and misclassification of labor in order to be able to expand employment from the formal economy by tapping into the informal economy which downgrades the level of work so I think creating more jobs in the formal economy by insisting that labor regulations by formal employers should be enforced but also expanding the technical capacity in the informal economy to carry out productive and trade activities to engage with formal economy and to improve their quality until they can formalize I think both of those are important dimensions right thank you so much Kate so we have another question here from Maritza about the impact of the COVID crisis on women workers specifically so she asks has there been an analysis done from the perspective of gender about the precarity of women workers and and how this may have increased during COVID-19 Caroline would you like to take a shot at that one sure so all the research evidence does suggest that women have been disproportionately hard hit so much so actually that you know many are referring to this recession not as a as a recession but as C sessions so really spotlighting and this certainly holds and is the case in the informal economy I mean the context I know best is South Africa we know of a hard lockdown we lost 3 million jobs and 2 million of those jobs were women we've also shown that this was equally the case in the informal economy and and also in the recovery process so those who are going back to work it seems as if more men are able to do that and also women are often reporting lower incomes than their male counterparts so this is a profoundly gendered story here with good evidence kind of backing that up thank you Caroline can I add one sentence to that respond right ahead just add I think it's also pivotal to take an intersectional approach here to gender in its intersections particularly with other identities so in the Indian case for example caste and religion would become very specifically important I'll just put a link in the chat to the work of an Indian feminist economist Ashwini Beshpande who has specifically talked about the gender and caste disaggregated impacts on livelihood on COVID so I think those intersections are specific and in each country context it may be race in one place or tribe or ethnicity or region or caste but I think that intersectional disaggregation is key just also in our 12 city study we've looked at the intersection of the different sectors in the informal economy and then women and men within them so it's not just women versus men generally that you have to look within the informal between formal and informal workers and then within the informal economy to really get at what's happening and the pathways of impact right thank you everyone a question now for Laura from Celeste so Celeste asks I would like to know how countries like Mozambique can protect informal workers from the impact of COVID-19 without a clear database of informal workers and with limited fiscal space well that's the great challenge is that so many countries we're facing trying to extend social protection to a group of workers on whom they have no information and with very limited limited money which means that they weren't actually giving the money out to according to the amount of need but according to what that managed to put together from emergency resources and sometimes external donor support and I know Mozambique was one country that that was going through that I mean having the databases is incredibly important and I mean I think we saw that in countries that were able to move really quickly in their responses the fact that they had big databases like Brazil and could go on those databases to get relief out in a relatively I think Brazil the relief was out within three weeks so it is important to build those and have them and certainly there's a large emphasis towards that and it is also part of this idea of the digital welfare state and perhaps one of the sort of positive elements of it although they've been in the many debates about that as well however I do think that there are ways I mean there certainly are ways of countries without those databases managed to gather information and some of them involved working with organizations of informal workers so for example in Sierra Leone this is one of the examples was that you know government agents went out and tried to get you know they decided on who the sort of target groups were for the aid went out and collected information and then double cross-checks that information with organizations of informal workers I think they will also attempt to look at different databases so you know trying to bring together a multiplicity of databases we saw attempts to work with local government databases to pick up information on informal workers to bring that together with data from informal worker organizations also using social security databases and sometimes growing on data from sort of cell phone companies I think in Nigeria there was the attempts and okay both of us that the attempts identify low income people through the amount of money they were spending on their mobile phones so there is a group called faith social protection alternatives for COVID which has collected a whole lot of information on the ways in which countries tried to collect information in a rapid fashion on informal workers and I think there are many debates about the pros and cons of them but I mean it's not impossible but certainly it's much more possible when you when you already have the information and it's certainly one of the demands from informal worker organizations post COVID has been for registration and so I do think that that is that is an important thing to be thinking about the second point was about having no money I mean the fiscal space issue is always going to come up I think there are creative solutions and I mean the Institute for Economic Justice in South Africa for example has done some very interesting work to look at how you can expand fiscal space in creative ways and that doesn't mean that it would work in Mozambique two very different examples but I do think at places often there is an excuse to say we don't have enough money but we do have enough money for X, Y and Z and so sometimes it's more about actually shifting the emphasis to focus on the resources that are there and how they could be better spent but I do think that there is a lot of work to do around increasing fiscal space and I know that one of the big initiatives that's the moment is around the Global Social Protection Fund that is being spearheaded by several organisations at the international level which is arguing for the institution of a fund which would be funded by donor governments as well as big corporates and which would provide money to countries which really are lacking in the fiscal space to provide social protection I think there are questions in a country like Mozambique where oil is and where they are they actually are some resources where the money is not being spent you know being spent in the right way is also a question Thank you, Laura We have now a question for Gotham this is from Sarbeswar wondering what will the impact be of the labour code being introduced by the Government of India on informal workers and especially on construction workers That's a loaded question I mean let I lay my guard straight on the table I think I'm a public signatory to letters that have been very critical of the new labour codes I think that they represent a reduction in the diversity of approaches to labour protections that is a drastic simplification of a very complex and segmented labour market There are some welcome moves in them for example a recognition of platform and gig workers and social security which I think is a very important move but they really kind of contradict and dismantle a lot of the history of hard fought wins of institutions with delivery for worker protection and labour rights and have not been designed in a way that reflects demands that workers have been making for the kinds of recognition and strengthening of labour rights that they want So I think that I think the codes are going to be a new interface with the state I think it's complicated and they will create many intended and unintended consequences but I do really rule a lost opportunity to take on well articulated documented demands from multiple sectors of work organisations for the kinds of recognition that they wanted I think this is very much a view of labour from the state not a representation of labour that it has made for itself and I think it represents a kind of top-down formalization that Marti was referring to that everyone thinks it's a good idea but no one quite knows what it means and I think it goes back to something that many of us are saying about it's not just formalization in a self evident way the terms of recognition matter the content of that formalization matters where it comes from matters so I think the labour codes are the story of them is yet to play out but I do feel like we have lost an opportunity and also made things a little bit more difficult for ourselves with a simplification that has not given us nearly as much as it should have Great, thank you Gautam Now a question for Kate about methodology so Marti asks about the inverse correlation between COVID and informal labour can we know more about the methodology of the study that you presented what conclusion and recommendations would one draw if this inverse relationship is true Thank you, thanks for that I don't think this is so much an issue of methodology as simply a conjunction of facts the fact is Africa has been less affected by coronavirus and it also has larger informal economies as I've said the lower effect has to do with a range of other issues demography pre-existing tracing systems climate co-immunities but I think there is one interesting dimension that is indirectly linked to levels of informality and the extent to which informality is expressed as informal wage labour or informal self-employment and that has to do with the tendency for extensive very close queuing over and over again to get relief I was quite shocked by the pictures from South Africa of the extensive close quartered queuing that took place as people lined up for food packages benefits etc and I think that's something we've seen over and over again in other countries where measures to control COVID actually end up packing people together as they cluster in Heathrow airport to get their passenger locator forms seen to or at cash output points or at relief points there I think there is something that could be looked at more carefully as linking the ways in which efforts to control COVID actually create points of intensification of spreading and that this takes place among populations that are forced into these tight channels of queuing for admission or for benefits great thank you Kate now a question to go back to Caroline this is a question about voice so have street vendors been given enough of a platform to have a voice in the develop in development policies particularly in South Africa I'm going to try and be positive but I can't be I mean and things have got worse over the COVID period so the answer is no definitely not and I know you're particularly interested in the case of Durban where certainly we've seen the spaces where there was constructive engagement with the city council closing off so we're seeing in many of the cities we work across the world and in South Africa that the local authorities that are interfacing with informal vendors and other informal workers are the policing arm of the state and many of the kind of local economic development officials and people who we've had interesting engagements with historically have all receded to their homes and are not in their offices and are fairly inaccessible so there is while at national level there's been some new openings certainly at local level the situation is somewhat bleak obviously is difficult to generalize so you know I'm so struck by Kate's work in West Africa and maybe there's still some spaces where lockdowns haven't been so hard where you know in scanning the terrain in the local authority space those progressive more engaged officials are open to to kind of rethinking things with informal workers so in summary yeah not the not the most positive story thank you Caroline Marty I'll hand back over to you well thank you and thanks for the wonderful questions and for you for curating them and I know we haven't done justice to all of the questions and all of the participants but I thought it would be good if we could go have a go round from the speakers just their final thoughts on what they heard from each other from Kunal and from the Q&A so maybe I will do it in reverse order so we'll have Kate Laura Gotham Caroline so Kate starting with you thanks thanks a lot I was intrigued by a few of the points made by others Gotham referred to the misrecognition of the real conditions in the global south and I think we need to be careful about the extent to which misrecognition of real conditions is allowed to translate into misclassification of workers looking at various forms of remote working at the bottom of value chains at the bottom of as last mile workers in digital bottom of the pyramid initiatives etc let's not move from one form of misrecognition to another a second concern is to think about the geographies of vulnerability there are a number of different geographies here between north and south among different continents between countries that have very different conditions and we should be thinking about how informal economies vary and also about the extent to which informal wage labor the share of informal wage labor relative to informal self self-employment may alter the way that people are affected people working in the informal economy are affected and finally I think that the idea of social protection becoming a blinder to the wider needs of informal economies that emphasizing too much on social protection may actually distract attention from the real needs of informal actors which is labor protection and an expansion of formal jobs rather than having an increasing shift of job creation to the creation of more and more informal jobs at the bottom of global value chains as last mile workers in bottom of the pyramid initiatives and as last mile workers for various forms of gig economy so I think these are things we need to keep very much at the center the front of our mind which is the importance of labor protection and formalization rather than the importance of social protection which simply gives a tiny top up to precarious livelihoods which is important but isn't going to move people to decent work so Laura that's a good segue to you it is I mean I so I'll perhaps follow on from Kate I mean I think that I think social protection is important although my presentation you know might have said that I do think it needs to be seen as part of a package with labor protections obviously improving labor protections is important but I think we can't get away from the fact that coverage by social protection is also critical you know without without that social protection informal workers you know if one incident one health incident without social protection and you are back back to where you started we've seen in you know research we've just done with domestic workers in Asia where there's something like 40 to 60 percent of workers are having to take out a loan to finance a health care visit one health care visit having to pay between one and three weeks of their wages to visit health care to get health care and that takes you you know and and they're not being able to work for for weeks because of of health issues and so I think we can't make too hard to divide between social protection and labor protections they are interrelated and we have to see them as interrelated and I think to divide them up is is part of the problem but I do I do think we also need to be more nuanced about how we talk about social protection I mean the dominant discourse around social protection in the global development world is social protection as cash grant and that's not everything social protection is right a social protection systems can also be redistributed redistributive higher level protections if they are financed and designed in in the right ways which is I think why I was talking about the devil being in the detail and I don't think we've had you know I've had enough time here to perhaps go through that that detail but I do think you know just it's important not to to it's important sorry it's important to see them as interrelated and it's important to to think about social protection as more than cash grants because there's also social services which are critical health childcare and those are also critical to income security thanks all right Gautam yeah you know I I think this is the complexity of the debate you know I I was very struck by some of the things Gage was saying particularly about thinking about this not just as wage employment and labor but as thinking about the necessity for quality and and conditions of work including thinking about moving from beyond the base support I think for me partly I think it's also depends on sort of the experience from where we are I think from urban India the deficiencies in our public infrastructures have been so nakedly laid there that at this point I you know find myself very much also sort of saying that yes I don't want to only have protective social protection that bare net I want transformative social protection I want the things that can enable generational and social mobility and I do think it's important like Laura said not to make that divide sharply though I don't think that's what Kate is saying and I agree with a lot of what she's saying and I think I think this is a tension that's good for us to hold because to me the way I'm seeing it now is that without those investments in let's call them public infrastructures education health and housing particularly you know the most striking data point for me from last year was in that working with the domestic workers union and realizing that 70% of the debt that domestic workers were leaving the lockdown India and the study we did 70% of that debt was unpaid rent because of the disproportionate in fact that those urban conditions had on the balance between income and livelihood so I think for me the approach is somewhere in between those questions it's not social protection as cash transfer income support it's transformative social protection as functioning public institutions on health education and housing and one of the arguments that I think is very important for us is to expand that notion of social protection to include things like housing which it traditionally hasn't and I think the minute we do that we get to a much more comprehensive understanding of bringing together both the work life of the worker but also the home life and I think we can't afford that distinction again in those ways so that's what I've sort of been left with and I'm aware that it's very strongly shaped from my location the urban Indian context and I think you know we all speak from places we know and I think that's an important thing to do that diversity is real thank you Caroline now we come to another urban lens so I think there is something important to to reflect on in that we should never waste a good crisis so I do think that there's new gaps and possibilities there's been a shake-up in who we regard as essential workers there's been creative financing options that you know from quarters that you would never have imagined there's been a real kind of rethink in the economics in the planning in the social protection spaces so you know in many ways it's incumbent on the group in the webinar to really be scanning the advocacy spaces with all the caveats people have raised and you know I always look to Kate's work in particular about also seeing how the big players in the private sector are repositioning themselves and sometimes using the informal economy as a kind of yeah in multiple ways that we've got to kind of keep our lenses there but also see where the new possibilities are and really maximize them so I wanted to just have a little bit more of a positive note thank you Kanaal do you want to add anything just one thing I would say is that you know we talked a lot about social policies a little protection and so on but I think we didn't haven't probably talked enough about structural transformation inclusive structural transformation in other words ways to get the poor out of where they are either in terms of increasing the livelihoods in the informal economy or perhaps moving into the formal sector though I myself am not too optimistic about that so I think that's also important how can we make those who are working in the informal economy more productive and have more better paid earnings with higher earnings and that's a very important aspect of this of this debate right well thank you all so much and I just would add a footnote on this social protection and labor protection just to say that labor protection in many of these economies really doesn't cover many workers because of the high rates of self-employment so we need to think of the equivalent of labor protection for the self-employed and in the urban context that brings in many of the issues that Caroline and Gotham have been talking about about infrastructure and tenure and access to public space so we need we need to reconceptualize what labor protection means for the self-employed as we mentioned at the outset Sally Rover was to have given the closing reflections but she had a family emergency yesterday so I'm going to do the closing reflections and I just want to say that we are at a particular moment with COVID and we know that COVID has had this disproportionate impact on informal workers and I want to pick up on something that Kunal said about this economic crisis and previous economic crisis crises this is the first one because we've been tracking it at least from the Asian financial crisis and the great recession this is the first one where a lot of observers have focused on the impact on informal workers we have done so during the Asian and the great recession but mainly most observers assumed the informal economy was this proverbial cushion to fall back on for formal workers who lost their jobs and little if any attention was paid to the economic impacts of the earlier economic crises on informal workers and their livelihoods so this is an important a really important moment to seize as several speakers including Caroline have talked about and the COVID crisis has exposed all of these pre-existing structural fault lines in labor markets and in the policy and legal environment and exposed what I call the three eyes of informal work the inequities the injustices and the indignities of being informally employed and I think Martin also spoke about this the COVID crisis has also shown a spotlight on the role of informal workers in provision of essential goods and services I think there's a ripe moment for us to see all of the people who are the frontline health workers how many of them actually have health insurance themselves I think a lot of the frontline health workers are informally employed and we certainly know in the food and the food delivery and all of that that our essential goods and services are being provided by informal workers and I think what is interesting we've heard about in the speakers is that it's also shown a spotlight on the policing role of government because of these restrictions that have been imposed in the lockdowns so the policing role of government has increased and the protective arm of government was exposed for all of its weaknesses because of the lack of workers being registered the lack of digital access you couldn't even go to your banks if the money came through a bank I mean a lot of the weaknesses of the protective arm of the government was exposed so it's a really important moment that we need to seize as it offers both opportunities and threats and you know I wake up every morning as sort of a Pollyanna and see the opportunities and I go to sleep every night worried about the threats so the opportunities for transformation are there if we seize them and I you know I think this holding on to what we've gained in a way through COVID is important and so the opportunities are for transformation are to recognize informal workers and their contributions to economies and societies to integrate informal workers into the recovery plans and this should include we were talked quite a bit about this within wego is rebuilding on fair terms the supply chains for the goods and services provided by informal workers and I like Kate's notion of not just stabilizing precarity but trying to improve the ways that informal workers are integrated into these supply chains it's an opportunity to extend social protection to informal workers with all the caveats that were raised by Laura and then by Kate about how narrowly social protection might be defined and what we really want is structural transformation of social protection it also offers an opportunity to include the informal worker leaders in policy making and rule setting because what we found around the world is that the organizations of informal workers played a huge role in channeling well demanding channeling facilitating government food aid or government cash aid and they became relief agencies overnight and their community leaders which they have because they're membership based organizations the community leaders at the neighborhood level were amazing relief agents and they were giving of their own rations to more needy households they also showed a huge amount of empathy and compassion so we need to seize on that but you know like Caroline I can also see the amazing threats that we are facing in this moment because you know there was a book that Gautam will know long ago that was written called Everyone Loves a Famine and it was because you know with famine relief comes all opportunities for getting cuts and bribes and benefiting from famine relief so everyone is fighting for the recovery plans right and capital is much better organized than labor to take advantage of these these plans so there is this real danger that informal workers will continue to be excluded like they were from much of the relief from the recovery schemes there's also a real danger that they're going to be permanently displaced from their places of work especially if they work in public spaces and we've seen more evictions we've seen destructions of markets and the infrastructure at markets of street vendors and there's always a threat that more public space will be privatized that happens all the time there's increased police harassment the police have been emboldened during this time with all the restrictions and the question is what are they going to go back to in terms of their policing behavior and there's a real risk of deepened discrimination and stigmatization of informal workers as vectors of the virus so we are concerned that there are three possible scenarios going forward one is the bad old deal that we return to the old normal which was really not very good for informal workers but the one that we're really concerned about is a worse new deal were any gains that have been made by the informal workers will be reversed and I think this is a real threat and we have to be very vigilant about it but I do think we also have the opportunity for a better new deal if we hold on to some of these gains that have been made if you will during COVID you know like the new terms and categories of workers that Gautam showed in his slide and if we can make more out of the digital divide and the digital welfare state that Laura talked about and the weaknesses and the social registries if we just take advantage of the gaps and also the understanding that came with COVID and build on that but a better new deal for informal workers really does require a paradigm shift from stigmatizing all informal workers as a problem to recognizing that most informal workers contribute to the economy and to society so it really is our hope that the reflections in the volume and in today's webinar will contribute to this paradigm shift and to a better new deal for informal workers and I wanted to end by saying that the two guiding principles of the global movement of informal workers that we go is related to in a way is one is do no harm and the other is nothing for us without us so do no harm is really to get the state and its agents to stop evicting confiscating goods harassing policing and all of that and the nothing for us without us motto is that the informal worker leaders from the organizations should be invited to the policy table and neither of those requires fiscal space both of those require a change in mindsets and attitudes and I think if we can get going on that then other things will follow so I would like to close the event by just thanking giving a round of thanks and first to the co-host um Ford Foundation and Martin UNU wider and Kunal the speakers Caroline Skinner Gautam Pan Laura Alfers Kate Maher great panel our discussant Kunal Sen again and I want to thank all the participants you were wonderfully patient that we couldn't address all your questions but you fielded a lot of really important questions to the interpreters to the wego communications team behind the the scenes making sure all this happened to Jenna Harvey who who opened the event and fielded the questions and to Francoise Karey she's a marvelous co-editor who pays attention to every detail I'm less of a detail person she was great to work with she didn't let any detail fall through the gaps and I want to thank Sally Rover in absentia Sally Rover the international coordinator of wego who so wanted to be here today and who has could contributed so much to wego's research to the volume which we launched today and to leading wego so thank you all take care stay well thank you bye bye thank you bye