In this episode, we start a new building block of our social protection solar system with the first part of the topic on delivery and provision of social protection. We will be looking at the innovations in the delivery of services and cash grants, focusing on informal workers and on the role that informal workers organizations might have in improving access to these workers by facilitating the last mile delivery of services or benefits.
To open this block, we will turn to Africa and look into three cases of provision of child care services. First, we go to South Africa, to talk to Richard Dobson about the pop-up child care facility in the Warwick Junction market, in Durban. Richard is an architect and co-founder of the NGO Asiye eTafuleni. Next, we move to Accra, in Ghana, to talk to Dorcas Ansah, WIEGO’s Accra Focal city coordinator. We discussed the guidelines for implementing child care facilities in the Ghanaian capital markets and the plans for expanding the initiative.
We finish our tour in Rwanda, where the market vendors association SITRIECY is also implementing child care facilities in the Kigali markets. We talked to SITRIECY’s secretary-general and StreetNet International treasurer Jeanette Nyiramassengesho. She explained their approach to combine provision of child care for informal workers’ children in markets with the creation of a community savings group.
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Learn more
- WIEGO: Child Care in Markets: An E-Book https://www.wiego.org/research-library-publications/child-care-in-markets/
- Working in Warwick: Including Street Traders in Urban Plans
https://www.wiego.org/research-library-publications/working-warwick-including-street-traders-urban-plans/
- WIEGO - Child Care in Markets project: https://www.wiego.org/project/child-care-markets/
- Guidelines and Standards for Day-Care Centres in and around Markets in Ghana, by Susan Sabaa, Dela Quarshie-Twum https://www.wiego.org/advocacy-worker-education-resources/guidelines-and-standards-day-care-centres-and-around-markets-ghana/
- Webinar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn9niHLL8vI
- About Asiye eTafuleni https://aet.org.za/about-asiye-etafuleni/our-story/
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34:22
#42 Social Dialogue and Social Protection for Informal Workers
In the fourth and last episode of the governance building block we dive into the discussion of social dialogue and social protection for informal workers.
But what does social dialogue actually mean? How can in be used as a tool to improve social protection schemes to better include informal workers? What are the aspects we should look at when analysing these spaces and what are the main barriers workers in the informal employment face to access them? To help us understand these questions we invited two guests.
First, we are going to talk to Jane Barrett, who will set the stage and introduce us to the main aspects of social dialogue, the power dynamics and how these spaces should work. Jane is the former Organization and Representation programme director at WIEGO. She has extensive experience in collective bargaining, membership recruitment and organizing, trade union membership and leadership education, research and policy advocacy.
In the second part of the episode we talk to Aura Sevilla, who will talk about the concrete social dialogue experiences in Southeast Asia. Aura is the Southeast Asia focal point of the Social Protection programme at WIEGO. She has been working in a study report analysing six countries in the region: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand.
*Our theme music is Focus from AA Aalto (Creative Commons)
References
Informal workers and dialogue for social protection, Social Protection Responses to COVID-19 #3, by Annie Devenish and Cyrus Afshar https://www.wiego.org/social-protection-responses-covid-19/
Social Dialogue for the Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy, by Global Deal https://www.wiego.org/research-library-publications/social-dialogue-transition-informal-formal-economy/
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41:19
#41 Governance, Social Protection And Law
In the third episode of the governance building block we move on to the discussion of legal frameworks and social protection.
How can legal provisions of participation, access to information, transparency and equality be leveraged to include those workers into social protection systems? What are the main legal frameworks? How does administrative justice work for this end and how it can be used a tool for informal workers in their advocacy efforts? To help us understand these questions we invited Pamhidzai Bamu.
Pamhi holds a masters and a PhD in Labour Law from the University of Cape Town. She is currently the President of the African Labour Law Society. She has consulted for the International Labour Organisation and the Southern African Development Community on various projects. She is currently the Africa Coordinator of WIEGO’s Law Programme.
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References
Social Protection for Self-Employed Informal Workers in Sub-Saharan Africa: A rights-based assessment of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis https://www.wiego.org/publications/social-protection-self-employed-informal-workers-sub-saharan-africa-rights-based
R202 - Social Protection Floors Recommendation, 2012 (No. 202) https://normlex.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:3065524
C189 - Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189) https://normlex.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C189
African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights
https://au.int/en/treaties/african-charter-human-and-peoples-rights
*Our theme music is Focus from AA Aalto (Creative Commons)
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30:22
#40 Political Economy Of Digital Social Protection In Mozambique
In the second episode of the governance building block we continue to discuss the issues surrounding digitization and social protection. This time, we take a political economy perspective to understand the interests, ideas, actors and policy implications of digitization. To help us understand this complex issue, we invited again Ruth Castel-Branco,
Ruth is a Senior Researcher at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of Witwatersrand. Her research is focused on the casualization of labour, worker organizing and the redistributive role of the state. She has studied the case of Mozambique, and shared some of her findings with us in this talk.
References
Improvising an E-state: The Struggle for Cash Transfer Digitalization in Mozambique, by Ruth Castel-Branco. Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dech.12665
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35:32
#39 Governance And Digitization Of Social Protection
In this episode, we start a new building block of our social protection solar system with the first episode on the topic of governance. We have invited two guests to lay the groundwork for this block, to help us understand social protection governance, as well as the new concerns and potentials brought by digitization. We start with Tony Roberts. Tony is a researcher based at the Institute of Development Studies on the campus of the University of Sussex in the UK. He has worked on the use of digital technologies in social justice organisations since 1988. As a founder of the African Digital Rights Network his research focuses on the human rights implications of introducing digital technologies. He will share some of the findings of his report on digitization and social protection.
On the second part, we talked to Gbenga Sesan. Gbenga is the Executive Director of Paradigm Initiative, a non-profit organisation that works with digitization and data protection rights in Africa. He will bring some concrete cases of how digitization affects informal workers.
Globally, 2 billion people work in the informal economy. This means that 61% of workers rely on work that offers little pay and few protections. Women informal workers, such as domestic workers, home-based workers, street vendors and waste pickers are at the base of the economic pyramid with the highest risk of poverty. Public policies and social protection schemes often do not consider these workers, leaving them vulnerable to income losses and struggling to cope after an event or shock. In this monthly podcast we will discuss some of the most pressing issues related to social protection from the perspective of informal workers, including debates around the future of work, demographic changes and the informal economy, as well as social services, like child care and health that can protect informal workers’ incomes. Subscribe to the “Informal Economy Podcast: Social Protection” to learn more about WIEGO’s cutting-edge research and hear from informal workers organisations about the debates, policies, successes and challenges they face in accessing and reforming social protection systems.
South Africa