UNIFEM's Progress of the World's Women 2005: Women, Work, and Poverty
In September 2004, UNIFEM asked WIEGO to write the 2005 issue of Progress of the World's Women - UNIFEM's biennial flagship publication - on the topic of "Women, Work, and Poverty". Officially launched at the United Nations on September 16, 2005, to coincide with the Millennium Development Summit, the publication focuses on employment, especially informal employment, as a key pathway to reducing poverty and gender inequality. It begins by looking at the totality of women's work, the linkages among the different types of women's work (paid and unpaid, formal and informal), and how these linkages tend to situate women in the more insecure forms of informal employment. It then provides the latest data on the size and composition of the informal economy in different regions and compares official national data on average earnings and poverty risk across different segments of both the informal and formal workers in several countries. It also looks at the costs and benefits of informal work and provides a strategic framework, with promising examples, for organizing informal workers and promoting decent work for informal workers, especially women.
The publication involved inter-agency collaboration, with financial and technical support to UNIFEM from both UNDP and ILO. It also involved active collaboration between the WIEGO team of authors, a panel of external advisors, and the UNIFEM editorial and publication team. And it involved significant collaboration within the WIEGO network. The authors were:
- Marty Chen, Coordinator of WIEGO
- Joann Vanek, Director of WIEGO's Statistics programme
- Francie Lund, Director of WIEGO's Social Protection programme
- James Heintz, Assistant Research Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and newly-appointed Research Coordinator of WIEGO's Statistics programme
- Renana Jhabvala, National Coordinator of SEWA and Member of WIEGO's Steering Committee
- Chris Bonner, Director of WIEGO's Organization and Representation programme
- Debbie Budlender, Community Agency for Social Enquiry, Cape Town, South Africa
- Diane Elson, University of Essex, UK and The Levy Institute of Bard College, USA
- Guadalupe Espinosa, Institute of Social Development, Mexico City, Mexico
- Noeleen Heyzer, UNIFEM, New York, USA
- Selim Jahan, UNDP, New York, USA
- Francesca Perucci, UN Statistics Division, New York, USA
- Anne Trebilcock, ILO, Geneva, Switzerland
- the segmentation of the labour force, both formal and informal, by employment status and sex and
- at average earnings and risk of poverty for each segment by sex.
- Canada: Sylvia Fuller and Leah F. Vosko, York University, Toronto
- Costa Rica: Jesper Venema, ILO Regional Office, Panama City
- Egypt: Mona Amer, University of Cairo and Alia El-Mahdi, University of Cairo, Cairo
- El Salvador: Edgar Lara Lopez and Reinaldo Chanchan, FUNDE (Fundacion Nacional para el Desarrollo), San Salvado with Sarah Gammage, newly-appointed Research Coordinator of WIEGO's Global Markets programme
- India: Jeemol Unni, ILO consultant, National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector, New Delhi
- South Africa:Daniela Casale, Colette Muller and Dorrit Posel, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban
Others in the WIEGO network who were consulted on the occupational cases featured in Chapter 4 or the good practice cases featured in Chapters 5 and 6 include: Kofi Asamoah, Stephanie Barrientos, Ela Bhatt, Mirai Chatterjee, Nicole Constable, Dan Gallin, Pat Horn, Elaine Jones, Paula Kantor, Martin Medina, Winnie Mitullah, Carlos Mireles Morales, Pun Ngai, Fred Pieterson, Jennefer Sebstad, and Lynda Yanz.