Connections in Accra, Ghana
WIEGO held its annual Team retreat and Board meeting meetings in October in Accra, the capital of Ghana, a country in which informal employment accounts for as much as 90 per cent of all employment. At concurrent Board and Team meetings, the focus was on “Maximizing the Moment,” a theme chosen because increased funding has allowed for the acceleration and expansion of WIEGO activities, especially those in support of the membership-based organizations (MBOs) of the poor. This comes at a time when a confluence of issues and events has caused a global spike in interest in employment, both formal and informal.
The time in Ghana was enriched by field visits, guided by informal workers, to markets and indigenous caterers’ chop bars where Board and Team members learned about the local context.(Read a worker's story.) Afterward, Dorcas Ansah (who helped coordinate WIEGO’s Occupational Health & Safety project in Ghana) facilitated a debrief that explored some of the issues related to the governance and regulation of informal places of work in Accra. That evening, WIEGO, the Ghana Trades Union Congress (GTUC), and the Institute for Local Government Studies (ILGS) hosted a Policy Dialogue. Panellists included officials from the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), from the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, and from the Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare. The event was attended by representatives of informal worker organizations, trade unions and others with an interest in the informal economy in Ghana. Ideas and experiences were exchanged about how best to include informal workers in urban plans and policies.
The ILGS has been WIEGO's partner in the Occupational Health and Safety project in Ghana. A few days after the Policy Dialogue, WIEGO learned that ILGS, which is developing a focus on providing information and training to informal workers, has been invited by the Ghanaian Government to contribute to local development planning with special input on the informal economy. This is a crucial component of the government’s current decentralization process. ILGS Director Dr. Esther Ofei-Abooagye has asked WIEGO to collaborate on this work.
A second exciting outcome of the meetings was a decision taken by WIEGO to focus in an integrated way on informal employment issues within a country. Just in the early stages of planning, this project will bring together and build on the many threads of WIEGO`s already significant “presence” in the country. This includes strong trade union and other institutional links and connections with researchers and civil servants. As well, two of our founding board members (Grace Bediako and William Steel) and two of our current board members (Kofi Asamoah and Rudith King) live in Ghana, and both the GTUC and the StreetNet Ghana Alliance are Institutional Members.
WIEGO is engaged with Ghanaian organizations in a range of activities, including:
- an Occupational Health & Safety (OHS) project in Ghana in concert with the Institute of Local Government Studies (ILGS)
- an analysis of national data on informal employment in Ghana
- a WIEGO Social Protection Case Study on the Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme
- a Law and the Informal Economy Project
- collaboration with the GTUC in support of a Liberia street vendor alliance (see the 2011 workshop report)
- documentation of a promising example of fair trade through a commissioned case study of a cocoa cooperative
In collaboration with the GTUC, WIEGO is also about to start a three-year research project to monitor the state of the urban informal economy in Accra.
By working across several programmes and projects in one national context, WIEGO hopes to explore intersections such as how labour law, urban planning and OHS might work together, and how collaborations between sectoral organizations might create synergies that lead to wide-ranging shifts in attitude and policy at the local and national level.
