Informal women workers in Delhi. Photo credit: Rashmi Choudhary
For over a decade WIEGO has supported a local network of worker organizations representing domestic workers, home-based workers, street vendors and waste pickers in Delhi. This is with a view to secure increased rights and protections and supportive policies.
Delhi is on the front line of the climate change crisis, with extreme heat and air pollution that pose enormous threats to health and livelihoods, especially for workers in informal employment. WIEGO is documenting the impacts of the climate change crisis on workers, and supporting local partners in developing adaptive strategies (such as cooling infrastructure) and advocating on the basis of these proposals.
All informal workers face climate change and it impacts their livelihood – reduced income as well as reduced hours of work. Workers talk about fatigue and dehydration, excessive sweating, and general mental stress and anxiety.
Our urban imagination needs to be reconfigured, not only to ensure water, shade, and rest–eat–leisure spaces to mitigate heat wave impacts, but also to find more ways of advancing workers’ rights in cities
A central focus of WIEGO in Delhi is to facilitate spaces for diverse urban stakeholders (academics, practitioners, worker organizations and community groups) and social movements (in housing rights, environmental justice, and workers’ rights, among others) to come together and find common cause. WIEGO supports these groups to mainstream a focus on informal livelihoods in all their respective areas of work. This has resulted in impactful advocacy campaigns, such as the Main Bhi Dilli (“I too am Delhi”) campaign, which produced a People’s Plan for use in advocacy in the 2021–2041 master planning process in the city.
WIEGO supports partners such as Mahila Housing Trust in pursuing innovative strategies to improve working conditions for home-based workers. We have used learnings from these practical experiences to develop a policy agenda for supporting workplace-homes – including guidelines for developing appropriate zoning regulations and infrastructure upgrading.
Until the Covid-19 pandemic, home-based work was comparatively rare for people of the Global North, but commonplace in the Global South. Covid resulted in a sea change with huge implications in both North and South, but especially in the North. In this issue the editors bring together contributions from both North and South to contribute to an understanding homeworking in the post-Covid era and its architectural/urban manifestations.
In absence of any overarching policy protecting them, home-based workers are one of the worst affected in the coronavirus pandemic.
There are an estimated 4.92 million informal workers in Delhi, India, comprising over 80% of the city’s total workforce. This report...
Read MoreWe coordinate and support action research, statistical and budget analysis, and good-practice documentation to ensure workers have a strong evidence base to support their advocacy.
We build capacity and organizational strength through skills training, leadership development, coaching and overall support to membership-based organizations of workers in informal employment in areas they identify as priorities.
We walk alongside workers organizations to co-create innovative proposals for policy change, drawing on both lived experiences and technical knowledge of their sectors. We bring together workers’ organizations and allies in advocacy efforts to engage government and other stakeholders on these proposals and fight for reforms.
WIEGO does groundbreaking statistical work to help policymakers and workers understand the size and characteristics of the informal economy in cities across the world.
Access the latest statisticsof people who work in India are in informal employment
of women who work in Delhi’s urban areas are in informal employment
of women who work in Delhi’s urban areas work as street vendors or market traders
