WIEGO Blog

How close collaboration between homeworker organizations and key allies secured a huge victory: for the first time, EU legislation on corporate sustainability will protect the human rights of all supply chain workers, including homeworkers.

If governments cannot create jobs, yet criminalize citizens who create their own jobs, they risk social instability. Yet governments routinely refuse to engage with informal vendors to discuss an enabling legal framework to regulate their use of public space. Instead, governments see vendors and other workers in the informal economy as a source of income only.

Dakar’s street vendors have united in the PASI platform to assert their rights and propose alternative solutions to the evictions and relocations imposed by the authorities.

The launch of e-Shram, a national database of workers who earn a living in the informal economy, holds lessons for implementation going forward in India, and for governments in other countries interested in developing similar schemes.

Renana Jhabvala, co-founder of SEWA and former chair of WIEGO, talks about the historical relationship between both organizations, and the positive impact that collecting data and statistics has had on women’s work in India and beyond.