An ongoing project to map social protection systems as they interact with informal employment globally, the aim is to build an online knowledge repository that can be used for knowledge sharing, analysis and policy development.
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A social protection system incorporates various actors, processes, platforms and institutions working together to ensure coverage, adequacy, comprehensiveness, sustainability and good governance. Strengthening each part of the system and understanding the relationships between them is essential for systemic change.
To better include workers in informal employment into social protection, we explore the system’s building blocks and recognize good practices and challenges in their operation. Understanding workers’ experiences in navigating current systems is necessary to make meaningful and inclusive reforms, and this is a central focus of our work.
Our mapping includes brief, accessible summaries of the global literature related to each of the key building blocks, focusing on the inclusion of workers in informal employment. These summaries critically assess both challenges and successes and are available in English, French and Spanish. For each block we produce at least three podcasts, highlighting grass-roots experiences with social protection systems. These podcasts feature interviews with membership-based organizations, support organizations and other allies.
In the first block of the systems mapping, we dealt with the financing of social protection schemes. Finance is particularly challenging in the case of workers in informal employment, who in many cases don’t have an employer to share the burden of the costs of health care, pensions and child care.
This block contains four podcast episodes (and one bonus episode in Spanish) and one briefing note, with a literature review on the topic. We opened with a general discussion on Innovations in Financing, talked about Rajasthan’s experiment to finance gig workers’ social protection, and closed with alternative ways to finance social protection for waste pickers in India and in Argentina.
Go to Podcast EpisodesIn the second building block, we look at registration. Is digital technology helping to include workers in informal employment into social protection schemes or is it creating new barriers?
This block contains three podcast episodes and one briefing note, with a literature review on the topic. The podcasts begin with a regional overview of the registration challenges for domestic workers in Latin America. The second and third episodes explored registration and digitalization in Cambodia and South Africa respectively.
Go to Podcast Episodes