Universal Health Coverage (UHC) has become a rallying call for the global health movement and is now officially encapsulated within the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 3.8: Achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all. A major challenge for governments around the world has been to ensure that UHC reaches informal workers, who make up over 60 percent of the global workforce and are at higher risk of poverty than workers in the formal economy.
Home-based workers, who work to produce goods in their own homes, are a particularly vulnerable sector of the informal workforce.
The good news: in Southeast Asia, where informal employment makes up almost 80 percent of total employment, governments have recognized this problem and are taking some important steps towards extending UHC to informal workers.