Women's Informal Work in 14 Developing Countries: Industry Outlook

Abstract

This chapter examines the difficulty of assessing the scale of informal employment from a gender perspective: as we show, the widespread paucity of adequate data of sufficient quality is a major obstacle. This, in turn, has significant implications for effective policy-making for the informal economy generally, and from a gender perspective in particular. We focus on industries where large shares of women workers may be assumed, in particular agriculture; wholesale and retail; and hotels, restaurants and catering. Evidence is presented from 14 countries covered in the 2008-11 Decisions for Life (DFL) project, a major trade union project aiming at empowering adolescent girls and young women in work in which the authors were involved as researchers. This project covered the large countries Brazil, India and Indonesia, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, and the sub-Saharan African countries Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.