Assessing the scale of women’s informal work: An industry outlook for 14 developing countries

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.
Currently, the harmonized labour force statistics available at country level deliver only a limited contribution to the understanding of the opportunities and constraints that, in particular, women in agriculture face in their efforts to attain decent work and a decent living. For various reasons, leaving out employment data on agriculture may well diminish the possibilities of assessing these perspectives. First, it hampers the assessment of the specific conditions for the structural transformation of national economies that does justice to the role of employment. The most important processes here are related to the shift of employment from agriculture, with large shares of low-productive, own-account workers and contributing family members, to the manufacturing industry and in particular to the services sector. Our statistical exercise combined with industry information on the commerce sector suggests that in quite some developing countries the perspectives for notably (young) women on decent and sustainable employment linked with the shift away from agriculture may be much less rosy than value-added and productivity calculations may indicate. Better employment data at country and industry levels may clarify prospects and problems of particular
Second, the lack of adequate national employment data hampers insight in the constraints of this transformation in terms of the lack of infrastructural provisions and basic services. For example, overviews of the situation of women in agriculture in sub-Saharan countries clarify that the persistent lack of such provisions and services turns out to be a major factor in the continuation of conditions of poverty and food insecurity where majorities of women are locked in; even more so if unbalanced transformation takes off and large-scale commercial agriculture starts to emerge. Time and time again, most of the burden of such developments is on girls and women (cf. Van Klaveren et al., 2009c, 2009e, 2009f, for South Africa, Malawi and Zambia; Van Klaveren and Tijdens, 2012: 117‒19). Socio-economic policies aiming at decent work and decent living inclusive of the interests of girls and women, cannot do without adequate statistics. Such statistics should capture their large contributions to the informal economy, including in terms of time use. Here integration of labour force survey data with data from household survey and time-use surveys may be worthwhile. Our research also suggests that there is merit in the expansion of surveying employment status, wherever possible connected with surveying coverage of social security and infrastructural provisions. Such surveys may generate more shaded pictures of formality/informality, for example by using an informality index.