Perceptions and Motivations

This is a page on perceptions and motivations of informality.

Learning Circle 1

On March 24, 2021, the UNDP Accelerator Labs hosted its first learning circle on informality to address the following key learning questions:

- How do informal workers see themselves?

- What are the motivations for doing this work?

These reflections come from 16 UNDP Accelerator Labs (Colombia, Nepal, Uganda, Guinea, Bangladesh, Morocco, Guatemala, Peru, Cambodia, Philippines, Cabo Verde, El Salvador, Paraguay, Mauritius, Nigeria, Panama, Libya, Barbados, Viet Nam). The documentation of this session forms the basis of insights meant to unpack the drivers and dynamics of informality, and is supplemented iterative learning from continuous reflection available at https://acceleratorlabs.undp.org/content/acceleratorlabs/en/home/blogs.html?tagid=language:English

Attributes of Informality

What drives/ motivates people to work informal jobs?

The learning circle identified four traits that motivate people to work in informal settings: flexibility, freedom, agility, and self-organization. From our Lab members’ experiences, informality enables flexibility. For example, people work in informal settings to be able to also study, start a business, take care of children, or do household chores. This insight may partly explain why informality is predominantly associated with female workers in Africa and Latin America. Freedom in this context is one’s opportunity to earn multiple income streams while agility was illustrated as one’s ability to adapt to new needs, set up a business faster, or not having to deal with bureaucracy. That agility, in many cases, leads to self-organization, where informal workers integrate and collaborate amongst each other they are able to adapt quicker and pivot their services to market needs.

Early signs tell us that one’s motivation to pursue informal jobs may vary depending on one’s age, where younger workers value the agility and freedom informality brings, while older and predominantly female workers value the flexibility.

In general, we’ve seen that the insights shared can pertain to various types of informality such as informal businesses, self-employment, and informal workers. We saw patterns of how the positive traits of the informal sector are mostly associated with self employment and informal businesses. Informal workers in vulnerable settings seem to not benefit as much from the positive aspects of informality.

For many workers, often the majority of them in developing countries (e.g. 60% in Zimbabwe), informality is a pragmatic choice in the sense that no other alternatives are available when people do not hold a formal education, are unemployed and are living in a vulnerable socio-economic situation. Their main motivation in getting an informal job is to survive, earn a living and for a few, the hope of a safer future. It is not seen as a desperate act but rather as a strategic one fueled by the need to feed one’s family and send children to school.

Perceptions of Formality

How do informal workers perceive more formal employment, structures, etc? What is perceived negatively in formality, and by whom?

Informal sector workers do not necessarily perceive themselves as informal. Hence the binary categorization of formal/informal is not always an appropriate approach to understand the perceptions of formality.

We cannot also assess informality only as employment. It is also an ecosystem of services that add value to the market, to its citizens and has a key role in satisfying needs unmet by the traditional market and/or government services.

This excerpt is also potentially relevant to: Equity