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 acceleratorlabs.undp.org.

Attributes of Informality

What drives/ motivates people to work informal jobs?

For many, informality is a pragmatic opportunity as no other alternatives are available when people do not hold a formal education, are unemployed and are living in vulnerable socio-economic situations. Their main motivation in getting an informal job is to survive, earn a living and for a few, the hope of a safer future. Policy prescriptions often focus on protection for all workers, including those in precarious and/or informal settings.

The challenge is that informality is often entrenched such that it is not represented in data, and those in informal jobs do not want exposure to policy out of fear of repercussion. In order to open up policy discussions, this entry is meant to document motivations to understand drivers as a preliminary exercise.

Discussions via learning circles among the UNDP Accelerator Labs unearthed drivers for informality, namely four perceptions beyond exigency: 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 AmericaTemplate:Citation needed. 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. A typical example of these self-organized groups are informal waste pickers or informal market vendors/food producers.

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.

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

Facts & figures

Zimbabwe has the world’s second largest informal economy with over 60% of the population relying on informal activities for their source of income. <source seed content from Zimbabwe blog>. According to the Zimbabwe 2014 Labour Force Survey, 94.5% of employment in the country is informalized. Source: UNDP Zimbabwe blog

Amadou to fill in with few more African examples.