Paper short abstract:

With increasing female enterprises in India, we examine whether technology adoption can reduce gender productivity gap for enterprises. We find ICT use for marketing, communication and finance significantly increases productivity of female-owned informal enterprises, overcoming traditional barriers.

Paper long abstract:

South Asia has one of the lowest female labour force participation (LFP) rates globally. India has seen a gradual increase in female LFP in the last decade, largely driven by self-employment. Interestingly, while a larger proportion of self-employed women are unpaid workers, the share of women enterprise-owners increased at a higher rate between 2017-18 and 2023-24, though the change is not uniform across states. We hypothesise that increasing productivity of small-businesses owned by women could be crucial in narrowing the gender employment gap. We particularly examine whether access to and usage of modern digital technology has a higher productivity-increasing effect on female-owned enterprises. This study contributes to the literature on low female LFP, entrepreneurship and technology adoption, and regional disparities.

In India, over 90 percent of the firms are informal. We utilise nationally representative Unincorporated Enterprise dataset (2022-23) with granular information on ICT adoption for over 400,000 firms. Though the proportion of internet users is low, number of internet subscribers has grown by 14 percent annually in the last decade.

The results suggest that average productivity of female-owned enterprises is approximately 40% of that of males. However, adopting ICT for marketing, communication, and finance can significantly narrow the productivity gap. Sector-specific analysis of apparel manufacturing and retail trade indicates that ICT adoption enables female entrepreneurs to access new markets, streamline financial transactions, and facilitate procurement of raw materials. This can help overcome traditional barriers for women entrepreneurs, like limited spatial mobility, thereby enhancing their productivity and encouraging female LFP.

Paper short abstract:

I present the preliminary findings of my ethnographic research and show how technocratic and bourgeois imaginations of urban ecologies are dispossessing informal waste workers and denying them access to waste and waste work(spaces), and how they are navigating these precarious urban ecologies.

Paper long abstract:

Indian cities are transitioning towards more modernist, techno-managerial and capital-intensive approaches to urban environmentalism. While these transitions are deemed normative pathways to address the ‘polycrisis’, these depoliticised and technocratic imaginaries and practices primarily cater to the normative imaginations of the urban bourgeoisie, and, at times, become violent and exclusionary for the urban labouring poor. Despite informal waste workers’ crucial, effective and efficient contributions to reproducing the desired city(scapes), their knowledge, labour and socio-spatial practices are delegitimised, their questions, claims and contestations are rendered invisible from urban ecological imaginations, and they scarcely get featured in urban environmental scholarship. This paper draws on a multi-sited ethnographic study of waste infrastructures that I employed in Patna as part of my PhD research. I present my preliminary findings, arguing how informal waste workers are subject to elitist and casted urban sensibilities, imaginaries, infrastructures and practices, which, although fetishise and benefit from their cheap, dirty, exploitative, and precarious labour, continue to dispossess them of their labour and livelihoods and deny their claims to city-zenship. Foregrounding their everyday labour and lives, my research critically examines how informal waste workers embody, contest and navigate the changing waste infrastructures, drawing on their intersectional identities, social relations and subjectivities, and using the precarious temporality of the waste infrastructures to their advantage. This research aims to contribute to the understanding of 'informality' as a critical analytic site to better understand how in this ‘polycrisis’, informal workers contest and navigate uneven, unjust, uncertain, and unfree urban ecologies in their everyday lives.

Paper short abstract:

This paper assesses how employment dynamics within the informal economy impact workers during global crises. It draws on research conducted by WIEGO and partner organizations on the cost of living crisis and ongoing climate change monitoring work in Bangkok, Thailand.

Paper long abstract:

Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) has long mapped the differentiated impact of crises on specific groups of workers in urban informal employment. More recently, it has monitored the Covid 19 pandemic, the cost of living crisis and now climate change impacts on livelihoods (Alfers et al, 2022; Valdivia et al, 2024).

This paper aims to contribute to discussions of how employment dynamics and risks within the informal economy impact workers during multifaceted global crises (Dodman et al., 2023; Feriga et al., 2024). It draws on two elements of WIEGO’s monitoring work with partner HomeNet Thailand - the cost of living crisis and ongoing climate change monitoring work in Bangkok. Both action research processes, anchored on WIEGO’s knowledge co-production principles (Ogando and Harvey, 2020; Pacheco-Vega and Parizeau, 2018, Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), involve participatory focus groups, mobile phone surveys and key informant interviews with street vendors and home-based workers.

The paper synthesizes findings based on workers’ lived experiences and perceptions to center agency and situated knowledge. It particularly focuses on how access to space, urban infrastructure and resources are not only mediated by status in employment, gender, and age, but play a role in resilience. The paper includes methodological reflections on research design that can strengthen an intersectional lens and capacity-building in the research process. The paper concludes with critical reflections on the advocacy pathways to integrate community-driven solutions and inform inclusive and sustainable urban policies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores two different patterns of relationship between people with informal livelihoods and government through the prism of self-reliant citizenship using the cases of urban Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Paper long abstract:

The paper argues that colonial labour organisation patterns, governments’ approaches to the crises, and perceptions of informality shape people’s relationship with and expectations of the government and their vision of themselves as economic and political subjects in the informal sector. Both Zambia and Zimbabwe were labour reserve economies during the colonial period in which the informal economy was rather small and dominated by women who supplemented their husbands’ wages through informal income-generating activities. In the postcolonial period, the informal economy expanded as a consequence of economic and financial crises and unemployment. The informal economy became a space for both survival and entrepreneurship. It is, however, a sector in which problems, such as precarity, lack of social protection, financial insecurity, lack of access to finance, and challenges of labour organising are the most acute. People with livelihoods in the urban informal economy largely had to become self-reliant citizens who adapted to and navigated the changing circumstances. The two countries had different approaches to economic informality as a socioeconomic phenomenon, different policies towards the informal economy, and somewhat different organisational practices in the informal sector. As a result, despite some similarities, people’s self-reliance and expectations of the state took different forms in Zambia and Zimbabwe, expressing people’s visions of themselves as economic actors.

The paper is based on the rich interview data collected in Harare in 2016-2018 and Lusaka and Kitwe in 2023-2024.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a comparative analysis of public goods provision in Dar es Salaam, this presentation discusses the nexus between de-facto social regulations and infrastructural development in contexts of high climate change vulnerability and urban poverty.

Paper long abstract:

African cities face some of the harshest consequences of climate change and urban poverty. The under resourcing and fragmented powers of the state means that communities often self-provide and self-govern public goods, for instance by maintaining open spaces and roads, by supplying water, waste and other collective services. Social norms and de-facto regulations underpin these community provision systems, affecting how community produce and distribute access to public goods, with important consequences in terms of the efficiency and equality of urban life. However, despite their importance, social normative systems remain underexplored in the literature on urban informality and in the infrastructural turn of urban studies. This presentation will problematise the nexus between de-facto social regulations and public goods provision, discussing primary research conducted in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Specifically, I will discuss how social regulations supported communities in road repair and policing, provision and preservation of public space, while also enabling bridges between communities and utility companies for the provision of electricity. A comparative analysis of these diverse cases exemplifies a heterogeneity of social regulations, illuminating cross-cutting challenges and transferable lessons.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation will discuss whether informal economic activity expands a variety of forms of ownership using the results of a large international survey undertaken in seven countries in Asia and Africa.

Paper long abstract:

One of the most longstanding questions about informal economic activity surrounds whether it should be viewed as presenting valuable livelihood opportunities for the urban poor or reflecting and entrenching poverty in the absence of formal employment opportunities. This presentation will challenge this binary, contending that one of the primary criteria that should be used in assessing the desirability of informal economic activity is whether it expands ownership, particularly in contexts defined by significant wealth disparities. Building on this foundation, this presentation will discuss what the results of a large neighbourhood-based urban household survey undertaken in Bangladesh, China, India, the Philippines, Rwanda, Tanzania, and South Africa by the Centre for Sustainable, Healthy and Learning Cities and Neighbourhoods (SHLC) potentially provides into the relationship between informal economic activity and ownership. Focusing on ownership, it maintains, allows for a wide variety of informal economic activities across a broad geographical scope to be understood and evaluated within a common conceptual framework that recognizes both opportunities for empowerment and different forms of exploitation and exclusion, and is potentially valuable as a normative approach that can move beyond academic and policy discussions that too often lack the nuance necessary for understanding a diverse set of deeply political economic phenomena.

Paper short abstract:

By examining the gendered livelihood strategies of households resettled to the Lallubhai Compound in the eastern suburb of Mumbai, as part of Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP), I show how it is it is necessary to consider women's social reproduction work in urban redevelopment plans.

Paper long abstract:

The ambitious urban redevelopment projects in Mumbai incorporate a Rehabilitation and Resettlement (R&R) Policy, endorsed by the World Bank, to address the needs of displaced populations. However, this policy neglects the significant role women play in urban development and the disproportionate impact they face during resettlement.

I argue that the R&R policy overlooks the livelihoods of women, who contribute through both informal paid work and unpaid social reproductive labor. By focusing on the Lallubhai Compound, I analyze the intersection of urbanization, informal work, and women’s labor strategies using a social reproduction lens. Women’s everyday unpaid labor—cooking, cleaning, caregiving, and provisioning—is vital to sustaining households and communities, but often goes unrecognized.

Women in resettled households, such as those in Lallubhai Compound, bear the brunt of unpaid labor, including tasks like waiting in line for water, which are often overlooked due to gendered assumptions. In resettlement areas where essential services like creches, hospitals, security, and transportation are lacking, women are left to compensate for the state’s failure to provide these resources, further intensifying their burden. Ignoring the contribution of social reproductive labor can lead to a depletion of women’s energy and capacities, affecting the health and well-being of individuals, households, and communities.

By focusing on women’s labor in both social reproduction and informal work, this study offers insights for the World Bank and the state to better incorporate women’s roles and promote equity in urban redevelopment policies.

Paper short abstract:

The paper contributes to the discourse on urban commoning, resistance, survival and the right to the city while discussing traders' collective action, imaginative construction, and creative initiatives to repossess a market destroyed by fire despite eviction threats from traditional authorities.

Paper long abstract:

Kantamanto Market – one of Ghana’s largest used clothing markets, located next to the Central Railway station in the central business district of Accra, was engulfed in a huge fire on 2 January 2025. According to media reports, more than 30,000 traders were affected. There were attempts from some traditional authorities to reclaim the space to construct a shopping mall. The traders quickly employed different strategies to mobilise themselves to rebuild burnt stalls through cash and material donations and individual contributions. They also used media channels to speak against eviction attempts. The neoliberal capitalist planning agenda portraying African cities as the new frontier for development has deepened inequalities and marginalised some persons in these urban spaces. Such a development agenda underpinned the eviction threat the traders received from the traditional authorities. However, several authors have criticised these urban planning ideals claiming that it has resulted in conflicting rationalities where the poor are pushed out of certain urban spaces. The high cost of renting out the privately developed shopping mall would have displaced most petty traders operating in that space. Using the concept of urban commoning, the paper analyses traders' collective action, imaginative construction, and creative initiatives in reconstructing their market despite eviction threats from traditional authorities as a form of resistance. This paper contributes to the discourse on urban commoning, resistance, survival strategies and the right to the city.