To a second chance at life / Why should we care about building safety nets for women in the informal

Before joining Harvard Kennedy School, I worked at Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a large NGO that works with women in India’s informal economy. One of the first things I observed during my field visits to urban informal settlements through my work at SEWA was that the poor workers did not get a second chance at life. If the worker or someone in the family fell sick, the city got flooded, the economy collapsed, the progress made so far is reversed to zero. Informal workers, who are more susceptible to economic and illness shocks, must somehow survive them to move irreversibly out of poverty traps. Women workers, on the other hand, must also confront the double whammy of poverty and gender-based marginalization.

These realities became more visible when the pandemic hit. The urban informal poor faced the most acute brunt of the crisis. Informal economy workers in urban parts of India, where I was coordinating relief measures for SEWA, were forced to choose between two equally bleak alternatives—stay hungry by not working or get covid by continuing to work.

Sumanben, for example, had started her E-rickshaw driving journey about 6 months ago. This was the culmination of almost two years of work that had begun with Sumanben unlearning the patriarchal beliefs that had convinced her that a woman cannot go to work, let alone drive. She took the plunge, determined to overcome all the barriers that she knew she would face—financial, physical, cultural—to ensure that she could pay for her three children’s quality education. She worked with SEWA to get trained, saved 100 rupees (~US$1.5) every month for a year to make the down-payment for the E-rickshaw , studied for the first time ever to pass a driving license test, and negotiated with the local police and other male drivers to get her a spot as the only female driver in the neighborhood. However, as the pandemic hit, and the Indian government announced strict lockdowns, Sumanben lost her livelihood as there were very few commuters left on the streets . However, the loan repayment instalments and the payment for rickshaw parking did not stop. She also lost her shot at ensuring her children get access to quality education and was forced to drop them out of school.

There were many such informal sector workers I met in those four months--waste pickers, street vendors, agriculture workers, construction workers—who had fallen below subsistence levels due to the economic and health shock of COVID.

Many systems need to transform to cater to the needs of the informal poor, but if there is one thing that can protect the poor from the crises, it is a reliable social protection system. I believe that we must build safety nets for the poor to ensure social and economic mobility. Without fair second chances, there is no way to escape the poverty trap. I feel privileged to have the opportunity to work with the World Bank’s Social Protection Global Practice in the summer to take the first step towards building a universal social protection.