Urban Informal Workers: Representative Voice & Economic Rights

he purpose of this paper is to provide a summary analysis of five case studies prepared for the 2013 World Development Report team that illustrate why and how the representative voice and economic rights of urban informal workers should be promoted. Section 1 provides a statistical overview of the urban informal workforce, including: the official statistical definition of informal employment, recent data on non-agricultural employment (a proxy for urban employment data which are not readily available), and the first-ever published data on the four groups of urban informal workers featured in the case studies and this paper. Section 2 explains what platforms for representative voice and what types of economic rights urban informal workers need—and demand - and why the voice and rights of these workers is of such critical importance today. Section 3 presents a summary of five case studies.