Informal Work and Wellbeing in Urban South Asia: Who Succeeds, Who Fails and Under What Conditions?

Understanding and managing urbanisation in developing countries is one of the major global policy challenges for the first half of the 21st century. Rapidly growing towns and cities are increasingly recognised as powerhouses of economic development, employment generation and as having the potential to be great drivers of improvements in human wellbeing. At the same time they can also be the sites of extreme impoverishment, substandard housing, dominated by informal employment, insecure and hazardous working conditions, vulnerability, environmental degradation and unrest.This study sets out to explore the associational relationships between a variety of institutional conditions and the wellbeing outcomes for informal workers living in informal settlements in Bangladesh and India.