The Ford Foundation has announced a five-year, $25 million grant to support workers in the informal economy. It’s part of a push to get governments to invest more in protections for an estimated 2.1 billion informal workers around the world that the foundation said have been “devastated by the lack of social and labor protections” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ford’s grant will support the work of Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing, or WIEGO, a global research, policy, and advocacy network that supports women and “the working poor.” Some of the $25 million will be given as grants to global groups representing domestic and home-based informal workers, street vendors, and waste pickers in more than 90 countries, according to a press release.
WIEGO has found that those categories of workers were especially hard-hit by the pandemic. For example, a WIEGO study found that in Durban, South Africa, 97% of street vendors and 74% of waste pickers stopped working amid lockdown restrictions in April 2020. The group will release a 12-city study of the effects of COVID-19 on informal workers next month.