Fields of work

Skills Development for Women in the Informal Sector: Improved Knowledge Base on Issues, Policies and Actions

For many social, cultural and economic reasons, women have continued to account for the greater share of informal sector employment. Their share has been estimated at typically 60 per cent to 80 per cent. As in the formal sector, women tend to be concentrated in a narrower range of occupations and activities (e.g. food processing, garment making, domestic services, etc.) and at the lower-end of the market (i.e. less remunerative, less productive, micro in scale). The increasing trend in the use of subcontracting from larger firms in the formal and global markets to ever smaller firms, household production units and homeworkers has major implications for women's employment. Available studies point out that subcontracting and homework have contributed to the further informalization of women's employment. In addition to obstacles faced by informal sector workers and producers to improving their incomes and employment (such as lack of access to productive resources and assets, services, markets), women have to surmount gender-based constraints. These constraints include cultural and institutional restrictions on ownership and control of property and income, household and childcare responsibilities, and attitudes towards women's economic activities and access to resources.

The Informal Sector Unit of the In-Focus Programme on Knowledge, Skills and Employability is concerned with the following issues: (1) the gender dimensions and gender-specific implications of informalization of employment and patterns of informal employment; (2) the implications of these gender-informal employment interfaces for the development of skills and knowledge among women workers, especially those in marginal and insecure occupations; (3) strategies and policies which address barriers and constraints to skills development among women in the informal sector, and their outcomes; and (4) the contribution of the skills and knowledge on women's employability, gender equality and women's economic empowerment, and decent work.

Within the framework of on-going technical cooperation projects, and through a number of secondary research, the Informal Sector Unit will build up a knowledge base on these four items. From this base, new lessons and guidelines will be drawn and shared with ILO constituents and partners to assist in the assessment and development of programmes and policies. These will also be incorporated in the Capacity building Programme on Gender Equality, Employment Promotion and Poverty Eradication , in particular to demonstrate ways and means by which policies, systems and methodologies can better address the skills needs of informal sector workers and effectively reduce inequalities in opportunities between men and women.

For the current biennium, the Informal Sector Unit will produce a number of papers, which will then be used for the preparation of a policy report and awareness-raising materials in the next biennium.