Post-pandemic resilient communities: is the informal economy a reservoir for the next generation of digitalized and green businesses in the Global South?

In addition to the almost 2bln workers already active in the informal sector, World Bank and ILO estimate that the pandemic might have put at risk of precarious employment 500mln-1.5bln more. These losses, and related consequences, are not evenly distributed given that Africa, Asia and Latin America is where 93% of the world’s informal employment is located and where post-pandemic crisis is likely to hit harder (especially women, migrants and young people). Yet, the concern is global. Indeed, besides vulnerability and precariousness at individual and community levels, informality also eventually reduces state capacity and the ability of institutions to design and implement policies that properly address social, economic and environmental issues (i.e. SDGs) in a long term perspective. Accordingly, informality-related challenges have been devoted a great deal of attention and political statements. But seldom have these statements been followed by concrete instructions, guidelines or evidence-based policies to tackle informality across the world.

Starting from this gap, PRESILIENT is a large network comprising 14 partners (of which 7 non- academic) and 15 associated partners located in Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America committed to delivering the a world class cross-regional training on informality in the Global South to: measure it, address it, find viable and sustainable alternatives. By doing this, we have committed to four main objectives:

O.1 train the next generation of experts on informality in the global south.
O.2 carry out a research spanning 15 different countries and to produce novel data and significant theoretical advancements in the field.
O.3 produce strategic intelligence that can be used to provide practical policy recommendations
O.4 enable multi-directional knowledge transfer through network events, pairing of academic and non-academic partners (who will jointly supervise each fellow), secondment and task-based teamwork.