Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising (Wiego) and UN Women have put together an initiative called Coping in Crisis: Informal Workers’ Lives and Livelihoods during Covid-19. It aims to show the gendered impact the pandemic has had on women, particularly those in the informal trading sector.
The organisations spoke to several informal workers and traders who detailed how difficult Covid-19 had made their lives from being harassed by metro police and having their goods confiscated, to worrying about how to feed their families and how to get their children to school.
Wiego’s policy brief says the plight and needs of women informal traders can be summed up as follows: