Posts tagged with 'informal workers'
Rafaela Aires’s workday starts at 9:00 a.m., leading her down city streets that weave past the Atlantic shoreline and under concrete overpasses. Her collected bottles and cardboard boxes used to form heaps in a hand-drawn cart. Now, they rattle in ...
Do informal transport networks in African cities provide equitable services for everyone that needs them? Unsurprisingly, the answer is often no. Operators frequently prefer to drive the safest and most central routes, inadvertently prioritizing commuters traveling to formal jobs in ...
About two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050. While cities are hubs of innovation and opportunity, the increasing pace of urbanization also exacerbates inequality, stresses infrastructure, and fuels climate change, air pollution and other environmental problems. The ...
When India’s federal government announced a public health lockdown on March 24, 2022 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it generated desperate scenes. Economic activity ground to a halt. Millions of migrant workers traveled back to their home states. In ...
Owusu lives with his wife and four children in the Tantra Hills neighborhood of Accra, Ghana, where he shares his residence with five other tenants and their families. The house has a toilet and electricity, but the costs for both ...
Plummeting bus and train ridership, lost jobs, overflowing warehouses, more inequality: 2020’s disruptions to the transport sector were widespread and deep. Speaking at Transforming Transportation 2021, co-hosted by WRI and the World Bank, sustainable mobility leaders from around the world ...
Solid waste workers have been indispensable to protecting cities around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their heroic examples, from India to Vietnam to Latin America, have helped cities keep moving. But a critical alignment of factors is making their ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a disruptive new normal for everyone through shelter-in-place orders and social distancing guidelines. But for the billions of urban poor, these guidelines aren’t just burdensome; they’re essentially impossible. Social distancing is a critically important response ...
As cities across India contend with rapid outward expansion and growth, critical urban services are lagging behind, impacting long-term environmental sustainability, public health and quality of life. Rapid urbanization and the realities of climate change require the implementation of solutions ...
SWaCH is a finalist for the WRI Ross Prize for Cities. Pinky Sonawane spent her childhood gathering garbage on the streets of Pune, India. She’d join her mother in pulling plastic bottles, cans and cardboard from roadside dumpsters, selling ...
Illegal. Criminal. A drag on the economy. These are just a few of the derisive labels that beleaguer urban informal workers, says Martha Chen, co-founder of and senior advisor to Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing. Informal workers – ...
Urbanization is changing the face of the planet – for better and for worse. City populations, GDP and investment are increasing exponentially. At the same time, carbon emissions are rising, more and more people are living in slums, and air pollution ...
Think of the delicious food stands in Southeast Asia, the street performers in Africa, the rickshaw driver in Bangladesh, and the invisible home-based workers who embroider garments and stitch shoes in India. What do they all have in common? They ...
