informal workers - The African Mirror

Mar

2022

Nigeria’s pandemic lockdown measures were hard on informal workers

During the first wave of the pandemic in Nigeria, security forces were mandated to enforce lockdown and stay-at-home orders. Intended as public health measures, these controls inflicted collateral damage. Authors CHIDI NZEADIBE, Professor of Environmental Management & Sustainability, University of Nigeria CHRISTIAN EZEIBE, Senior Lecturer, Political Science, University of Nigeria KELECHI ELIJAH NNAMANI, Lecturer and Researcher, Department of Political Science, University of Nigeria NKEMDILIM PATRICIA ANAZONWU, Lecturer and researcher, Social Work, University of Nigeria NNABUIKE OSADEBE, Lecturer, Sociology and Anthropology , University of Nigeria OBIORA ANICHEBE, Associate Professor of Social and Political Philosophy, University of Nigeria PETER MBAH, Professor of…

Dec

2020

By The African Mirror

How COVID-19 upended informal workers worldwide

COVID-19

JOHN SURICO ABOUT half of the wage earners in Colombia found themselves in the informal economy last year—working unregulated jobs with flexibility, but also, minimal social protection. Yet although rates have steadily declined, informality has remained a weakness. “Before the pandemic, we were in a fragile situation, economically,” says Mauricio Quiñones Domínguez, a Medellín-based economist. Then COVID-19 hit. The hard-hit country, previously strapped with one of the highest unemployment rates in Latin America, has seen joblessness soar to an unprecedented 21.2% (It now hovers around 16%, although ‘real’ unemployment could be higher.) Informality is expected to follow, reversing years’ worth…

Sep

2020

By The African Mirror

Hitting women hard, pandemic makes gender poverty gap wider – U.N

COVID-19

ANASTASIA MOLONEY THE coronavirus pandemic will widen the poverty gap between women and men, pushing 47 million more women and girls into impoverished lives by next year, and undoing progress made in recent decades, the United Nations said on Wednesday. Worldwide more women than men will be made poor by the economic fallout and massive job losses caused by COVID-19, with informal workers worst hit in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, according to new U.N. estimates. "The increases in women's extreme poverty ... are a stark indictment of deep flaws in the ways we have constructed our societies and economies,"…