Around two billion people worldwide―more than sixty percent of the global workforce―earn their living in informal jobs. These workers face high vulnerability and lack basic protections, while governments lose crucial tax revenues and struggle to plan beyond urgent crises. The COVID-19 pandemic has only deepened these challenges. Without long-term planning and fiscal space, many countries have been forced into a cycle of short-term responses that fail to build resilient economies, robust welfare systems or sustainable infrastructure.
Informal employment affects all regions, but its scale and consequences are mostly felt in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Climate change and other global shocks threaten to push more people into informality, compounding social and environmental pressures. PRESILIENT brings together fourteen core institutions (seven academic, seven non-academic) and fifteen regional partners across Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America. It will train fifteen doctoral candidates in cutting-edge methods to measure informality, map its drivers and design sustainable alternatives. Social sciences experts will work alongside economists, statisticians and policymakers to ensure that cultural, institutional and gender dimensions are fully integrated.
The project pursues four main objectives:
Training: Deliver a PhD-level, interdisciplinary curriculum combining coursework, fieldwork, and hands-on policy engagement to equip ESRs with analytical and transferable skills.
Data and Theory: Generate novel, cross-regional data through mixed qualitative and quantitative methods; develop a sectoral taxonomy and advance theoretical understanding of informality’s social, economic and governance facets.
Policy Impact: Co-create evidence-based recommendations with UN agencies, development banks, business forums and EU bodies to support humane, gender-sensitive and green recovery strategies.
Knowledge Exchange: Foster multi-directional learning through secondments, joint supervision by academic/non-academic partners, and network events, ensuring continuous improvement and readiness for medium‐ and long-term planning.
By combining rigorous social science inquiry with practical policy engagement, PRESILIENT will help governments, businesses and communities transform informal work from a systemic weakness into a source of inclusive, resilient development.
