Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PRESILIENT (Post-pandemic resilient communities: is the informal economy a reservoir for the next generation of digitalized and green businesses in the Global South?)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2023-03-01 do 2025-02-28
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.
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.
Since the project’s start, all technical and scientific work packages have advanced according to plan, generating novel data, refining methodologies and building research capacity across 15 target countries.
Work Package 1 – Horizon Scanning (Completed):
A harmonized literature review and topic-detection exercise was carried out in each country. Fellows collected three corpora per country (academic, media/social, grey literature) using a shared keyword matrix. A supervised topic-modeling workflow then produced comparative insights on COVID-19’s impact across sectors.
Key findings include:
Rapid digitalization trends in commerce and e-services, alongside uneven sectoral shocks (tourism, transport and retail hardest hit; agriculture relatively resilient).
Emergence of local solidarity initiatives complementing formal responses.
Distinct regional priorities—from waste management and food markets in West Africa to MSME resilience and remittance dynamics in Latin America.
All raw data and analytical code are publicly available in a Zenodo repository (doi:10.5281/zenodo.14285318).
Work Package 2 – Delphi Survey (Ongoing):
Building on Horizon Scanning findings, a two-round expert survey is being deployed to identify emergent sectors, technologies and social phenomena that can support sustainable recovery. A common questionnaire template has been localized with regional partners; first‐wave responses are expected by October 2025. This phase trains researchers in advanced questionnaire design, expert sampling and consensus methods.
Work Package 3 – Case Study Development (Under Preparation):
A shared research protocol and data management plan guide the forthcoming qualitative fieldwork. Regional teams will select, investigate and compare case studies of high-impact informal sectors (e.g. urban street vending, digital marketplaces), using mixed-methods interviews, focus groups and policy-stakeholder workshops. Preliminary methodological workshops have piloted these approaches in network events.
Work Package 4 – Researcher Training (Underway):
An interdisciplinary PhD-level curriculum combines in-house modules, secondments with non-academic partners and collective workshops on qualitative methods, data science, and policy analysis. Fellows have drafted individual career-development plans and participated in thematic trainings on ethnographic fieldnotes, systematic reviews, and GDELT news analytics. Four major network events have fostered peer learning and methodological exchange.
Milestones & Deliverables:
All recruitment, ethics approval and mid-term review milestones have been reached (with minor delays due to administrative processes). Twelve deliverables—including the research protocol, data management plan and interim publication reports—have been submitted and validated.
Work Package 1 – Horizon Scanning (Completed):
A harmonized literature review and topic-detection exercise was carried out in each country. Fellows collected three corpora per country (academic, media/social, grey literature) using a shared keyword matrix. A supervised topic-modeling workflow then produced comparative insights on COVID-19’s impact across sectors.
Key findings include:
Rapid digitalization trends in commerce and e-services, alongside uneven sectoral shocks (tourism, transport and retail hardest hit; agriculture relatively resilient).
Emergence of local solidarity initiatives complementing formal responses.
Distinct regional priorities—from waste management and food markets in West Africa to MSME resilience and remittance dynamics in Latin America.
All raw data and analytical code are publicly available in a Zenodo repository (doi:10.5281/zenodo.14285318).
Work Package 2 – Delphi Survey (Ongoing):
Building on Horizon Scanning findings, a two-round expert survey is being deployed to identify emergent sectors, technologies and social phenomena that can support sustainable recovery. A common questionnaire template has been localized with regional partners; first‐wave responses are expected by October 2025. This phase trains researchers in advanced questionnaire design, expert sampling and consensus methods.
Work Package 3 – Case Study Development (Under Preparation):
A shared research protocol and data management plan guide the forthcoming qualitative fieldwork. Regional teams will select, investigate and compare case studies of high-impact informal sectors (e.g. urban street vending, digital marketplaces), using mixed-methods interviews, focus groups and policy-stakeholder workshops. Preliminary methodological workshops have piloted these approaches in network events.
Work Package 4 – Researcher Training (Underway):
An interdisciplinary PhD-level curriculum combines in-house modules, secondments with non-academic partners and collective workshops on qualitative methods, data science, and policy analysis. Fellows have drafted individual career-development plans and participated in thematic trainings on ethnographic fieldnotes, systematic reviews, and GDELT news analytics. Four major network events have fostered peer learning and methodological exchange.
Milestones & Deliverables:
All recruitment, ethics approval and mid-term review milestones have been reached (with minor delays due to administrative processes). Twelve deliverables—including the research protocol, data management plan and interim publication reports—have been submitted and validated.
PRESILIENT has already generated several innovations that advance both the empirical study of informality and its practical application:
The Integrated Mixed-Methods Toolkit combined supervised topic modeling on multi-source corpora (academic, media and grey literature) with Delphi-style expert elicitation and forthcoming qualitative case studies. Accordingly, the impact expected is to offer a replicable, scalable protocol for mapping complex informal economies across diverse contexts—an advance on single-method or single-region approaches.
Cross-Regional Taxonomy of Informality allows development of a sector-and-region comparative taxonomy, identifying “hotspots” of vulnerability (tourism, transport, retail, construction, manufacturing) and resilience (agriculture, digital commerce, tele-services) with an impact that is bound to enable experts and policymakers to target interventions in key sectors of national and regional economies (rather than applying one-size-fits-all measures)
Early-Stage Researcher Network involving training of 15 doctoral candidates through a joint academic/non-academic supervisory model and secondments, bridging theory and practice with the goal of building an upscalable and expandable training path able to produce specialists equipped with theoretical, methodological and analytical trainings for data collection, processing and policy engagement, a thing currently only limitedly available in the Global South.
Open Data and Reproducible Workflows will support release of Horizon Scanning datasets and analysis code alongside detailed data-management guidelines that is bound to lower barriers for follow-on research, enabling others to validate, extend or adapt PRESILIENT’s methods to new countries or thematic areas.
Overview of Achievements to Date
A fully operational mixed-methods research pipeline, tested across 15 countries.
A publicly available multisource database with topic-detection outputs.
Established network structures (advisory board, regional partners) primed for rapid knowledge exchange.
Early alignment with key stakeholders (ILO, UN agencies, regional business forums) poised to incorporate PRESILIENT findings into funding calls and policy guidelines.
The Integrated Mixed-Methods Toolkit combined supervised topic modeling on multi-source corpora (academic, media and grey literature) with Delphi-style expert elicitation and forthcoming qualitative case studies. Accordingly, the impact expected is to offer a replicable, scalable protocol for mapping complex informal economies across diverse contexts—an advance on single-method or single-region approaches.
Cross-Regional Taxonomy of Informality allows development of a sector-and-region comparative taxonomy, identifying “hotspots” of vulnerability (tourism, transport, retail, construction, manufacturing) and resilience (agriculture, digital commerce, tele-services) with an impact that is bound to enable experts and policymakers to target interventions in key sectors of national and regional economies (rather than applying one-size-fits-all measures)
Early-Stage Researcher Network involving training of 15 doctoral candidates through a joint academic/non-academic supervisory model and secondments, bridging theory and practice with the goal of building an upscalable and expandable training path able to produce specialists equipped with theoretical, methodological and analytical trainings for data collection, processing and policy engagement, a thing currently only limitedly available in the Global South.
Open Data and Reproducible Workflows will support release of Horizon Scanning datasets and analysis code alongside detailed data-management guidelines that is bound to lower barriers for follow-on research, enabling others to validate, extend or adapt PRESILIENT’s methods to new countries or thematic areas.
Overview of Achievements to Date
A fully operational mixed-methods research pipeline, tested across 15 countries.
A publicly available multisource database with topic-detection outputs.
Established network structures (advisory board, regional partners) primed for rapid knowledge exchange.
Early alignment with key stakeholders (ILO, UN agencies, regional business forums) poised to incorporate PRESILIENT findings into funding calls and policy guidelines.