March 27, 2025 – Suhany Zaimah, a Knowledge Fellow in the 2024 cohort, completed her project titled Parenting Support for Informal Workers: Analysis and Recommendations for Parenting Programs to Meet the Needs of Parents in the Informal Economy. Across the globe, informal workers form a substantial part of the workforce, with approximately 2 billion people—60% of the global workforce—engaged in informal employment. A defining characteristic of informal work is its unregulated nature, which often results in unsafe working conditions, low-income security, and the absence of social protections such as paid leave or unemployment benefits. Another common reality for informal workers worldwide is that most of them are also parents, balancing the demands of their work with caregiving responsibilities. There are higher concentrations of informal workers in regions like Africa (86%), India (88%), Asia and the Pacific (68%), and the Americas (40%); yet, childcare services remain limited throughout much of the Global South where higher concentrations of informal workers struggle to provide for their families without the support of social protections or family-friendly policies like paid leave.
There is remarkably little research examining the intersection of informal employment and parenting, or how the nature of informal work affects childcare practices of informal communities. This project was designed to begin investigating this topic. The project was guided by the following research questions:
- How is informal work defined?
- What are the unique caregiving challenges faced by the parents of this particularly vulnerable group?
- What are the broader implications of their working conditions on childcare activities and responsibilities?
- What are examples of promising practices for providing parenting support to informal workers?
This report concentrates on how informal employment affects caregiving practices and explores ways to strengthen parenting programs to better meet the unique needs of these workers by highlighting programs that support parents across diverse informal work settings. It was written for program implementers and practitioners to help them design more inclusive and responsive parenting programs to reach those engaged in informal work.