Some of the key insights we gained from this set of learning activities about Informal Enterprise and Employment include: 1. Information and advising about social security policies, procedures, and coverage are key to overcoming barriers to access but are not enough. These insights are analyzed in the reports about our experiment evaluating the effectiveness of personalized advising to employers of domestic workers, which found that further streamlining and digitilization of the registration process is necessary to reduce administrative barriers, and in the report from our experiment that found that informational seminars improved construction workers' perception of the value of social insurance.  2. Labor productivity and enterprise efficiency among SMEs can be improved through investment in  collective goods or services, but it is a complex problem to solve, and it is only part of the solution for acheiving decent work standards. These insights are explored in the report of an experiment in which we tested the effects of continuous quality monitoring on the efficiency of production of school smocks in the same garment cluster and the results of the census a census of an SME garment cluster.  3. Facilitated interaction between informal workers and clients improves trust and recognition of the value of informal work. This insight arose as part of an experiment in which households recieved schedule recycling pick up from informal recycling workers, a survey of households in treatment and control neighborhoods revealed higher levels of trust where this facilitated service operated.   4. Gender norms are a fundamental part of how informal work and informal careers are "regulated" when the aplication or effectiveness of formal rules and regulations is weak. We documented 1) how gender descrimination is a key barrier to access social security and other labor rights for domestic workers,, 2) how notions of masculinity, paternalism barriers to construction workers access to social security, and 3) how garment workshops operate in domestic spaces, where the economic logic and norms of dependent employment mixes and mingles with household norms of reciprocity, protection, and patriarcal authority.  5. Data on medium-sized informal enterprises is difficult to access. We conducted two surveys of SMEs from three sectors in two different territories in order to map needs, demands, and the supply of SME support to those sectors. We had a great deal more success in accessing micro and small enterprises than medium enterprise.  

Meaning of Social Security among Workers in the Construction Industry
Paid domestic work in the labor market in Paraguay
Data to drive the development of the garment sector
Confeccionando calidad textil en Yaguarón
Experimentando la formalización
Building good knowledge regarding social security and formalization
Dignificando el reciclaje a través de la confianza mutua

One of the biggest barriers is securing the support of high quality consultants for data collection, analysis, and especially writing of succint and coherent reports. A second persistent barrier is the limited bandwith and variable political committment of our public sector counterparts to accompany the learning loops and to fully integrated the lessons and tools developed to strengthen the public policies under there charge. 

Data on the informal sector is very limited, so analyzing it requires generating original data in many cases. The methods chosen attempt to create many different kinds of data about different aspects about informal economic activity and employment, in order to analyze different barriers such as the kinds of informal norms that operate in the sector, the factors that effect labor productivity and enterprise profitability, the adminsitrative and bureaucratic costs of formalization, and the legal incentives that operate in specific sectors. 

With this set of innovation methods we try to balance between generating reliable and and valid evidence to answer questions about the barriers to formalization and improving work standards and the need to engage a broud set of actors in an excersize of collective ingelligence and practical problem solving around the many barriers to formalizing enterprise and employment in general, the implementation of specific interventions or activities in our learning loop in particular. The participatory aspects of these methodologies are important both to gain access to valid and useful information and also to analyze and construct knowledge through a process that is broadly legitimate and actionable.  

Civil society collaborators included the assocation of recyclers of San Francisco neighborhood, the Asociation of Garment Workshops of Yaguaron, Cooperative Financial Institutions (COMECIPAR, Cooperativa Univesataria) and social clubs (Club Centenario), Environmental NGOs (Fundacion Moises Bertoni). These organizations helped codesign and coimplement various interventions.  

We worked with masters students from the Catholic University of Asunción on analysis of social capital and the use of information technology among informal recylcers for our learning loop in inclusive recycling. 

For our experiment about flexible manufacturing we worked with a national apparell brand (Martel) to train quality monitors and to establish and carry out contracts for the production of school smocks in apparell workshops in the Yaguaron garment cluster. The apparell workshop association of Yaguaron was a key partner for designing and carrying out a census of apparell workshops in the cluster.  For our inclusive recycling learning loop we collaborated withe local coca cola bottler (Paresa) to develop a prototype of household recycling pickup service.  

The Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Security, Directorate of Social Security, was a key partner in the development, design and execution of our learning loops on domestic workers and construction work. The National Innovation Strategy, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce (MIC),  and the National Profesional Promotion Service (SNPP) were key partners for the flexible manufacturing learning loop and the SME promotion and formalization portfolio we are developing for 2023. SNPP provided instructors that we trained as quality monitors and time keepers for the manufacturing experiment and the MIC is collaborating with us to carry out surveys of SMEs in the food service, automotive, and tourism and hospitality industries of two districts in order to inform the design SME support services for local "Entreprenuer Support Centers" in these localities.

The Recylers Association of San Francisco neighborhood and the apparel manufacturing association represent civil society organizations active at a very local or grassroots level. This type of engagement is relatively rare within UNDP projects which tend to have a focus at the ministerial level in Paraguay.

The series of learning loops and collaborations in this action learning plan highlighted the need for the integration interventions that adress labor productivity, as well as, administrative and information barriers to formalization and improvement of labor conditions.