·       Improving labor productivity of informal waste pickers (as an enabler for financing better social protection) requires collective action in the recycling system to improve sorting of waste and the logistics of waste collection. We observed how strengthening the capacity of associations or organizations of informal workers, particularly the trust among them and between them and other actors in the recycling system, are key elements in the pathway towards productivity and the formalization of associative relationships. Both these processes are signaling toward a long-term investment in their cooperative practices and collective assets as the tools to facilitate the formalization of their work by enabling access to social protection.    ·       It is possible to improve productivity (flexible manufacturing) of associated clothing workshops (clusters) through close accompaniment and technical training. Monitoring practices, introduced during training and production, seem to play also a role that must be further investigated, but was observed on our experimental interventions.    ·       Subcontracting from large formal firms to small informal firms and an overwhelming reliance on temporary work in the construction industry are the main barriers to access to social insurance among construction workers.     ·       Construction workers also don’t have accurate information about social security policies, coverage, and procedures, which leads to their undervaluing coverage. Employers lack accurate information about how to register their domestic workers for social insurance and the information published on official websites is outdated.    ·       Gender norms about withstanding risks and “paying one’s dues” as an informal male worker in the construction industry are barriers for their recognition and exercise of their right to social insurance.  

Inclusive Recycling Learning Loop: https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2020/Leveraging-Collective-Intelligence-to-Improve-Asuncions-Waste-Management.html   https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2021/recycling-as-a-collective-action-dilemma.html   https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2021/a-day-in-the-life-of-Asuncions-waste-pickers.html   https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2021/prototyping-a-new-generation-of-eco-friendly-wastebaskets.html   https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2021/A-day-in-the-life-of-Asuncion-waste-pickers---Part-II.html   https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2022/Mi-Barrio-sin-Residuos--innovacion-en-reciclaje.html   Technical report on how to work better in recycling: https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/library/hablemos-sobre-como-trabajar-mejor.html   Informality in the construction sector learning loop: https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2021/structural-roots-of-informality-in-Paraguays-construction-sector.html   https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2021/structural-roots-of-informality-in-Paraguays-construction-sector.html   Technical report on informality in the construction sector: https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/library/diagnostico-del-empleo-informal-en-la-cadena-de-la-construccion-.html   Informality in domestic work: https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2021/Domestic-Work--a-challenge-and-learning-agenda.html  

  The biggest challenge in this learning portfolio was keeping to the timeline of activities and maintaining a close collaborative relationship with our state counterparts. The context of pandemic and quarantine generated delays in approval of activities but also in their execution, as well as barriers for reaching the level of participation in our experiments that we hoped to reach among workers. We had to make a large investment of time to familiarize our counterparts at the Ministry of Labor with innovation and experimentation methods and to train the project’s staff. This has been successful, but we have a way to go to achieve greater appropriation in the government. Socializing learning and evidence that is generated through this work has been challenging, as most often our knowledge products have to go through several steps of approval before becoming public. In the work on recycling, we have achieved sustained participation from an association of informal workers and stable private-sector institutional partners. In the other learning loops, participation of workers and the private sector has been meaningful but more episodic, and it remains a goal to build more stable relationships with these sectors. The short timeframe to complete the learning loops, especially the experimentation phase, affects the scope of impact of the experiment, as well as the ability to refine the experiments through replication and iteration.  

The main goal of the learning loops in this portfolio is to characterize informal workers, the value-chain dynamics that shape their employment conditions and identify the barriers to their productivity and their access to their social security, including formal legal barriers and informal gender and social norms. The Permanent Household Survey is the most reliable and systematic source of data available in Paraguay. It is a good starting point to begin characterizing any population. However, given how heterogenous the informal sector is, it was necessary to collect original qualitative and quantitative data focused narrowly on these issues for workers in particular industries.

These methods helped us first to understand the barriers to formalization of employment from the perspective of workers and the other actors in their value chains and to put these barriers into the context of the legal frameworks and broader social systems in which informal work takes place. Second, they helped us design interventions that responded to the specific barriers we discovered. Third, they allowed us to test the effects of these interventions and generate evidence and learning about what really works on the ground, why it works or not, and how to continue improving our approaches to employment formalization.  

The San Francisco Neighborhood Waste Pickers’ Association has been the main partner in our inclusive recycling learning loop. They participated in a series of workshops to characterize their work and barriers to their productivity, a GPS shadow mapping exercise, and a pilot recycling program designed to provide more personalized recycling collection to households in particular neighborhoods. For the recycling pilot program, Moises Bertoni Foundation was an institutional partner.   We also consulted with domestic worker unions to characterize the barriers to their access to social security.   The Apparel Workshop Association of Yaguaron participated in the characterization process of the clothing cluster and the experiment (randomized control trial) carried out. 

We consulted with researchers from CADEP and CDE, two Paraguayan thinktanks, to characterize barriers to domestic workers’ access to social security. 

For the inclusive recycling project, our private sector partners have been the local CocaCola Bottling company, and the waste management company, Soluciones Ecológicas. They codesinged and executed the recycling collection service with the waste picker association.   For our experiment about domestic workers’s access to social security, we partnered with two financial services cooperatives (COMECIPAR, Cooperativa Universitaria) and a social club (Club Centenario), to identify households with interest and financial capacity to register their workers for social insurance and offer personalized advising to complete the registration process. Signing MOUs with these associations was key for reaching a group of people with socioeconomic possibilities for domestic work formalization.   For an experiment about labor productivity in the garment industry, we collaborated with the Apparel Workshop Association of Yaguaron and employed a large local apparel brand as a consultant to introduce quality management practices and test their effect on productive efficiency.     

The Ministry of Labor, Employment, and Social Security (MTESS) has been our main partner for the learning loops on domestic workers and construction workers. They have provided feedback on the learning methodologies and knowledge products, and validated and contributed to the design of experimental interventions.   For the work on the apparel industry, instructors from the National System for Professional Promotion (SNPP), received training in quality management and performed the monitoring function to measure manufacturing productivity in apparel workshops that participated in our experiment in the manufacturing cluster in the municipality of Yaguaron.   The Municipality of Yaguaron hosted a workshop to disseminate the results of the apparel experiment in which apparel workshop owners helped us interpret the results and propose ways to improve local and national policies as well as their own collaboration in the private sector to develop greater flexibility and competitiveness in their cluster    

The challenge of improving social protection of informal workers and of improving their working conditions in general is immensely complex. Even the narrower problem of improving access to contributory social insurance involves identifying and overcoming technological, economic, social, gender, legal barriers. If we widen thew view toward goals such as improving recycling services or improving manufacturing competitiveness, the complexity is easily overwhelming. The learning loop method, when combined with participation of diverse actors, gives us a way to tackle this complexity systematically, generating insights, intervening on the basis of insights, and then testing the results.