WIEGO: Communicative Daily Life Stories to Assess Social Impact in the Lives of Informal Workers

Abstract

WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing) is a global research-policy network that seeks to improve the status of the working poor, especially women, in the informal economy. The members of this network are individual researchers, individual development practitioners, and organizations of informal workers, which total more than 175 affiliates in 85 countries. Social researchers involved in the network conducted qualitative fieldwork in these communities and monitor the social impact of research. The researchers created spaces for dialogue and collected workers’ impact stories through diverse qualitative tools and in different contexts, especially narratives and focus groups. The aim was to increase the visibility of informal workers, their living and working conditions, and their personal experience with regard to the social impact of urban policies. Through communicative daily life stories to social researchers working at WIEGO, this article analyzes how they are socially impacting the lives of informal workers. Based on this connection, all information related to social impact is interpreted through a communicative approach, connecting the stories of the social researchers and the interpretation of informal workers’ lives to evidence-based actions.

In this study, communicative daily life stories (CDLS; Flecha & Soler, 2014; Gómez, 2017; Ramis et al., 2014) were implemented and analyzed to learn how researchers collect impact stories in different contexts. Researchers collect impact stories to increase the visibility of informal workers, their living and working conditions, and how they personally experience the social impact of policies. CDLS were collected and analyzed using the communicative methodology, promoting, among other things, greater validity for the study in determining how social researchers socially impact the lives of informal workers.

WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing) is a global research-policy-advocacy network that seeks to improve the status of the working poor, especially women, in the informal economy. The network believes in the equality of economic opportunities and the rights of all human beings. In this field, WIEGO is making an outstanding contribution by developing the abilities of informal workers’ organizations, expanding workers’ knowledge, and influencing local, national, and international policies. The members of this network are classified into three broad constituencies: (a) WIEGO individual members: researchers, statisticians, and academics who study the informal economy; (b) WIEGO institutional members, which are membership-based organizations (MBOs) of informal workers (trade unions, cooperatives, and worker associations) from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America; and (c) practitioners from development agencies (inter-governmental, governmental, and nongovernmental) who provide services to or shape policies toward the informal workforce (WIEGO, n.d.-c). Its current importance resides in the network that has generated WIEGO. This network, composed largely of women, has 34 institutional members (which are mostly MBOs) and 159 individual members. One of the institutional members is the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), which is the largest organization of informal workers in the world and the largest registered trade union in India (Chen et al., 2005); it is a union of more than 2 million members (WIEGO, n.d.-c).

Most of the world’s working poor make their living in the informal economy, where earnings are typically low but costs and risks are high. In the decade of the 1970s, the term “informal sector” was coined. Hart (1973) defined it as the autonomous capacity for generating income. Currently, interest in the informal economy has been renewed because it represents a significant share of the global economy and workforce. During the recent recession, informal employment expanded significantly (Horn, 2009) and, at the same time, emerged in new forms and in unexpected places (WIEGO, n.d.-c).WIEGO is conducting research on the composition of the informal economy, through projects undertaken jointly with organized informal workers, to give visibility to the day-to-day realities faced by informal workers. In this sense, Freire’s (1970) standpoint is always present since the voices of the most silenced are prioritized and the agents participate to transform their reality. Godfrey (2011) emphasizes the importance of research in informal work with the aim of alleviating poverty. It is with this objective that WIEGO researchers pay substantial attention to designing and developing the methodological approach in each of its studies. As Denzin (2015) states, it is essential to consider the emancipatory visions of the social agents in research. Therefore, all informal workers’ contributions are added to the research through a dialogic scope, including all the agents in the research process and the evaluations of interventions. The dialogic perspective (Valls & Padrós, 2011) of the WIEGO network involves informal workers who have traditionally been excluded from spaces of public dialogue regaining their prominence in the public sphere. In the social sciences, knowledge has traditionally been subordinated to the questioning raised by scientific researchers regarding reality (Aiello & Joanpere, 2014). In this case, the reality of the informal workers presented here requires voice, visibility, and validity (WIEGO, n.d.-a).

In the next section, a description of how to collect a CDLS is presented to understand how the researchers gather the impact of those interventions. In this section, the researchers and methods are presented in detail. As a result, a detailed dialogic interaction between three items will be presented: first, the relationship between researchers and informal workers; second, visibility; and finally, validity. The conclusions contribute to the advancement of knowledge in assessing social impact in the lives of informal workers and other vulnerable groups.

WIEGO’s Researchers Collect Impact Stories of Informal Workers to Assess Social Impact

CDLS With WIEGO’s Social Researchers

The following results were obtained from data collected after interviewing two WIEGO researchers and from the analysis of reality using the communicative methodology (Flecha & Soler, 2014). Qualitative research and communicative methodology start from the point of view that the most important part of reality is social, as in Charmaz’s (2017) approach: Critical inquiry is embedded in a transformative paradigm that seeks to expose, oppose, and redress forms of oppression, inequality, and injustice. In this study, this transformative paradigm is the same work conducted by two WIEGO researchers involved with supporting informal workers’ rights. For that reason, this methodology starts with the agents themselves to reveal the social motives that underlie the WIEGO research. CDLS may be used to describe a specific aspect of a person’s life in the person’s own words (Chase, 2008), which allows for the investigation of how WIEGO researchers make it possible for informal workers to assess social impact themselves. In particular, the very fact of conducting CDLS implies a process of collaborative understanding dedicated to comprehending the reality people experience, with the aim of transforming it. According to Atkinson (1998), the life story interview is clearly the best narrative method for an in-depth examination of individual lives or of life as a whole. CDLS (Gómez & Munté, 2015) are

conversation narrations that the researcher maintains with the participant about daily life and in relation to the theme of the research. Therefore, the focus of the research is to study the timely moment and interpretation of the narrator of her biography through a dialogic relationship. (p. 68)

The goal of the CDLS (Gómez, 2017) is to interpret reality through egalitarian and intersubjective dialogue, in which participants contribute their feelings, suggestions, and opinions and researchers present relevant theories, facilitating a dialogical interpretation of reality. Specifically, by means of this data-gathering technique, thoughts and reflections, as well as ways of acting, living, and resolving concrete situations in the participants’ daily lives are studied (Gómez, 2017). By means of the participant’s reflected narration, a story is created in which the researcher and the participant interpret the story to identify elements of the present, past, and future.

The two WIEGO researchers chosen to participate in a CDLS were conveniently selected for their availability to share their point of view because of their broad career experience and because they hold different positions in the organization, contributing distinct perspectives on this network. In particular, one CDLS was conducted with Sally Roever, a researcher with more than 15 years of experience. Her experience is based on grounded and in-depth knowledge gained through mixed-method field research and collaboration with informal workers and their MBOs. Because of this significant experience, Sally became the Director of the Informal Economy Monitoring Study (IEMS) and sits on WIEGO committees for research, law, and informality as well as the focal cities initiative. She helps make contacts between local researchers and informal workers. She is WIEGO’s international coordinator. The other researcher is Sonia Dias, who is the waste specialist giving advice for and working in cross-programmatic projects at WIEGO and seats in WIEGO’s research team. She has been active in this field since 1985, focusing on promoting the integration of social inclusion aspects from participatory approaches. She is an expert in solid waste management, gender and the informal sector, and the integration of social inclusion into waste collection and recycling.

The analysis of the information in the communicative research methodology implemented in this study by means of the CDLS with Sally and Sonia is organized in this case in one dimension, the transformational, since we did not encounter exclusionary elements. The communicative methodology (Gómez & Munté, 2015) has two dimensions, the exclusionary and the transformational, since it seeks social transformation. The analysis of data identifies barriers to the transformation (exclusionary dimension) and ways to overcome them (transformative dimension).

Relationship Between Researchers and Informal Workers

The researchers, Sally and Sonia, emphasized the importance of a close and collaborative relationship and a person-to-person connection with the informal workers. This relationship between researchers and participants has been widely studied in the literature (e.g., Gómez, 2014; Moser & Stein, 2011; Reed, 2016). Both researchers emphasized the importance of trying to understand very deeply the everyday challenges and daily reality that the informal workers must face. Mead (1934) stated that the construction of a person, including that person’s values and desires, occurs through the constant interrelation and dialogue between the individual and society. A dialogic framework is enabled by learning spaces that provide a safe environment, encourage openness and trust, and facilitate critical engagement within and among participants and between participants and their worlds (Rule, 2004).

Dialogue in the qualitative inquiry is an integral mechanism for data collection (Degerickx et al., 2017; O’Reilly & Kiyimba, 2015). According to Sally and Sonia, there are two ways of collecting the stories. One is by learning from the participants due to their active roles within the organizations. In the other, the participating women themselves contact the researchers as a result of their gained trust. The relationship established between the WIEGO researchers and the informal workers is not limited to the day or days when the narrative is gathered; instead, this relationship has already been created in the WIEGO projects in local areas. In the case of Brazil, Sonia has been working on informal workers’ issues for the past 30 years. Along the same lines, Sally exposes the common dynamics developed by WIEGO from the trajectory of a researcher from Lima:

She works with workers’ organizations in different occupational sectors, street vendors, waste pickers, domestic workers, home-based workers, market traders, market porters, newspaper vendors, etc. So she works with all these groups, and she has a local qualitative researcher who has worked with us for 6-7 years . . . . She developed relationships with these workers’ organizations over time, they know her, she knows them. They (informal workers) trust her; they feel she will represent what they are saying, so that is kind of our idea: we will build ties to local researchers over time who really understand who we are and who they are and what needs to be done.

WIEGO scientists, as researchers in the social sciences, develop the capability to analyze contextual changes (Weber, 2012) and, at the same time, keep in mind the current ethical principles (O’Reilly & Kiyimba, 2015). In this sense, the interviewed researchers note that the ultimate purpose is to serve the workers’ movement; in other words, WIEGO, following Wright (2010), conducts Emancipatory Social Sciences. In particular, Sonia reveals that she is not a conventional researcher and explains how she incorporates the above-mentioned principles:

You need to implement your fieldwork in ways such that other researchers are able to see that you do honest research, that the material you produce can be looked at by other researchers and transmit that honesty and truthfulness of your research. You need to be able to use what you produce as a result of your research in ways that can be transformative.

As already been demonstrated in the literature on qualitative methodology, the participants are part of the research decision-making processes, which helps them to have an impact on improving their living conditions (Gómez et al., 2006). This is corroborated by the organizations working with WIEGO at the local level, where informal workers are included in decisions throughout the development of projects. Sally and Sonia participate in both the design and implementation and the evaluation of results. Sonia explains that from her experience participating in solid waste management in Brazil, the informal workers association, which participates in Belo Horizonte City, did so because the researchers and agents established trust and making transformation commitments (Freire, 1970). Collaborative work allows for the adaptation of the research methodology to the reality of informal workers:

When you are doing field work, sometimes you cannot gather the information with the kind of techniques that you had planned before because the reality while working with vulnerable groups, especially waste pickers, is so complex and so dynamic . . . . In one case, with a new group, I had everything planned, but when I was there, I had to spend 2 days waste picking with them to gather the information that I needed.

WIEGO local researchers involve themselves directly with the movement, from exchanging their phone numbers or contact cards with the participants to looking for university courses for the informal workers to attend. The boundaries between personal and professional life disappear, and what prevails is social commitment. Sonia explains that in a meeting with other organizations and informal workers, she questioned the role of the investigators since they did not give feedback to the agents involved in the research. In that same meeting, one waste picker said, “That does not happen with [Sonia]. She comments and gives us feedback.” In other words, the informal workers demonstrated their confidence in WIEGO because they knew that the collected data would be used in a positive way. When using communicative methodology in this case, which was implemented when conducting the CDLS with Sonia and Sally, the ultimate aim is to gather their interpretations, preestablished ideas, and/or reflections on their actions as social researchers that may reproduce or transform social inequalities. Sonia and Sally’s reflections on how they relate to their participants and how they interpret and transform their reality are crucial, as in the last example Sonia provided, in which she defends her role and position as a social researcher as making a difference in the lives of the participants and other researchers.

Collective voice and visibility

Collecting the worker’s life story is an effective way of placing an individual worker within a broader context because the story acquires meaning within a group and from a social context of reference (Davies & Gannon, 2006; Mills, 1959). Birch and Catani (2007) argue that immersions (experiences of learning about poverty face-to-face) should find more creative ways of establishing a space for the voice of the stakeholders and answer the question, “What would those living in poverty want us to do?” To answer this question, WIEGO creates spaces for their voices not only for individual members of the urban working poor but also, more importantly, for the collective and representative voice (Chen et al., 2013). All voices collected in WIEGO from informal workers play a role in engaging and empowering workers, especially women. For example, the reflections reported after an exposure and dialogue with the SEWA program (Chen et al., 2005) explain a case in India of collective voice. TruptiNasta Catering is a cooperative composed entirely of former waste pickers. Babiben, a member of this cooperative, illustrates how women can transform their lives, starting from the simple recognition of a person by her name:

Membership in the co-op meant meetings, and in this co-op all members were expected to speak up, express their opinions and address each other by name. This experience had a transformative impact on Babiben. Like most Indian women, she had never heard her name spoken before. In addition, she quickly found that her ability to think for herself was valued in this setting; her opinions carried weight. She distinguished herself as a leader among the women in the co-op. She became a member of the executive committee seven years ago. (Chen et al., 2005, pp. 23–24)

As a result of the union of voices of informal workers, a precise example was given at the First World Conference of Waste Pickers in Bogota in 2008. A number of representatives from waste-picker organizations participated in this congress, including unions, cooperatives, associations, supportive nongovernmental organizations, development agencies, governments, and researchers. On one hand, they participated to advance their struggle for recognition, respect, and civil liberty. On the other hand, this gathering served the purpose of learning and sharing experiences from different countries between waste pickers and other stakeholders (Ezeah et al., 2013). As Sonia comments, sometimes it is the informal workers themselves who present the results in conferences and congresses of experiences through WIEGO projects. Prior to the conference, they arrange meetings with the local organizations to inform, discuss, and strategize with all members about what will be discussed at the conference. During these meetings, workers can express their demands to be addressed at the main event. Likewise, at the same conference, members of WIEGO accompany and give support throughout the process. For example,

We went over all the sessions that she had to attend and speak at, and we asked her how she wanted to make an input.

Regarding the collection of impact stories, the researchers specified that the most commonly used techniques are observant participation, direct participation, video diary, and photo-news publications (visual stories). Within the framework of promoting research with impact (Reed, 2016), Sally stated, “I think it is about reflecting the transformative experiences in the way that people can sort of connect with. So that is the motivation we have with the workers’ life stories series.” Along these lines, the Gender and Waste Project analyzed how to empower female waste pickers. This project developed in Latin America based on a research-action pilot project in Minas Gerais, Brazil, begun in 2012. Specifically, the project studied the obstacles the workers encountered and how they overcame them, using six strategies: involving women in all phases, engaging multiple partners and expertise, collegiate coordination, regional workshops (as focus groups because participants were informal workers and WIEGO members), production of key resources such as gender toolkits, and on-going communication. All strategies were based in everyday reality (Rule, 2004) and were developed in dialogic spaces, had an educational function, and were intended to provoke critical dialogue and transformation within society (Meek & Simonian, 2017). The general tenets that guide their work is the prioritization of women’s situated experience as the starting point for building gender awareness tied to political action (Dias & Ogando, 2015). Regarding the issue of visibility, Sonia discussed the case of Pollyana Diogo, which happened during the realization of the project. Pollyana is a waste picker who suffered domestic violence perpetuated by her husband. She is a Brazilian Black woman. She began attending the workshops about gender issues when she was about 20 years old, and now she is 25 to 26 and continues to participate. Sonia organized a focus group for the gender project, in which Pollyana admitted to the group that she was a victim of gender violence. Sonia explains the revelation of Pollyana’s case:

She had never told anyone about what she endured at home. But when we started the gender project, for the first time Pollyana admitted to the group that she had been beaten up frequently by her husband. So this created commotion in the group.

The group and the leaders supported her, providing information on gender-based assistance to support victims and explaining the tools necessary to face gender violence. Meanwhile, one of the leaders was able to start moving forward to get some support for Pollyana. Finally, after an individual process with collective support, she told her partner that she wanted to leave him. As a result, he tried to kill her; instead, she escaped with one of her fingers amputated. After that, she took training courses and even worked for the gender project. This example demonstrates the power of making the problem visible in transforming a personal situation as well as changing other personal stories (Valls et al., 2016). In this sense, Sonia explains that, in a later workshop when another woman explained a similar case, “because I had learned it from Pollyana, this for me was a life-changing experience, because I had seen similar issues.” These statements show how Pollyana became an example of overcoming gender violence while her experience made the problem visible among the group of informal workers.

Validity

Validity stems from the use of CDLS using the communicative methodology. The dialogue with Sonia and Sally confers validity to the interpretation of their contributions because the communicative methodology works with validity claims based on egalitarian dialogue (Soler-Gallart, 2017). Gathering information using CDLS places a special emphasis on validity because of the nature of the reflections and interpretations performed by the same two researchers in WIEGO projects. The analysis of the CDLS using communicative methodology (Gómez et al., 2006) implies an intersubjective dialogue with the aim of reaching understanding and uses validity claims to achieve consensus, not the imposition of the more powerful position. It also implies compromise that aims to seek truth as an intersubjective understanding. For WIEGO, validity refers to achievements in gaining legal recognition of the informal workers and their organizations. In addition, it demonstrates that the working poor in the informal economy contribute to legitimizing both objective economic and social policies (WIEGO, n.d.-b). One successful example took place in Lima. Lima’s mayor from 2014 to 2016 stated that no one was complying with Lima’s metropolitan street vending ordinance because it was too old (from 1995) and needed to be reviewed. In the face of this reality, the mayor incorporated the dialogical perspective and dialogic leadership (Redondo-Sama, 2016) in local politics. He prioritized the voices of the poorest street vendors in all 43 districts in Lima. The informal workers participated by making proposals in the process of consultation executed by the city council. Finally, the city made a new law that considered the contributions and needs reported by informal workers. For example, a preoccupation that Sally exposed was the subject of licenses:

For example, they [vendors] said that a priority should be to make licenses last for two years instead of one because one year was not enough time to save enough money to cover the rent for a space in the market.

As a result of this participation in the process of constructing the new law, the policymakers saw the validity of arguments, they saw that the street vendors were organized, they understood the context, they performed research, and the research informed their arguments, allowing them to make effective arguments in this type of legal setting. The challenge for street vendors in Peru is to get the law evenly implemented and to protect it against rollbacks; this is also the case in India, where, after 40 years of struggling, court cases, litigation, protests and mobilizations, street vendors finally have a law, but in 2017, they are still fighting to get it implemented. However, in both cases, the informal workers themselves have led the public debate on their demands.

Sally argues that WIEGO wants to change social structures, which is a complex process. Despite this complexity, she emphasizes the permanent need to make the struggle of the informal workers visible since if we continue to allow this sector to remain invisible, we continue to silence an important sector of the population. Similarly, if the collective is silent, it is impossible for them to acquire validity. However, to guarantee that the research offers voice, visibility, and, finally, validity to these workers, the evaluation of the impact of these items is relevant. In this sense, quantitative assessments are insufficient because of the qualitative nature of the social impact (Maas & Liket, 2011). The following quotation from a CDLS with a researcher illustrates the importance of research to give validity to the informal workers; at the same time, she emphasizes that quantitative methodology is not enough to measure the impact:

The bigger picture of what we are doing is to build the movement, make livelihoods more secure and try to support collective organizations to transform systems. And it is difficult to measure impact and monitor using quantitative measures.

In the data collection process, it is possible, through qualitative techniques, to corroborate how the informal workers can influence the structural conditions (Connell et al., 2017). Through their dialogical participation and visibility process, the informal workers are capable of building new laws, policies, and standards and having legal recognition and contracts secured with municipalities and residence associations (WIEGO, n.d.-a). Overall, WIEGO is an example of how, through communicative action (Habermas, 1987) and dialogic action (Freire, 1970, 1997), vulnerable collectives, and specifically informal workers, can acquire validity, create knowledge, and transform social contexts.

Conclusion

WIEGO is an excellent example of how research can be designed to achieve social impact and thus contribute to the improvement of society (Reale et al., 2018). For this reason, WIEGO is evidence of social impact in the Social Impact Open Repository (SIOR; Flecha et al., 2015; SIOR, n.d.). One of the most important contributions of WIEGO is its own methodology design, which seeks to conduct research that contributes to the transformation of social realities and that improves the lives of people. Both participants of the CDLS highlighted the impact of the qualitative tools, especially narratives (impact stories) and focus groups, that allow individual stories to influence the collective experiences through dialogue spaces. There is no single method to measure impact, since it depends on the methodology developed in each project. All projects have inherent chains of dialogue among all agents directly or indirectly involved in the research. The union of all voices, with their particularities, gives meaning. The resulting collective voice of dialogue fosters the validity of informal workers’ arguments. Furthermore, to achieve validity, it is essential to have previously given participants voice and visibility. Because of this, the dialogical approach to research is fundamental. Altogether, the egalitarian dialogue on the research process is based on the validity of the arguments in finding the truth of the subject matter from the intersubjective understanding of participants.

The present research provides examples of how informal workers can develop powerful initiatives to transform personal lives and social contexts. WIEGO has not only developed to study poverty situations but also contributes to the formulation of policies and measures based on evidence and oriented toward the resolution of social problems. Furthermore, this study shows how knowledge transparency and direct involvement in social inequality transform reality through their own actions. Methods such as these are how academia helps the government and society to achieve results (Bastow et al., 2014). In WIEGO, researchers and social agents work to secure livelihoods for the working poor. As researchers have explained, and as revealed by the documents consulted, Freire’s (1997) premise that “change is difficult, but it is possible” makes particular sense. Through its methodology, WIEGO presents an effective way of working to generate social impact. In other words, all people involved in WIEGO are part of a process of social creation.