Conference Agenda

This paper takes stock of the insights and learnings from a COVID-19 Emergency Cash Transfer (ECT) program that was administered to vulnerable informal sector workers in Sierra Leone. The study aims to identify potential impacts of this intervention on a range of outcomes. The paper starts by reviewing relevant examples of cash transfer programs that were instituted in response to the COVID-19 crisis. It then describes the context, the intervention, and data of the ECT program before presenting correlation analysis between the ECT and various measures of economic security and subjective well-being of households with urban informal sector workers in Sierra Leone. The quasi-experimental analysis is conducted by matching administrative data to survey data and using program eligibility criteria and inverse probability weights to identify the short- and medium-term relationship between a one-off US$ 135 cash transfer and various labor market, food security, human capital and subjective wellbeing outcomes for recipient and non-recipient households of the ECT. The results show positive correlations between receiving the transfer and the number of hours worked as well as employment in the medium-term. It also finds that program beneficiaries report higher chances of their main income increasing or staying the same compared to non-beneficiaries. The positive correlation between the transfer and income disappears over the medium-term, perhaps suggesting that one-off transfers work best to cushion vulnerable self-employed households and informal wage workers in the short-term but does not impact medium-term employment or income. The analysis is followed by discussion on limitations of data and suggestions for future work.

The adoption of the Social Protection Floors Recommendation of 2012 (SPFR) is widely recognised as an “historic” (Deacon 2013) and “radical” (Cichon 2013) reorientation of social protection, promising a new “universal and comprehensive” approach. Despite the SPFR’s bold ambitions, however, the adoption of social protection floors at global- and national-level has proven uneven. In practice, the social protection floors initiative has generally been “subordinate” (Seekings 2019) to the Decent Work agenda. Particularly in many lower-income settings in the global South, for instance, vertical expansion of benefits to waged workers through social insurance has taken precedence over the SPFR’s more radical promise to horizontally expand the frontiers of social assistance. In Cambodia, for example, entrenched norms of fiscal and social conservativism entail that policy attention has focused on expanding benefits provided to the 700,000 workers in the country’s largest formal industry – the garment sector – rather than expanding the scope of social protection to include the yet more numerous informal or agricultural sector workforce.

In this paper, we examine the consequences of this lopsided social protection strategy for its apparent beneficiaries: women working within the garment industry. We argue that the focus on extending support for formal workers, at the exclusion of informal workers is, in fact, detrimental to both groups. To illustrate these arguments, we draw on original data from the GCRF-funded ReFashion project, a longitudinal study tracing the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on a cohort of 200 garment workers in Cambodia over 24 months. We show how, in the absence of a robust social protection floor, workers in the garment sector effectively fund a social safety net for family members through remittance transfers. However, garment sector salaries alone are insufficient for this task, leading to a “debtfare” (Green 2023) model, in which workers finance these costs through increasing resort to personal debt. The result is a crisis of over-indebtedness among workers in the garment industry that undermines the achievement of Decent Work in the sector. We suggest that Covid-19 offers a moment for reflection, like that which followed the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and inspired the SPRF itself, to learn from the vulnerabilities exposed by the pandemic and recentre a radical vision of social protection that delivers for all.