Job guarantees for sustainable work in low-income urban communities

Data and analytics scale up job guarantee programmes to promote and rebuild economic livelihoods of low-income urban communities.

Dr Swati Dhingra, Associate Professor (Reader), Centre for Economic Performance and Department of Economics, London School of Economics and Member, Modelling Review Expert Panel, HMG's Department of International Trade

Along with their grave public health consequences, health emergencies create profound economic and social disruption that destroy the livelihoods and wellbeing of millions for years afterwards. The World Bank expects Covid-19 to push 88-115 million people into extreme poverty, with a greater concentration in urban areas. Cities provide higher income-earning opportunities in normal times, but in many developing economies, they have limited infrastructure to protect livelihoods during health emergencies. They mostly fall outside anti-poverty programmes designed for the chronically poor. They lack the community ties and agricultural work that can provide relief. They are congested and suffer more from pandemics. 

Covid-19 has unequivocally highlighted the fragility and inequity of urban systems. Millions of informal workers, young jobseekers, and migrants have seen their work prospects and livelihoods decimated. An uneven recovery has put many on a trajectory towards long-term unemployment, which has scarring effects on lifelong earnings, employment and community wellbeing. In our project setting of India, 52% of young urban workers had no income during lockdown. In low-income states, 45% have no work or pay a year later. Recovery solutions remain scarce owing to concerns over implementability of active labour market policies outside of small formal sectors or tightly-knit villages.

The solution benefits populations vulnerable to livelihood insecurity in low-income urban areas of developing economies. It directly delivers services to communities with deficient waste systems and creates green jobs for informal workers, including rag-pickers. They are engaged in developing the solution through feedback mechanisms within an ongoing large pilot, smaller pilots and service provision (before the pandemic) and through interviews and large-scale surveys to elicit preferences and needs (2018, 2020, 2021).

Ward councillors and local government (in health/waste/labour) benefit from service provision, value for money estimates, and toolkits to justify resource needs to higher government levels. They are directly involved as services are provided in coordination with municipal waste collection activities.

State/national governments and international agencies developing labour market policies and infrastructure will benefit from evaluation, new data and analytical toolkits. They are engaged through meetings and seminars. 

Stakeholder participation is built in through an advisory board consisting of representatives from each group, grievance redressal mechanisms, and technological safeguards. The latter include data from mobile applications and community platforms, which help identify potential problems as they arise. The data is crowdsourced from various stakeholders in the community, like waste providers and generators, to enable cross-verification for accuracy of ground realities.

The solution creates clean jobs in the green economy for unemployed workers and provides key services in areas where safe waste management is virtually non-existent. Wards are selected by city governments and all households are served to ensure equity in public service delivery.

Following data security regulations, the solution generates community-sourced data and apps, maps and dashboards that are available free-of-charge to local governments and the community to generate resources for recovery and for future emergencies.

The solution will provide a report and peer-reviewed publication explaining how data and broader metrics can be integrated into job guarantees to provide larger social multipliers and their measurement.

 A manual, the apps and software tools, and their underlying programs will be made available free of charge so interested communities can deploy them after necessary adaptation. For example, the underlying code for the community platform and the dashboards and the underlying programs for the AI used to create control groups will be provided. Broad applicability is central to keeping costs low by deploying scale economies in  developing the data toolkit.

Overall, the solution will help in achieving the 2030 Agenda for SDGs, which has become more challenging due to the socioeconomic deterioration from Covid-19.

The solution creates tangible benefits for waste-working communities who will be employed under safe working conditions and a guaranteed number of days of work each year. In many countries, waste workers belong to vulnerable communities, typically from historically marginalised socioeconomic groups. Services will be provided in low-income urban areas where safe waste practices remain negligible.

Health emergencies create additional pressures on urban waste systems, and filling that gap in public services has health and environmental benefits for under-served communities. E.g., many cities around the world (e.g., Manila, Vienna), experienced congestion in municipal waste management as city centres gave way to heavier pressures on residential waste systems during Covid-19.

The data collected in the project also provides resources to governments by creating necessary waste and data infrastructure for ongoing and future interventions, which has led them to partner in the solution development. 

 The solution comes directly from the overwhelming response by informal workers supporting urban job guarantee policies in two post-Covid data collection waves. Over 85% of a random sample of 8,500 workers prefer a job guarantee over alternative policies like cash transfers or hiring incentives. The Growth stage will enable immediate application and adaptation of the solution to different contexts.

The solution will be fine-tuned and tailored for immediate implementation in different geographies in the Growth stage. India makes up the highest proportion of the world’s poor, those who live below $1.90 a day. 85 million more people are living in poverty in India in 2020, relative to 2019. Covid-19 is expected to make even more people poor, with 63% of them in South Asia. The operations will be scaled up to cover low-income urban communities in India, which are at the centre of the fight against the deprivation unleashed by the pandemic. 

The partnering social enterprise provides waste management services in Bihar. It is one of fifteen waste management providers empanelled by India's largest low-income state, Uttar Pradesh. The UP Urban Development Ministry is ready to implement the solution to garner evidence of its efficacy. The Ministry of Railways is the single largest employer in India with 1.4 million employees. They are keen on starting waste management in their housing facilities across the country. The solution has been presented to these agencies and we expect that seed funding for accomplishing efficiency will encourage them to justify and deploy their own resources to scale up and continue with operations afterwards.

Monitoring and evaluation are built in through detailed baseline/midline/endline surveys, digital logs and data visualisation, mapping/census of households and workers in treatment areas (and control groups). Progress is determined through analytics that cross-verify digital logs of service delivery and provide economic, health and environmental indicators, that enable monitoring of the quality of service delivery and inclusiveness of vulnerable groups.

Economic progress is measured through employment outcomes (including earnings, hours/weeks of work, occupation/skills), household consumption, material deprivation, credit/debt, migration patterns, and experimental vignettes designs for policy questions.

Individual health and community wellbeing indicators include physical health (illnesses, especially pollution-related and communicable illnesses, hospitalisations, medication), mental wellbeing (anxiety, depression) and amenities (appearance, hygiene, service delivery).

Social value indicators include civic engagement and inclusiveness (representation of vulnerable groups in meetings, platforms), community participation (percent of waste treated, adoption and compliance with service delivery) and data infrastructure (household coverage, data accuracy, percent of waste dumps and sewage mapped). 

Baseline surveys in three low-income states have covered economic statistics. The Pilot has set up infrastructure for economic and social indicators, and health data is being discussed with the city administration. As most indicators evolve over time, two years is a reasonable period to measure progress.

As reported by the World Bank, the pandemic has increased local governments’ readiness to adopt waste management initiatives in particular, and green jobs policies more generally. But it has stretched municipal and national budgets, and due to its urgent nature, has left little time for experimentation to achieve efficiency and large social multipliers in value creation. 

The solution is timely and scalable, but it requires substantial technical expertise and financial resources. We expect that technical expertise developed during the Growth stage can be scaled up without the need to make major changes to the underlying methods for data and analytics. However, financial resources, such as wage and adaptation costs, need to be incurred per project, and it would not be feasible to deliver efficiency without additional funding. 

Over the next three years, the goal is to increase efficiency/value for money of the solution for wider adoption across urban areas of the developing world, a task that will be overseen by  Dr Jaitman (World Bank/UN) and Professor Yueh (Commonwealth). The aim will be to provide a general tool that governments/international agencies can tailor to their specific community needs, but to build in selection criteria through which these needs can be identified.

London School of Economics (LSE).

LSE Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), 

LSE Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, 

LSE Department of Economics

The solution offers interdisciplinary research in action. This narrows the possibilities for funding from typical sources like governments, research councils and donor organizations. 

Governments, especially in developing economies, rarely have time and resources to experiment with models of jobs programmes, that maximise social value through technology. They often need to implement programmes urgently to address crises and therefore, solutions do not go through a process of trial and error which increases their social value and makes them more cost-effective. Research funding organisations typically focus on specific fields, and interdisciplinary research with a strong implementation component is often not part of their funding criteria. Finally, donor bodies focus on the implementation components rather than research value. 

The solution is therefore ideally suited to the Trinity Challenge where interdisciplinary research and providing an immediately actionable recovery solution are important criteria for funding. The main constraint to the Growth stage is financial resources which will enable the solution to increase value for money and attain broad applicability. The solution builds on the best methods in economics but contributes more broadly to work, community, the environment and public health infrastructure. This combination of broad research remit and practical recovery solution aligns with TTC's agenda.

The solution benefits from technical inputs from Northeastern University (Founding Member, Trinity Challenge), which is factored into the costing. 

Dr Ameet Pinto, Assistant Professor at Northeastern University will be joining the team to provide expertise on technologies, that can be adapted to different contexts to maximise the social value of the solution. The frequency of waste activities enables logging of simple metrics and labour-intensive tasks to build public health data infrastructure. For example, early discussions with Dr Pinto have highlighted that easy-to-use technologies, like CO2 monitors and swab tests, could be coupled with the service provision to create public health data for local governments. These are easily logged by households and workers, and are much easier to implement than tools such as sewage testing kits which tend to be more suited to centralised sewage systems.   

We would also be glad to partner with Trinity Challenge member organisations to develop the solution further to promote the goal of a green urban recovery and clean jobs for future economic, environmental and public health resilience of cities.