According to a study conducted by the Trades Union Congress and the global research policy action group Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), nine out of ten workers in Ghana reportedly eat only once a day and rent textbooks for their children in order to cope with the high cost of living.
Informal sector workers represent 89 per cent of employment nationally and 83 per cent in urban areas. Despite the contribution of these workers to economic growth, vulnerabilities against them persist. Head porter, Rukaiya tells our reporter, that she and some colleagues, eat once a day or without protein to save money.
“When we buy food, we buy heavy ones, so that it can last us through the day, we just drink sachet water throughout the day and go to bed on an empty stomach,” she revealed. These hawkers, head porters and others have not been spared by the recent hikes in the cost of living, according to the WIEGO Accra cost of living report.
A senior research fellow at the University of Cape Coast, Dr Owusu Boampong, indicates the adoption of adverse coping mechanisms is a threat to the country’s human resource base. If our people are not eating well, and are going through these ways to live, we will face a human resource depletion in the future. It is high time we paid attention to this sector of the economy”, he added.
Though the government has signed treaties including the sustainable development goals, to ensure easy access to trading space for informal sector workers, constant evictions by government task forces have been a major setback to their output.
According to the lecturer at the University of Ghana Business School, Public Administration Department, Dr. James Mensah, government and informal sector players should agree on workspaces to prevent the frequent evictions, which disrupt their economic stability.
Stakeholders at the dissemination seminar advocate a mutual understanding between State agencies and the informal sector. The Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) cost of living report looked at the recent cost of living and its impact on informal sector workers. WIEGO is a global research-policy-action network that seeks to improve the status of the
working poor, especially women, in the informal economy.
