Available funds to travel to Asia – Informal employment in Asia

The multi-disciplinary and EU-funded project ‘Labour’ (see below) invites researchers and lecturers from Stockholm University to spend time abroad (e.g. for fieldwork, writing up retreat, teaching, NGO-work etc.) with any of the project partners in Asia (see list below). The duration should be a minimum of 30 days (and max 12 months) and the participant will receive 2100 Euro/month to cover costs (travel, housing, visa, etc) and/or as salary top-up. The focus of participants’ projects is flexible.

Please contact Thomas Borén or Ilda Lindell, at the Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University; thomas.boren@humangeo.su.se or ilda.lindell@humangeo.su.se.

 

List of Asian partners:

Bhutan: Chithuen Phendhey Association (Taba)

Laos: Participatory Development Training Center Lao (Vientiane)

Maldives: Maldives National University, Faculty of Hospitality and Tourism Studies (Male)

Myanmar: Charity Oriented Myanmar (Yangon, N.B. closed at the moment)

Philippines: PAKISAMA (Pambansang Kilusan ng mga Samahang Magsasaka) (Quezon City, Manilla)

Thailand: Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok)

Vietnam: Center for Sustainable Development Studies (Hanoi)

 

Information about the research project on informal employment in Asia (’Labour’)

According to the last WESO report, there are over 1.4bn workers in vulnerable jobs worldwide, with numbers expected to rise in 2020 due to COVID-19. Several attempts have been made at both domestic and international levels to address these concerns. This includes efforts through the Sustainable Development Goals process, which includes a specific statistical indicator to measure informal employment (8.3.1), the formulation of SDG8 (decent work) and SDG9 (sustainable industrialization). Across countries and world regions, the degree to which SDGs have been used to address youth issues and inform national policies varies significantly. Indeed, in spite of the fact that the great majority of states have formally committed to addressing the SDGs, including those related to insecure employment, there is little evidence to indicate that developing regions currently have the capacity to systematically study the problems if informal employment and vulnerability in ways that facilitate the development and implementation of concrete viable solutions. This is due, in our view, to two major challenges. First, although a number of approaches that have been used inside the EU, there has been little, if any, attempt to adapt the existing framework elsewhere. Second, no systematic review of anti-precariousness policy has been attempted beyond the EU region. LABOUR is a research and training programme designed to address the above-mentioned shortfalls of research and development approaches with particular attention to a region where this is particularly worrying concern. Informal employment in Asia is estimated to account for 68.2% of the active population. By gathering a team of 14 participants that includes academic and non-academic partners working on labour insecurity, we aim not only at producing specialists on the topic and on the region but also at proposing concrete mitigation measures that can be taken into account by decision-makers and development organisations.

Stockholm university is a partner in the research project “LABOUR: Tacking informal employment in Asia: building post-COV19 solutions to precariousness through case-study based evidence on Bhutan, Laos, Maldives, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam”. Pi at Stockholm University is  Thomas Borén, Department of Human Geography. Participants in the project are also Ilda Lindell and Dominic Power, at the same department.

The Program Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions-Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (MSCA-RISE),  Horizon 2020, EU’s largest research and innovation program, is financing the project 2021-2024. Researchers from Estonia, Ireland, Moldavia, Sweden, Portugal, Lithuania, and Turkey are participating in the project. The project is coordinated by the University of Tallinn.

Link to short project description (partly in Swedish)