Social Protection in Egypt – Situation analysis on Informal Workers and their families

Informal workers and their families in Egypt face obstacles in accessing social protection programmes due to a multitude of factors, partly related to characteristics of their work, including volatility of earnings, irregular periods of work (due to illness, unemployment, etc.), diversity of employment relationships, the lack of clarity on the division of the workforce, role and responsibilities, geographical mobility, and finally the failure of their work to be adequately captured in conventional social protection mechanisms. This lack of social protection was exacerbated with the COVID-19 crisis, which revealed that these informal economy workers lost their income related activities without being eligible to any kind of social benefits to compensate their loss of income. As the COVID-19 crisis context keeps exacerbating the lack of social protection of informal economy workers, the prime ministerial decree No. 2183 of 2020 created an inter- ministerial committee, headed by the MoSS with the mandate to develop a strategy to extend social protection to informal workers. To support the government with the development of the strategy, ILO and UNICEF in conducting a situation analysis for informal workers in Egypt to know more about the working conditions of those workers and the challenges facing extending social protection to them.

Project symbol

EGY/21/04/CEF

Admin unit

DWT/CO-Cairo

Start date

01/11/2021

End date

15/08/2022

Total allocation

24610

Total expenditure

Status

Closed

24534

Development Partners

United Nations Children's Fund

Country/Countries

Egypt

Outcomes

Outcome 8: Comprehensive and sustainable social protection for all