RNSF Workshop on organization of informal workers : Cooperatives and public dialogue within informal workers formalization - Café Correcto project’s initiatives in Peru and Bolivia.

Within the preparation of the RNSF workshop on the “ organization of informal workers” that will take place from the 4th to the 8th December 2017 in Lima, Peru, we would like to present some of the initiatives that will be discussed. Here is the Progettomondo MLAL initiative “Café Correcto”, implemented in Peru and Bolivia, and its latest results. 

The project “Training to improve livelihoods, particularly through the development of skills and education and vocational training, vulnerable and marginalized people and the people who depend on the informal economy” implemented by Progettomondo MLAL in Peru and Bolivia have reached several results during the last year of implementation.  

Café Correcto aims at improving the productive, working and personal capacities of women and men self-employed or employed in small enterprises in the construction, food, engineering and textile sectors, by strengthening their capacities, consolidating the representative associations/organizations of the prioritized sectors (in order to manage the access to social protection and to micro business and financial services) and structuring the public and private actors dealing with employment promotion, access to market and social protection.

During the last year, several training and workshop on labor rights and “cooperativism” have been organized to inform and advice local coffee producers on labor legislation and on how organize themselves in cooperative structures to better protect their rights as a first step of formalization of their situation.

As a result, 57.6% of coffee producers’ families have access to public service and 42.8% of families benefit from insurance mechanisms. Moreover, the awareness activities aiming at strengthening the legal framework resulted in the approval of a law on access to public services and forms of insurance for informal workers and the organization of various debate involving civil society and institutional stakeholders.

The participation to the workshops has been enlarged to cooperative not yet included in the project to strengthen the network, facilitating exchange and share of practices among participants and to build a broad front of debate with the State for the modernization of the cooperative sector as a path to move informal workers to formal economy.

At the same time, a significative work has been carried out in the intervention areas, focusing on young people and accompanying them in complementary activities with each other, in order to build new local opportunities for development and strengthen the dialogue and the associative model.

Finally, thanks to the various meetings held within the project, it has been possible to awaken the interest of leaders and partners in the ideation and creation of a mechanism for a fund to manage the economic resources generated from the felling of wood. The ambition of the project is to build, in a participatory way and from below, a model that helps the generation of alternative systems to subsistence agriculture, centered on the cooperative system with its territorial and national articulations.

Progettomondo MLAL and the various stakeholders of the Café Correcto initiative are awaited at the RNSF workshop in  Peru. This will be the occasion to present and share their best practices in the field of informal workers organization and advocacy push-strategy toward public institutions concerning labor law.