About WIEGO: Who We Are

WIEGO Programme Staff and Steering Committee

WIEGO Programme Staff

Martha Alter Chen is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Coordinator of the global research policy network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). She is an ex-oficio member of the WIEGO Steering Committee. An experienced development practitioner and scholar with a doctorate in South Asian Regional Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, her areas of specialization are gender and poverty alleviation, with a focus on issues of employment and livelihoods. Before joining Harvard University in 1987, Dr. Chen lived for 15 years in Bangladesh, where she worked with BRAC, one of the world’s largest NGOs, and in India where she served as field representative of Oxfam America for India and Bangladesh. She is the author of numerous books including, most recently, The Progress of the World’s Women 2005: Women, Work and Poverty (co-authored with Joann Vanek, Francie Lund, James Heintz, Renana Jhabvala and Chris Bonner), Mainstreaming Informal Employment and Gender in Poverty Reduction (co-authored with Joann Vanek and Marilyn Carr), Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture (co-authored with Joann Vanek) and Perpetual Mourning: Widowhood in Rural India.

Sharit Bhowmik is the Director of the Urban Policies Programme of WIEGO, an ex-oficio member of the WIEGO Steering Committee, and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Mumbai. In addition, he currently hold the following positions: Managing Committee Member of the Indian Sociological Society; Executive Committee Member of the National Alliance of Street Vendors of India (NASVI); Chairperson of the Labour Education and Research Network (LEARN), an NGO which helps to organize workers in the informal economy; Council Member of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR); Member of the National Steering Committee of Indo-Dutch Project in Development Alternatives (IDPAD) of ICSSR; Member of the Board of Control for Orphanages and Other Charitable Institutions Act of the Government of Maharashtra; and a Member of the State Monitoring Committee State for Implementation of Juvenile Justice Act. Additionally, he previously served as an expert member of the National Task Force on Street Vendors, which was formed by the Government of India’s Ministry of Urban Development and Poverty Alleviation, and as a member of the Drafting Committee for the National Policy for Street Vendors. His research interests include the urban informal sector, plantation labour, and cooperatives.

Christine Bonner is the Director of the Organization and Representation Programme of WIEGO and an ex-oficio member of the WIEGO Steering Committee. She has spent 30 years working in and with the labor movement in South Africa in various capacities. Most recently, she served as the founding Director of the Development Institute for Training, Support and Education for Labour (DITSELA) focusing on the development and provision of union education, and on support for union organizational development. Most recently, she co-authored The Progress of the World’s Women 2005: Women, Work and Poverty with Martha Chen, Joann Vanek, Francie Lund, James Heintz, and Renana Jhabvala.

Sarah Gammage, an economist, is the Research Coordinator of the WIEGO Global Markets Programme and the Washington D.C. representative of the Centro de Estudios Ambientales y Sociales para el Desarrollo Sostenible, a Non-Governmental Organization in El Salvador. She is also an affiliate researcher at the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University. Her research includes examining the effects of macroeconomic policy and globalization on women in Latin America; exploring the impact of migration, internal displacement and refugee status on the intergenerational transmission of poverty; and analyzing human-environment interactions in diverse ecosystems. Over the last ten years, she has worked with and for a number of development organizations including the United Nations Development Programme, the International Center for Research on Women, the Global Policy Network, and the International Institute for Environment and Development. She is the board chair of the Ecumenical Programme in Central America and serves on the Latin American Committee of the American Friends Service Committee. She has a master’s degree in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a doctorate in Development Studies from the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. She is an active member of the Latin American Studies Association and the International Association for Feminist Economics.

James Heintz is the Research Coordinator of the WIEGO Statistics Programme and an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has written on a wide range of economic policy issues, including job creation, global labor standards, egalitarian macroeconomic strategies, and investment behavior. He has worked as an international consultant on projects in Ghana and South Africa, sponsored by the International Labor Organization and the United Nations Development Programme, that focus on employment-oriented development policy.

Elaine Jones is the Director of the WIEGO Global Markets Programme, an ex-oficio member of the WIEGO Steering Committee, and an independent advisor in the fields of ethical and fair trade. Elaine worked with The Body Shop International, as Head of Ethical Trade up until May 2003 where she played a key role in developing trading relationships with community-based producer organisations in 27 countries as part of the company’s Community Trade Programme. At the same time she was instrumental in building an ethical supply chain strategy which worked on promoting compliance with International Labour Standards in global supply chains.

During her time at The Body Shop, Elaine served on the Board of The Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) , a tri-partite organisation which unites Companies, Unions and NGOs in the promotion of Labour Standards internationally. Elaine is currently engaged in developing materials and delivering training on Ethical Trade with The Co-operative College, Manchester where she is an Associate Tutor.

Elaine Jones spent a total of 12 years living and working in Latin America in Bolivia, Mexico, Cuba and Dominican Republic through programmes of international cooperation and development. During this time, Elaine worked with a variety of locally-based development NGOs in the fields of community development, documentation, publications and research, gender, environment and development, organisational strengthening and capacity-building.

Elaine Jones is an active member of the international Fair Trade movement for more than five years has served as a Board member and Council Trustee of Twin and Twin Trading, the London-based organisation which trades fair trade coffee, cocoa, fresh fruit and nuts. Twin Trading was a founder of two of the UK’s most successful Fair Trade brands, CafeDirect and Day Chocolate Company.

Francie Lund is the Director of the Social Protection Programme of WIEGO, an ex-oficio member of the WIEGO Steering Committee, and an Associate Professor at the University of KwaZulu Natal (formerly the University of Natal) in Durban, South Africa, and teaches Social Policy in the School of Development Studies. She has done extensive research in social security, analysing the effects of different forms of social assistance on poor households, and especially their effects for women in rural areas. She chaired the Lund Committee on Child and Family Support which was convened after the transition to democracy in 1994.

WIEGO Steering Committee

Renana Jhabvala is the Chair of the WIEGO Steering Committee. She has been working with the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) since 1977 and is currently SEWA’s National Co-ordinator as well as the Chairperson of SEWA Bank and SEWA Bharat. Her most recent publications include The Progress of the World’s Women 2005: Women, Work and Poverty with Martha Chen, Joann Vanek, Francie Lund, James Heintz, and Christine Bonner; Informal Economy Centrestage: New Structures of Employment, which she co-edited with Ratna M. Sudarshan and Jeemol Unni; and The Unorganised Sector: Work Security and Social Protection, which she co-edited with R.K.A. Subramanya.

Kofi Asamoah has been the Deputy Secretary General of the Ghana Trades Union Congress since 2000. Prior to holding this position, Kofi previously served as the General Secretary of the Dock Workers Union in Ghana from 1996 - 2000 as well as the President of the Dockworkers in Africa (ITF). From 1988-1996, he worked as the Deputy General Secretary for the Maritime and Dockworkers Union in Ghana. Kofi is married with two children and holds a postgraduate certificate in labour policy studies from the University of Cape Coast in Ghana.

Jacques Charmes is an economist and statistician. Currently Director of the Département Sociétés et Santé at L'Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD, formerly ORSTOM), he is also teaching economics at the University of Versailles and at the Institute for Political Science in Paris. He has been involved in the design and analysis of many labour force, living standards and informal sector surveys in Africa, North and South of Sahara. He has written several articles, reports and manuals on the measurement of informal sector in labour force and National Accounts, with special emphasis on women. He has participated in many UN and World Bank programmes and activities on these topics, especially: the new international definition of the informal sector adopted in 1993 (15th International Conference of Labour Statisticians, ICLS), the definition of informal employment (17th ICLS, 2003), the handbook on the household sector accounts for the implementation of the new System of National Accounts, the handbook on measurement of the non-observed economy (OECD), the World's Women statistics compilations, and national human development reports in various regions. Recently he has been involved in two large programmes with the UN Economic Commission for Africa (African Centre for Gender and Development): the African Gender and Development Index (AGDI) and the “guidebook for mainstreaming gender perspectives and household production into national statistics, budgets and policies in Africa”.

José del Valle Perez was born in Mexico on December 19, 1946. He received a degree in law (barrister) from the Escuela Libre de Derecho. Since 1968, he has been active in union life, first as an advisor and in 1985 he began working with CROC (the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Farmers) where he was elected to Secretary General of the Syndicate of Graphic Arts and Secretary General of the National Federation of Refreshment Workers. Within the structure of CROC, he was elected to Secretary of International Affairs and Policies. He has attended numerous international congresses, seminars, and workshops. He has taken part in the International Labour Conferences at the ILO for the past 10 years. At present, he is a member of the Board of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU in English or CIOSL en español). He has held many public roles within the administration of the government of Mexico, as well as many public posts within the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Dan Gallin is Chair of the Global Labour Institute (GLI), a foundation established in 1997 with a secretariat in Geneva. The GLI investigates the consequences of the globalization of the world economy for workers and trade unions, develops and proposes counterstrategies and promotes international thought and action in the labour movement. Gallin worked from August 1960 until April 1997 for the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant and Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF), since 1968 as General Secretary.

He was born in 1931 as a Romanian citizen, became stateless in 1949 and was granted Swiss citizenship in 1969. He studied political science and sociology in the United States and in Switzerland and lives since 1953 in Geneva. He joined the socialist movement as a student in the United States in 1951 and has been a member of the Swiss Social-Democratic Party since 1955. He is a member of the Swiss General Workers' Union(UNIA) and has been a member of one of its predecessors, the Swiss Commercial, Transport and Food Workers' Union, since 1960.

He has served as President of the International Federation of Workers' Education Associations (IFWEA) from 1992 to 2003 and served as Director of the Organization and Representation Programme of WIEGO from June 30, 2000 to July 31, 2002. He continues to serve on the WIEGO Steering Committee.

Gallin also serves on the Board of the following institutions: Collège du Travail (Geneva), Federation News (General Federation of Trade Unions, UK) (editorial board), International Union Rights (International Centre for Trade Union Rights, UK) (editorial board).

He is currently researching union organization of women workers in the informal economy, the role of trade unions in development and issues of policy and organization in the international trade union movement.

Pat Horn is the International Co-ordinator of StreetNet International , an international federation which has been formed to promote and protect the rights of street vendors around the world. An experienced trade unionist and activist in the women's movement, her work now focuses principally on the issues of workers in the informal economy, with a specialization in the areas of work of the street vending sector, such as urban policies and the own-account labour market. StreetNet International has almost 200 000 members in 19 affiliated organizations in 17 countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Prior to starting in 2000 to work full-time on the launch of StreetNet International, Ms Horn worked as a trade unionist from 1976 - 1991 in the emerging independent trade union movement in Apartheid South Africa (which became COSATU - Congress of South African Trade Unions - in 1985) and as a women's activist in the African National Congress (ANC) Women's League when it launched its democratic structures on the ground in the early 1990s. From 1993 she merged these two experiences into founding the Self-Employed Women's Union (SEWU) which organized women in the informal economy into a new kind of trade unionism in five regions of South Africa for the ten years from 1994 - 2004.

Dave Spooner has a background in education and writing on international trade unionism, and the use of internet technologies for international solidarity. In the 1980s he worked with trade unions in north-west England on transnational corporations, factory closures and unions in the South, co-founded International Labour Reports magazine, worked for the Hong Kong-based Asia Labour Monitor, returning to England in 1989 to work for Manchester City Council. He became International Programmes Officer for the UK Workers' Education Association in 1993 and Secretary of Euro-WEA in 1995. He was elected General Secretary of IFWEA in 2003.

During his time with the WEA he worked closely with the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions in developing education work to support informal economy workers, and has subsequently been involved in similar work elsewhere in Southern Africa and in Asia. He was commissioned to join the British Government delegation to the ILC discussions on the informal economy in 2002, and has written on informal economy questions for the UK Department for International Development, the ILO and trade union and NGO publications. He has been a member of the WIEGO ORP Advisory Committee since 2000.

William F. Steel is one of the founding members of WIEGO, and has participated actively in the Steering Committee. At the end of 2005, he retired as Senior Adviser in the Africa Region Private Sector Group of the World Bank, where he had worked since 1983, specializing in small enterprise development and microfinance. He is currently living in Accra, Ghana, working part-time at the University of Ghana and as a consultant in the local World Bank Office. He continues to support the World Bank-IFC programme for development of micro, small and medium-scale enterprises (MSMEs) in Africa, for which he was the Regional Adviser based in Uganda for two years. He is also a leading expert in micro and rural finance, and recently co-authored studies of microfinance regulation in African countries. As Co-Chair of the Committee of Donor Agencies for Small Enterprise Development (1991-2004), he led the development of Guiding Principles for donor support both for microfinance (1995) and for business development services (2001). He has published numerous studies, articles and books on small enterprise development, informal financial markets, microfinance regulation, employment of women, and industrial adjustment. He previously taught economics at Vanderbilt University and the University of Ghana, and he has served as an Advisor in the African Development Bank and the Indonesia National Planning Agency.

Víctor E. Tokman is presently an Advisor to the President of Chile and an international consultant for ECLAC, IDB and the ILO. He is a member of the Steering Committee of WIEGO. He also teaches at the post graduate programme of FLACSO in Santiago. He retired from the ILO in 2001 after a long career mostly in Latin America, where he was Director of PREALC (Regional Employment Programme for Latin América and the Caribbean) and ended as Regional Director for the Américas and Assistant Director General. He was also the Director of the Employment and Development Department in Geneva. He graduated at Oxford as a D.Phil in economics, as a Master in the University of Chile and he obtained his first degree in the Universidad del Litoral in Argentina. He has published a large number of books and articles on employment, equity, labor and development. He is a recognized authority in the informal sector field. His pioneer work on this field started back in 1973 at the beginning of the introduction of the concept and continue to contribute up to present days. His last book on the informal sector is "From informality to modernization" (2000) and his most recent book which includes a main chapter on the evolution f the concept and a policy proposal is "Employment and Equity: 40 years of search" (2004, Fondo de Cultura Económica). Both books were published in Spanish.

Past Members of the WIEGO Steering Committee

Ela Bhatt is founder of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and served as the General Secretary of SEWA from 1972- 1996. She served as chair of the WIEGO Steering Committee until 2005. A lawyer by training, Ms. Bhatt is a respected leader of the international labour, cooperative, women and micro-finance movements who has won several national and international awards. She was one of the founders of Women’s World Banking and previously served as Chair of the International Alliance of Homebased Workers [Homenet], of the International Alliance of Street Vendors [Streetnet], and of WIEGO. She also served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. Most recently, she authored the book, We Are Poor but So Many: The Story of Self-Employed Women in India.

Marilyn Carr is development economist undertaking consultancies in: gender, trade and export promotion; women in the informal economy; women and non-timber forest products; and gender,science and technology. From 1988 to 2005, she was Director of the Global Markets Programme of WIEGO as well as a member of the WIEGO Steering Committee. She has been a Research Associate at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK; a Research Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies; a Senior Research Fellow at the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa; and a Visiting Fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development, London. She also was Senior Economic Adviser for UNIFEM, New York and Regional Director, UNIFEM, Harare; Senior Economist with ITDG in London; and worked on gender, technology and small business development throughout Africa with the Women's Centre of the UN Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa. She has written or edited 10 books and published several monographs and articles in her specialist areas.

Winnie Mitullah is a researcher and a lecturer at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS), University of Nairobi. She formerly served as the Director of the Urban Policies Programme of WIEGO and as a member of the WIEGO Steering Committee. She holds a PhD in Political Science and Public Administration. Her PhD thesis was on Urban Housing, with a major focus on policies relating to low income housing. Over the years, she has researched, written and consulted in the areas of urban development, with a focus on housing, informal urban economy, politics, institutions, governance, and the role of stakeholders in development. Recently completed works include a contribution to the Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, case study of Nairobi; contribution to the fourth-coming World Development Report 2005: A Better Investment Climate for Everyone, a study commissioned by the ILO on the Informal Labor in the Construction Industry in Kenya: A Case Study of Nairobi and a book chapter on `Gender Inclusion in Transition Politics: A Review and Critique of Women's Engagement.'

S.V.Sethuraman is an independent consultant working out of Washington, D.C. and a member former of the WIEGO Steering Committee. Until recently, he was the foremost thinker and writer on the informal sector in the ILO and wrote and/or edited most of the ILO’s publications on the informal sector in the last two decades.