Giving Compass' Take:

• Giving Evidence/Financial Times discusses the "informal economy," which accounts for over 60 percent of the global labor force, and profiles a UK-based organization called Wiego that supports such workers.

• This post also emphasizes the importance of engagement, and how putting more agency into the hands of constituents (such as specific groups of informal laborers) can have an impact.

• Here's more on how to bring the informal workforce to the forefront of the economy.

The council wanted them out. The Grand Parade area in front of Cape Town’s City Hall needed to be clear for filming one day last month, so the market traders who have their stalls there would need to disappear. There have been traders on that stretch of ground for hundreds of years and, for them, a day without trading is a day without income.

But they had taken a lesson from the previous month. In February, they were to be removed for the then-president Jacob Zuma’s “state of the nation” address, as the Grand Parade area might have been needed for a helicopter landing.

In the end the whole plan changed because of Mr. Zuma’s resignation. By March, though, the Grand Parade United Traders Association and its member stallholders knew about their legal rights, and, by showing that the council had not followed “due process”, had the clearance halted.

You may think of the “gig economy” as a new phenomenon, a byproduct of technology. In fact, it covers most workers globally.

Read the full article about empowering the poorest of the poor by Caroline Fiennes at Giving Evidence.