Research During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Crucial Arms for Struggle

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), a global research–action–policy network, collaborated with membership-based workers’ organisations and non‑governmental organisations to conduct a mixed methods, longitudinal study with nearly 2,000 informal workers across 11 cities in the global South and North. The research process underpins three of WIEGO’s core research principles, which include centring informal workers’ lived experience and knowledge, fostering collective ownership over the research process, and producing actionable evidence for advocacy. Drawing from the insights of researcher-activists, this article considers how WIEGO’s institutional readiness, highly nuanced and contextualised analyses, and attention to trust and care enabled a co-productive research process. Moreover, the article seeks to understand how these factors can potentially shape the broader objectives of research as both a capacity-building and mobilising tool and as a medium for translating knowledge for advocacy locally, nationally, and internationally.