What happens after the exchange?

There were fewer than 30 people in the first session of the ILO and ITCILO’s BRICS South-South Knowledge Series. The room was small enough to read.

Present was a strong ILO contingent, a large Ethiopian group, formal Indonesian representation and a scattering of practitioners from elsewhere in the Global South. GrowZA appeared to be the only clearly South African organisation present.

It was a serious room, but also a very particular kind of room. Most of the visible participants came from governments, international institutions and diplomatic missions. Worker formations, informal businesses and employer bodies were less obvious.

This was noteable because the conversation was about making informal workers more visible to institutions. The people being made visible were largely not in the room.

The series is led by Anita Amorim, who heads the ILO’s Emerging and Special Partnerships Unit and has spent years building the organisation’s work on South-South cooperation. The premise is that countries in the Global South should learn from one another as producers of knowledge, not wait for solutions to arrive from elsewhere.

That is the right premise. But knowledge does not travel cleanly. It arrives inside institutions with different capabilities, incentives and politics.

Carlos Galián, an ILO technical expert in social-protection financing, took the room through examples of how digitalisation is being used to address informality. The cases were useful because they showed that “formalisation” can mean very different things.

Brazil’s eSocial system brings labour, payroll, tax and social-security reporting into one platform. It reduces duplicated administration and creates a clearer record of the employment relationship. But it also shows how efficiently a state can integrate compliance once it decides to do so.

Cambodia’s CAM-IE platform takes a different route. Informal businesses can register through a mobile application, website or participating bank and connect to health insurance, skills programmes and finance. More than 119,000 applications had been received by July 2025. The more interesting part is that Cambodia is tracking whether registration leads to the use of services, rather than treating registration itself as success. ILO

In Mozambique, the ILO, M-Pesa and Portucel are testing digital wage payments for occasional workers in a forestry supply chain. It is a much narrower intervention. Workers are paid through mobile money rather than cash, creating a payment record and a possible route into financial services and social insurance. ILO

These are not versions of the same solution.

One integrates employer reporting. One offers informal businesses an entry point into services. One begins with the practical problem of how a specific group of workers gets paid.

The temptation in international discussions is to extract the platform from the conditions that made it possible. We see the application, dashboard or registry. We see less of the institutional bargaining, legal work, financing and failure that sits behind it.

This is where GrowZA’s inclusion in the series becomes relevant.

Across our work, we keep encountering the gap between participation and value.

A young person can complete a skills programme without entering work that recognises or rewards those skills. A social-investment programme can spend its budget without leaving the implementing institution stronger. A community can be consulted without gaining any authority over what follows. A worker can be registered without receiving reliable protection.

The programme exists. The value does not necessarily travel with it.

That is the connection between this series and our wider work on skills portability, precarious work, institutional capability and social investment. We are interested in what happens after someone enters the system.

During the session, we asked what should be a fairly basic question:

What is the minimum guaranteed offer to a worker before we can credibly ask them to formalise?

Workers provide data. They become more visible. They may face new tax, licensing or compliance obligations. What do they receive in return?

A number on a registry is not enough. Nor is the possibility that several disconnected services may eventually become available.

The offer has to be tangible: recognition of identity and skills, a credible record of work, fair and traceable payment, portable protection and somewhere to go when the system fails.

This is especially important in care work. Digital matching can connect a care worker to a household. It cannot, by itself, guarantee a fair contract, protect a migrant worker or address the unpaid care burden that keeps millions of women outside the labour market.

The technology may be new. The unequal distribution of risk is not.

GrowZA’s contribution to the series should therefore remain quite specific. We are not there to repeat the South African problem back to an international audience. We are also not there to collect case studies.

We can contribute a practice-based challenge to the conversation: how does a country move from an interesting model to something that its institutions can own, finance and operate?

That means asking who benefits, who carries the cost, who holds the data, who resolves failure and which institution remains accountable after the pilot ends.

It also means testing whether one of these approaches can be adapted around a real South African sector. Not a national platform. A contained worker journey with identifiable actors and a problem worth solving.

The series runs across three sessions. Its value will not lie in the number of examples shared. It will lie in whether the room can move from comparison to commitment.

GrowZA’s place in that process is not to provide the African example at the end of the agenda. It is to keep asking what would have to be true for the idea to work here.

Happy to be in the room learning and representing the South African Agenda.

This is how we #GrowZA