Local Solutions for a Global Economy

Our Initiatives

Our Initiatives

The Global Fairness Initiative seeks to run initiatives that secure fair wages to promote economic development for vulnerable workers, engage governments to extend balanced policies, adopt sustainable solutions so the poor can benefit from green innovations, extend meaningful social standards to attract investments, and remove barriers to create equal access to high value markets. The following initiatives help guide are mission, our programs, and our events, and are detailed below:

Initiative: Informality

Informality encompasses economic activities lacking adequate documentation. Although informality exists worldwide, this segment of the economy tends to be larger in developing nations. Informal employment provides a survival strategy in countries lacking social safety nets (such as unemployment insurance) or where wages and pensions are low. Demographic trends characteristic of developing economies, such as rapid population growth and urbanization, often augment the informal sector. Under these conditions, informal employment tends to absorb most of the expanding labor force in urban areas. Informal employment is typically a result of few viable, income-generating alternatives.

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Initiative: Multi-stakeholder Engagement

If informality in many countries provides the majority of new jobs, why spend the time, money, and effort to integrate it into the mainstream? Because the informal economy is composed of vulnerable workers, including small-scale farmers, domestic workers, home-based workers, children, wage employees, and small enterprises, who cannot weather economic downturns but could thrive with access to social safety nets and formal services that provide legal and physical safety. Integrating informal workers is a necessary government initiative to improve labor rights enforcement, employment conditions, competitiveness, and thereby create a more resilient national economy.

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Initiative: Inclusive Agricultural Economy

For nearly a decade, the Global Fairness Initiative (GFI) has been a leader in providing solutions that open economic access and opportunity for working poor communities around the globe. In these emerging economies, agricultural workers represent a large percentage of the labor force, yet are often among the poorest and most vulnerable. In order to ensure the sustainable economic and legal inclusion of the majority of workers, GFI works to identify and address the real barriers preventing long-term economic viability. By giving farmers the training, tools, and access necessary to operate in the real economy, GFI and its partners are helping to move thousands of families from subsistence to true sustainability.

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Initiative: Investing in Women-owned Enterprises

Women around the globe face poverty-related challenges unique to their gender due in large part to lack of access to land rights, multiple responsibilities within and outside the home, as well as limited access to formal education and technical training. In many regions of the world the majority of agricultural production is handled by women and adolescent girls. Although women are the backbone of the rural economy, they rarely receive fair and equitable compensation for their labor.

GFI creates adaptive and integrated projects to increase agricultural production and remove market barriers for women farmers to help address the growing food security issue, respond to climate change and erosion of natural resources, and address the economic disadvantages of informal working communities. The results are results driven multi-stakeholder engagements that economically empower poor women producers and create permanent and effective local market structures that allow marginalized women to respond to market fluctuations, mitigate risk and improve their livelihood.

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