Seen Economy

"Seen" activities are those which are accounted for as productive (including informal work) in the System of National Accounts (SNA). [to be edited later]

When adapting ESCO, a European labor taxonomy, to the South African "seen" economy, the first step involved asking if occupations in Europe - and the skills associated with them - are similar to those in South Africa. The answers to this were approached from two directions.

First, do occupations with the same titles across Europe and South Africa substantively entail the same tasks and require the same skills? For instance, being a "specialize seller" or "taxi driver" in Europe (and hence in ESCO), rarely involves having to negotiate prices or bargain. However, these are critical skills for such occupations in most developing countries, including South Africa. These gaps in occupational definitions and skills requirements are larger for more informal occupations, especially in a gig economy like South Africa's.

Second, do Europeans and South-Africans refer to the same occupations in the same terms? For example, is someone who conducts data collection called an data collector in both regions? Locals in South Africa use the term "fieldworker" more commonly. ESCO provides space to link "alternative titles" to every occupation it lists, so as to reflect this diversity of names given to the same jobs. It is also translated in every European language and reflects the conceptual diversity of ways languages refers to the same occupations. Expansion of ESCO beyond the EU, particularly in relatively data-poor developing contexts, requires careful groundwork for the new countries and languages.

Tabiya approached answers to these questions in two ways:

1. Using existing databases and taxonomy: We used a combination of Harambee's rich database of employment data, and SA's pre-existing local labor taxonomy in testing methodologies to systematically add South African alternative titles to ESCO.

2. Directly ground truthing the applicability and usability of ESCO for microentrepreneurs: We conducted a survey with young micro-entrepreneurs registered with Harambee in trying to assess whether: i) respondents could readily find their work on a list of ESCO occupations ii) skills under selected ESCO occupations fully captured the skills that a microentrepreneur thinks they have/need.