Survey data on the digitalization of informal businesses in the Global South

During the spring of 2022, the UNDP Accelerator Labs created an online survey to investigate the uptake of digital tools by informal businesses in the Global South. 

We uploaded the questionnaire onto a digital surveys platform (https://www.kobotoolbox.org/). We then reached out through UNDP’s network of informal or small businesses in 16 countries, inviting them to complete the questionnaire and spread awareness about it. This implies that respondents are in no way a random sample of the target populations; this choice was made in the interest of speed and cost-effectiveness. We obviously claim no representativity, though we believe that some of our results are strong enough to be considered, to a first approximation, valid as a big picture.  

1,013 questionnaires from 16 countries, covering all UNDP regions, were completed. In the remaining three countries, we received fewer than 30 completed questionnaire, and decided to discard them. At the country level, the number of respondents ranges from 25 (Ecuador) to 306 (Peru). Our own analysis of the data is published here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7896327.