Prequel of Season 1 : Before the Billions Were Counted

There is a number that has sat at the centre of my thinking for years. It is 61.

Sixty-one percent of the world's working population earns a living outside the formal economy.

That is not a rounding error. That is not a regional anomaly confined to developing markets.

That is 2.1 billion human beings who wake up every morning to work hard, produce real economic value, and receive nothing in return from the systems their governments built to protect workers.

No contract. No pension. No safety net. No visibility.

For decades, economists, institutions, and policymakers have studied this number. They have published reports about it. They have held conferences about it. They have included it in footnotes of development frameworks that were never designed to fix it.

BASE1 exists because studying a problem is not the same as measuring its solution.

We do not measure informality. We measure formalization. We do not look at where a country stands today. We look at how fast it is moving, and in which direction.

That instrument is the Formalization Velocity Index. And this newsletter is where we begin.

Mathieu K. Gouanou
Founder, BASE1: The World Informal Economy Summit
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathieugouanou/

That figure is not drawn from a think tank estimate or a contested academic model. It is the finding of the International Labour Organization, published in its landmark global assessment of informal employment. The ILO analysed labour force data across 99 countries representing the full spectrum of economic development. The result: 61 percent.

Read that again with its full weight. Six in ten workers on this planet operate without a formal employment contract, without access to social protection, without legal recourse when things go wrong, and without the data infrastructure that would allow policymakers to see them.

The formal economy, which absorbs the remaining 39 percent of workers, has generated the entire institutional architecture of modern capitalism. Central banks, stock exchanges, pension systems, labour courts, trade unions, corporate governance codes, and the multilateral development frameworks that govern trillions in annual capital flows. All of it was designed for, and continues to serve, four workers in ten.

The other six built a parallel economy. It has no headquarters. It has no lobby groups in

Brussels or Washington. It does not file quarterly reports. But it feeds families, moves goods, provides services, and sustains communities across every continent on this planet.

Three regional data points anchor the scale of what has been ignored.

In Africa, 85.8 percent of workers are employed informally. That figure is not a projection for 2050. It is the present reality on a continent of 1.4 billion people, the youngest and fastest-growing labour force in the world.

In Asia and the Pacific, between 52 and 56 percent of the workforce operates outside formal systems. That translates to between 1.1 and 1.3 billion workers — a figure that dwarfs the entire labour force of North America and Europe combined.

In OECD economies, the informal rate falls to approximately 15 percent. The formalization gap between the developed world and the global average is not a matter of degree. It is a matter of system design.

And within that global 61 percent, women face a structurally higher burden. Sixty-three percent of women workers are informal, compared to 58 percent of men. The five-percentage-point gap compounds across lifetimes of concentrated vulnerability in domestic work, home-based production, and street vending — sectors with the lowest employer rates and the weakest access to credit.

This is the problem BASE1 was built to address. Not by writing more reports. By measuring the velocity of change.

Source: ILO, Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture, 2018.

Every major disruption in economic history follows the same pattern. A large group of people with real needs and real productive capacity is systematically excluded from the dominant institutional architecture. Then someone builds the architecture they were missing. And the world realises, too late, that the exclusion was never inevitable. It was a design choice. The informal economy is that disruption. It has been waiting for its platform.

Consider what six decades of development economics has produced on this subject. Hernando de Soto documented the legal exclusion of informal producers in Peru in 1989 and argued that dead capital trapped outside formal property systems represented the primary constraint on developing-economy growth. His work was celebrated, cited, and largely unimplemented at scale. The ILO has published comprehensive statistical assessments of informal employment since the 1970s, building one of the most rigorous global datasets in social science. The World Bank's Jobs Group has produced dozens of country-level analyses linking informality to productivity gaps and income volatility. The research base is not the problem. The measurement architecture is.

Every institution that has studied the informal economy has measured its stock. How many workers. What percentage. Which sectors. Which regions. These are important baseline measurements. But they are static. They tell you where a country is. They do not tell you how fast it is moving, in which direction, and what is driving the acceleration or the stagnation.

This is the distinction that BASE1 was founded to make. And it is the distinction that gives rise to the Formalization Velocity Index.

The FVI does not measure informality. It measures formalization. Specifically, it measures the velocity at which workers and enterprises active in the informal economy move toward formal status — and the institutional, financial, regulatory, and digital conditions that determine whether that velocity is accelerating or decelerating.

This is a fundamentally different analytical posture. It shifts the question from "how bad is the problem?" to "how fast is the solution moving?" It shifts the policy frame from diagnosis to navigation. And it shifts the investment signal from risk avoidance to velocity identification.

The strategic implication is significant. Countries and regions with high formalization velocity represent the leading edge of the largest structural economic transition of the twenty-first century. Workers entering formal systems for the first time generate new tax revenues, new consumer spending, new access to credit, and new participation in social protection systems. Enterprises formalising for the first time become visible to investors, eligible for contracts, and capable of scaling. The compounding effect of formalization velocity, applied to 2.1 billion workers, produces an economic transformation that no existing development framework has adequately modelled.

This is the blue ocean that BASE1 occupies. It is not a niche. It is not a sub-discipline of development economics. It is the central question of global economic organisation for the next thirty years. And as of today, no institution owns it.

That changes with the launch of BASE1: The World Informal Economy Summit and the Formalization Velocity Index.

The platform BASE1 is building has a precise institutional function. It convenes the full ecosystem of actors whose decisions determine formalization velocity: national governments and labour ministries, development finance institutions, multilateral organisations, private sector enterprises operating in or sourcing from informal markets, academic researchers, and the civil society organisations that work directly with informal workers. It provides that ecosystem with a shared measurement instrument, the FVI, that translates the complexity of formalization dynamics into a navigable, comparable, and actionable signal.

And it begins with a newsletter. Because before institutions change, arguments change. Before capital moves, ideas move. Before policy shifts, the frame shifts.

The Prequel you are reading is the first frame. Season 1 begins April 1, 2026.

These are the baseline figures against which the Formalization Velocity Index will measure progress. Every number below is drawn from ILO publications and verified by Mr. John Steed, Chief Data Officer, BASE1.

We stand at the threshold of the greatest economic transformation in human history. For decades, we have counted workers as though they were static data points. Governments published labour force surveys. International organisations compiled regional aggregates. Development economists built models from those aggregates and presented their findings at conferences attended by other economists. The cycle repeated. The 61 percent remained. We were looking backward. Every instrument we built was designed to measure where the informal economy was. None of them were designed to measure where it was going, or how fast.

At BASE1, we operate from a different premise. We do not measure informality. We measure formalization. The distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between a photograph and a velocity sensor. A photograph tells you where a runner is at the moment the shutter opens. A velocity sensor tells you how fast they are moving, in which direction, and whether they are accelerating or decelerating. Policy built on photographs produces static responses to dynamic problems. Policy built on velocity produces interventions that compound.

The Formalization Velocity Index is that velocity sensor. It does not tell you how informal a country is today. It tells you how fast formalization is happening, and where it is accelerating. That is the question that has never been systematically answered at global scale. It is the question BASE1 was founded to answer. We do not look at where a country is today. We look at its momentum. The FVI is not an improvement on existing measurement frameworks. It is a paradigm shift. And the question we are asking — how fast is formalization happening, and where is it accelerating? — is the question that will define the next chapter of global economic policy.

Season 1 begins April 1, 2026. The Invisible Billions will no longer be invisible.

Mathieu K. Gouanou
Founder, BASE1: The World Informal Economy Summit
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathieugouanou/

Season 1: The Invisible Billions

Season 1 of the BASE1 Intelligence Newsletter launches April 1, 2026.

Two episodes. Published two weeks apart. Built around one central argument: 2.1 billion workers are the most undercounted, underserved, and underestimated economic constituency on the planet. And the institutions that were built to serve workers have, by design or by neglect, left them out.

Episode 1 will foreground the Asia-Pacific dimension of the informal economy — the region where between 52 and 56 percent of the global informal workforce is concentrated. Episode 2 will turn to Africa, where the informal employment rate of 85.8 percent represents not a crisis to be managed but a velocity opportunity to be measured.

The Formalization Velocity Index will be introduced as the central analytical lens of Season 1. Numeric scores are not published in Season 1. The framework, the logic, and the measurement posture are.

All data cited in this issue has been verified by Mr. John Steed, Chief Data Officer, BASE1.