Editor,

RE: "What the new maternity law means for a working mother” (The New Times, February 25).

The overwhelming majority of our people, including mothers or would-be mothers, are employed in the non-organized sector, including on family-owned farms, micro-enterprises especially those operating in the informal economy and work under very informal, often unwritten agreements completely beyond the reach of labour laws that are designed for employment in the modern, organized formal economy.

No one can question the importance of these kinds of laws and their benefit for the workers concerned, for the well-being of our families, and for our society as a whole.

The question therefore becomes, how can we ensure that the benefits, or at any rate the principles, reflected in these kinds of laws are extended to that huge underclass without, at the same time, destroying or constraining the ability of those other activities to continue to generate jobs and livelihoods for those left by the roadside, unable to find employment and/or incomes from the formal economy?

Basic equity requires that we find a solution to the many knotty problems involved, including innovative funding arrangements (take a leaf from Mutuelle de Santé) so that this fundamental right is not simply restricted to that little minority of mothers in the formal economy.

MweneKalinda