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While cash transfers gain prominence as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a strong impulse to regard them as a stepping-stone towards the formalization of employment and universalization of social protection. This contribution problematizes how populations in informality are included in narrowly targeted social assistance interventions, which are heavily reliant on targeted schemes and fail to make informality legible to programme administrators. The focus of the article lies in the politics of exclusion and inclusion that permeate digital infrastructures, particularly data infrastructures such as social registries, that are used to target Ecuador's most prominent social assistance programme, Bono de Desarrollo Humano, and the COVIDrelated programme Bono de Protección Familiar. The article is based on ethnographic work, interviews and narrative analysis. It finds that social registries compiled for proxy means testing weaken the link between eligibility and informal employment and obscure the processes that perpetuate precarity. More recent data innovations, such as machine learning, are also insufficient to locate vulnerable workers as they learn from historical social registries data and replicate their biases, for example by overlooking non-poor areas where informal employment also occurs. Data infrastructures have shifted attention to the technicalities of the selection of beneficiaries and away from power imbalances in the design of social assistance, despite their selectivity and politics. I would like to thank Kate Meagher for her encouragement and guidance and the editors for their critical comments and insightful suggestions on the earlier version of this article.

Mobility is a multifaceted concept with social, economic and political implications. This article reflects on the role of mobility and its relation to precarity in the emergence of protests in both Quito (Ecuador) and Santiago (Chile) in 2019 by examining the interplay between mobility and inequality. It argues that the announced increases in transport and fuel costs in Chile and Ecuador exposed obstacles to spatial and social mobility and existing inequalities. Although the protests arose in response to the announced reduction in fuel subsidies and possible increases in transport costs, we propose that they reflect a deeper issue, relating to the vulnerability of the livelihoods of significant segments of the population, despite the fact that both Quito and Santiago have seen improvements in several poverty and inequality indicators in recent years. We discuss how mobility and geography relate to patterns of structural marginalisation that are not necessarily evident from aggregate economic indicators, and how understanding inequality in terms of the ‘right to the city’ and access to public services explain the protests in both countries as a response to existing segregation and deep‐seated inequalities.

El programa de transferencias monetarias condicionadas Bono de Desarrollo Humano en Ecuador ha permitido extender la cobertura del sistema de protección social a familias en situación de  pobreza, dando relevancia a las labores de cuidado en la construcción de capital humano. A pesar de que las mujeres han ganado mayor visibilidad y han sido incluidas de manera significativa bajo este esquema, su inserción no ha generado rupturas con asignaciones tradicionales de género dentro del hogar y la sociedad. ¿De qué manera puede reimaginarse la protección social no contributiva para reducir las brechas de género e incluir de manera significativa y transformativa a las mujeres? El presente artículo aborda esta pregunta con una discusión institucional de los limitantes del diseño actual e invita a evaluar alternativas encaminadas hacia una nueva política de distribución guiada por una lógica de derechos y ruptura con los elementos normativos que relegan a la mujer al cuidado del hogar.

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