Thematic Solution Forum 4

ILO Solution on Skills Development, Youth Employment in the Framework of South-South and Triangular Cooperation

 

Photos with @UNOSSC @ilo @sesric @NumanOzcann @TawfikPerihan @boscomonte @baptista_f during #GSSD2017Antalya TSF4: ILO Solution on Skills Development, Youth Employment in the Framework of South-South and Triangular Cooperation
More about the session here: https://t.co/jU5NstgeH2 pic.twitter.com/o6ndL3ErrA

— GSSD Expo (@southsouthexpo) January 29, 2018

 

1. Introduction

The ILO Declaration on Social Justice for a Fair Globalization (2008) and the Global Jobs Pact (2009) highlight skills development as central to improving productivity, employability and social inclusion. The Human Resources Development Recommendation, 2004 (No. 195) provides guidance on the content of effective skills policies and systems. The Conclusions on skills for improved productivity, employment growth and development adopted by the International Labour Conference at its 97th Session in 2008 establish a strategy for skills development. The ILO Solution Forum aims to present development solutions relevant to youth and women employment in the framework of South-South and triangular cooperation. Particularly, the Forum will aim to provide results-based presentations and scalable southern development solutions and will ensure that employment decent work and social inclusion for youth and women are integral parts of any sustainable development strategy. It will also focus on skills and education policies to facilitate job transition and improve employability, including equitable outcomes for vulnerable groups such as women, girls and youth.  It aims at building partnerships to support tackling the youth employment crisis.

 

 

a) Objectives

To facilitate and promote discussion on South-South and triangular partnerships, including:

• How can these partnerships best be supported and scaled up, given the changing global economic, social and environmental context considering the decent work agenda, skills development and youth employment?
• How can the development community maximize the impact of South-South and triangular cooperation for evidence-based decision-making and policy planning taking into consideration skills development and a decent work perspective?

The ILO Solution Forum aims to present development solutions relevant to youth and women employment in the framework of South-South and triangular cooperation. Particularly, the Forum will aim to provide results-based presentations and scalable southern development solutions and will ensure that employment decent work and social inclusion for youth and women are integral parts of any sustainable development strategy. It will also focus on skills and education policies to facilitate job transition and improve employability, including equitable outcomes for vulnerable groups such as women, girls and youth.  It aims at building partnerships to support tackling the youth employment crisis.

 

b) Structure

The solution forum will be conducted in an interactive manner, combining presentation of the applied development solutions from technical experts in the field of youth and women employment. Three hours will dedicated for this forum. At the end the moderator will summarize the discussions and will provide closing remarks including possible recommendations on how to strengthen regional policy cohesion to promote youth employment through awareness raising, vocational training, pilot projects for the transfer of knowledge on employability strategies, among others. The summary report with recommendations will be developed after the forum and will be available for all the participants of the forum and on the web.

 

2. ILO and GSSD

The ILO has been actively involved in the GSSD since 2009 and hosted the 2010 Expo at ILO Headquarters in Geneva. The ILO has been active promoting decent work solutions in the different Expos, devoted to Social Protection (Geneva, 2010), Food Security (Rome, 2011) and Energy (Vienna, 2012) ^[1]; Environmental Sustainability and Green Jobs (Nairobi, 2013); SDG and South-South (Washington, 2014); Agenda 2030 and SSTC (Dubai, 2016). In the framework of the GSSD 2017, the ILO will organize a Solution Forum encompassing a series of good practices and lessons learned on South-South and triangular cooperation (SSTC) on the theme of Youth Employment. Involving representatives of governments, workers’ and employers’ organisations will contribute to address the issue from different perspectives and with an integrated approach. The latter will allow combining and better understanding the interrelation of fundamental principles and rights at work, labour standards, employment creation, social protection mechanisms, and social dialogue in strategies tackling youth employment. With the rise of new mechanisms of dialogue and cooperation among developing countries, the development solutions that will be showcased in this forum represent essential tools that bring new technology and capacity (i.e. transfers of know-how, technology, and exchanges of information), which can be utilized in the fight against youth unemployment. The ILO has a publication on the GSSD expos that can be found in http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—exrel/documents/publication/wcms_244336.pdf

 

3. Skills Development and Youth Employment: An Overview of the Current Challenges

Skills development plays an important role in supporting sustainable development. Skills enhances productivity and resource efficiency at the macro level. It facilitates jobseekers’ access to employment, which helps reduce poverty in a sustainable manner. Nevertheless, unequal access to skills development opportunities and modest labour market relevance of skills development leave full benefit of skills development untapped. This two-day elective module encourages the participants to discuss skills development issues through interactive sessions.

This workshop pays particular attention to the resource constraints and a limited administrative capacity of the existing public vocational/professional education and training systems that confront many of the developing countries. Our discussions in the thematic module therefore will highlight the importance of promoting demand-driven skills training through effective partnerships.

The ILO report “World Employment Social Outlook, Trends for Youth 2016” ^[2], state that the fragile economic outlook is putting further pressure on the already weak labour market prospects of youth around the globe. The prospects are particularly worrying for youth, where the unemployment rate reached 13.1 per cent in 2016 (up from 12.9 per cent in 2015) after the moderate signs of improvement registered between 2013 and 2015. This translates into an estimated 71 million unemployed youth worldwide in 2016 – half a million more than the previous year. In addition, it is estimated that some 156 million employed youth, or 37.7 per cent of working youth, in emerging and developing countries are living in extreme or moderate poverty in 2016 ^[3]. Lowering youth unemployment by improving access to stable work opportunities remains the key objective in developed countries, where the youth unemployment rate is expected to remain at the highest level in global terms – at 14.5 per cent in 2016 and 14.3 per cent in 2017 – despite continuing its downward trend, which started in 2013 when youth unemployment was close to 17.5 per cent. The youth unemployment rate in emerging countries is set to rise from its 2015 level to reach 13.6 per cent in 2016 and 13.7 per cent in 2017 – translating into an additional 0.6 million unemployed youth compared to 2015.

 

4. Global Framework for Addressing the Youth Employment Crisis and the Potential of SSTC

In June 2012 during the 101^st Session of the ILC, the ILO adopted a Resolution calling for immediate, targeted, and renewed action to tackle the youth employment crisis: The Youth employment crisis: A call for action ^[4] complementing the Resolution and conclusions concerning youth employment that were adopted by the ILC in 2005. A number of proposals for ILO action on youth employment have been inserted in this ILC resolution, including establishing “mechanisms to review and disseminate good practices on youth employment interventions, including through mutual learning and South–South cooperation”. Moreover, the conclusions prioritize five policy areas aimed at creating pro-employment growth and decent jobs:

• employment and economic policies to increase aggregate demand and improve access to finance
• education and training to ease the school-to-work transition
• labour market policies to target employment of disadvantaged youth
• entrepreneurship and self-employment to assist potential young entrepreneurs
• labour rights that are based on international labour standards to ensure that young people receive equal treatment and are afforded rights at work.

During the 316^th Session of the ILO Governing Body in November 2012, a seven-year Follow-up Plan was endorsed giving effect to the provisions of the aforementioned Resolution. The Plan aims at increasing ILO’s capacity to provide global leadership and act as a centre of excellence on youth employment, enhance its capacity in the five policy areas of the 2012 ILC Resolution, and expand action on knowledge development and dissemination, technical assistance, and partnerships and advocacy for decent work for youth. Moreover, its three strategic pillars are: knowledge development and dissemination, technical assistance and capacity building, and partnerships and advocacy. Finally, it was emphasized the need to explore “opportunities to extend South–South and triangular collaboration to include youth employment” as called for by the resolution ^[5].

The Global Initiative on Decent Jobs for Youth was launched in 2016, and it is a unique collaboration and partnership platform to join efforts to tackle the youth employment challenge and assist Member States in targeting and delivering on a crucial goal of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Investments to support young people in the labour market have increased worldwide since the economic crisis. Yet, there is still limited coordination and insufficient scale to address the full dimension of the youth employment challenge. To enhance harmonization and collaboration and to scale-up investments and impact, the Global Initiative acts as the catalyst for global, coordinated action. This strong focus on action is intertwined with three key elements: a multi stakeholder alliance, a knowledge platform, and resources.

 

2016 Global Initiative’s Strategy and its linkages to SSTC and peer approaches

To stimulate country-level action, scale up existing efforts, and increase impact, the Initiative focus on interventions that are locally owned, ensure clear coherence with national development priorities, and rely on rigorous evidence of what works in different settings. These interventions are concrete and focus on the following multisectorial areas:

• Green jobs for youth in collaboration with the Partnership for Action on Green Economy (PAGE) and SSTC;
• Quality apprenticeships in collaboration, inter alia, with the Global Apprenticeships Network (GAN) and triangular cooperation;
• Digital skills and “tech-hubs” to improve decent job opportunities for youth in the digital economy;
• Youth in fragile states and the question of fragile-to-fragile cooperation;
• Youth in the informal economy, promoting an integrated strategy for young peoples’ transition to the formal economy in synergy with the current urbanization issue-based process initiated by HLCP/CEB in support of Habitat III;
• Youth in the rural economy and peer learning approaches and sharing of good practices;
• Linkages to global markets and investments to improve opportunities for young entrepreneurs, also with the Youth and Trade Initiative;
• Transition to decent work for young workers (15-17) in hazardous occupations and SSTC.

The Action relies on the commitment of national and regional institutions and the support of United Nations Country Teams to fully engage a diverse set of local partners, drawing from the rich and varied composition of the Initiative’s multi-stakeholder Alliance.

 

 

Moderator

 

 

Panelists

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ILO Focal Point

Anita Amorim
Head, Emerging and Special Partnerships Unit (ESPU)
Department of Partnerships and Field Support (PARDEV)
amorim@ilo.org
+41-795931355

 

 

 

[1] http://www.ilo.org/pardev/partnerships/south-south/lang–en/index.htm

[2] http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—dcomm/—publ/documents/publication/wcms_513739.pdf

[3] i.e. living on less than US$3.10 per day

[4] The 2012 Resolution calls upon ILO constituents and partners to 1) Foster pro-employment growth and decent job creation through macroeconomic policies, employability, labour market policies, youth entrepreneurship and rights to tackle the social consequences of the crisis, while ensuring financial and fiscal sustainability; 2) Promote macroeconomic policies and fiscal incentives that support employment and stronger aggregate demand, improve access to finance and increase productive investment; and 3) Adopt fiscally sustainable and targeted measures, such as countercyclical policies and demand-side interventions, public employment programmes, employment guarantee schemes, labour-intensive infrastructure programmes, wage and training subsidies and other specific youth employment interventions. (For more information: http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—ed_norm/—relconf/documents/meetingdocument/wcms_185950.pdf)

[5] http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—ed_norm/—relconf/documents/meetingdocument/wcms_191163.pdf