Promoting Rural Employment For Poverty Reduction Conclusions Adopted At The 97th Session Of The International Labour Conference Geneva May June 2008

This report adopts a decent work perspective to approach the challenge of promoting employment and reducing poverty in rural areas by examining issues of employment, social protection, rights and social dialogue in rural areas in an integrated way.

Social security represents an investment in a country's human infrastructure, which is no less important than its physical infrastructure. This book outlines basic concepts such as the social protection floor and the social security staircase, analyses the affordability of various approaches, and examines the results of practices around the world, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Its second part weighs the pros and cons of conditional cash transfers and, based on a wealth of statistics, argues that effective social transfer programmes not only alleviate poverty, but also improve labour market participation, productivity, nutrition, health care, education, consumption and social inclusion. The overall message is that such investment can benefit poorer countries as well as richer ones, and that even in times of tightened budgets and global economic crisis , the dividends are well worth the expenditure.

This report is intended to facilitate the discussion of domestic work at the Conference, and provides information from across the world that may be useful in replying to the questionnaire appended to it. A special effort has been made to identify and examine focused and innovative laws and regulations on domestic workers that are emerging in a number of countries.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Sub-Saharan Africa's rural population is growing rapidly, and more young people are entering the labour market every year. This raises serious policy questions. Can rural economies absorb enough job seekers? Could better-educated youth transform Africa's rural economies by adopting new technologies and starting businesses? Are policymakers responding to the youth employment challenge? Or will there be widespread unemployment, social instability, and an exodus to cities and abroad? Youth and Jobs in Rural Africa: Beyond Stylized Facts uses survey data to build a nuanced understanding of the constraints and opportunities facing rural youth in Africa. Addressing the questions of Africa's rural youth is currently hampered by major gaps in our knowledge and stylized facts from cross-country trends or studies that do not focus on the core issues. Youth and Jobs in Rural Africa takes a different approach, drawing on household and firm surveys from selected African countries with an explicit focus on rural youth. It argues that a balance between alarm and optimism is warranted, and that Africa's "youth bulge" is not an unprecedented challenge. Jobs in rural areas are limited, but agriculture is transforming and youth are participating, adopting new technologies and running businesses. Governments have adopted youth employment as a priority, but policies often do not address the specific needs of rural populations. Youth and Jobs in Rural Africa emphasizes that by going beyond stylized facts and drawing on more granular analysis, we can design effective policies to turn Africa's youth problem into an opportunity for rural transformation.

The position of skills development on the agenda of policy-makers and development agencies improved markedly around the turn of the 21st century. This book tracks the ways skills have gained importance both in the developing and the more industrialized world. It analyses critically the multiple ’drivers' of skills development and the linkages of skills to the knowledge economy, growth, and employment in an increasingly competitive world. It also acknowledges the many modalities and delivery systems for skills development, arguing that this institutional diversity, often spread across several ministries and training authorities, has made it more difficult to give a national account of the skills development sector. The re-emergence of skills has triggered many reform initiatives associated with TVSD, some of which have become almost ’fashions' and are in danger of being adopted without sufficient evidence of their effectiveness. This work provides cautionary advice and fresh insights that planners will find rewarding.