Labour and Employment:

Emerging topics in the SOCIEUX+ agenda

It has now been over one year since SOCIEUX+ began providing technical assistance in the area of labour and employment. After its inclusion in the Facility, many partner countries expressed interest in the new sector, allowing us to mobilise expertise and collaborate with other programmes, partners and networks.

From April 2017 to February 2018, SOCIEUX+ received 33 requests in this area, most of them from Latin America and Africa. SOCIEUX+ is now providing support in the labour and employment sector to more than a dozen countries, from Argentina, Colombia and Mexico, to Benin, Cape Verde and Cameroon.

As a flexible instrument, SOCIEUX+ provides peer-to-peer assistance to reinforce our partners’ capacity to manage very specific issues. These have included:

– Supporting the formulation of a labour policy related to employment for people with disabilities and vocational training in Azerbaijan;

– Enhancing services for employment, training and entrepreneurship in Benin, through an organizational and systemic review of the Ministry of Labour and Public Service and its structures;

– Providing participants with the technical tools and knowledge to address the challenges of formalizing informal workers in Cameroon;

– Strengthening civil officers’ capacity to improve security and health at work situations in the Cape Verdean public administration;

– Improving public employment service delivery in Colombia in order to match labour supply with demand;

– Supporting the Employment Service Bureau of Kampala, Uganda, to facilitate job access among youth jobseekers and increase labour demand.

We appreciate the confidence that partner countries have placed in SOCIEUX+ this last year. The anniversary also gives us an opportunity for reflection on the most urgent needs in the field, especially concerning the following five areas: the elaboration of labour and employment policies; capacity building for employment service staff; development and human capital actions; information technology (IT) tools, reliable statistics on informal sector and public policy evaluation; and, social dialogue and governance.