Employment promotion

Without productive employment, achieving the goals of decent living standards, social and economic integration, personal fulfillment and social development becomes a chimera. Enterprise promotion and human resource development are key elements in achieving these goals.

The ILO conducts employment analysis and research, promotes employment-intensive investment and helps formulate employment policy. It also promotes skills development, job creation, enterprise development and cooperatives.

Employment creation

Persistent poverty, increasing income inequality and slow job growth – further exacerbated by financial and economic crises and climate change – are critical constraints on economic and social progress. Promoting inclusive job-rich growth is a central challenge for all countries today. With global unemployment at historically high levels, there has never been a greater need to put employment at the centre of economic and social policies. Even among those who work, the extent of poverty underscores the need for a far greater number of productive and decent jobs.
The insufficient pace in creating decent work worldwide points to the need for greater international coordination of macro-economic policies, as well as active labour market policies at the national level.

The Global Employment Agenda

The ILO identifies policies that help create and maintain decent work and income — policies that are formulated in a comprehensive Global Employment Agenda worked out by the three ILO constituents - governments, employers and workers.

The Agenda's main aim is to place employment at the heart of economic and social policies. Consistent with the Millennium Development Goals , the Agenda seeks, through the creation of productive employment, to better the lives of people who are either unemployed or whose remuneration from work is inadequate to allow them and their families to escape from poverty.

During the period 2010–15, the ILO’s strategy for promoting full, productive and freely chosen employment include the following key outcomes:
  • coordinated and coherent policies to generate inclusive job-rich growth
  • skills development policies to increase the employability of workers, the competitiveness of enterprises and the inclusiveness of growth policies and programmes to promote sustainable enterprises and entrepreneurship.