BASIC reflects the first letter of each of the countries in which the project is taking place: Brazil, Angola, South Africa, India and China. GENDER coordinates implementation in partnership with the ILO Gender Network.
Project activities and outputs across the five countries include adopting gender-sensitive workplace policies; training for constituents on non-discrimination; implementation of participatory gender audits; building capacity of labour statisticians to provide sex-disaggregated data; and mapping policy options to organize women workers in the informal economy..
The project incorporates some conclusions of the 2009 International Labour Conference (ILC), whose discussion on gender equality at the heart of decent work reaffirmed ILO’s commitment to equality between women and men in the world of work. The conclusions highlighted the impact of the global economic crisis on working women and men, and stressed that such crises should not create greater inequalities nor undermine women’s acquired rights. The ILC also adopted a Global Jobs Pact, which reaffirmed that “this current crisis should be viewed as an opportunity to shape new gender equality policy responses. Recovery packages during economic crises need to take into account the impact on women and men and integrate gender concerns in all measures”.
The project’s knowledge and capacity building components build on ILO’s comparative advantage in providing these to constituents in order to support gender-sensitive policy formulation. In the context of the global financial and economic crisis, such knowledge development focuses on identifying new trends and patterns in the world of work, and links between economic efficiency, social justice and gender equality. This includes making more systematic use of sex-disaggregated data to inform policy formulation, and working with labour statisticians to design new monitoring mechanisms to track achievements in gender equality in the world of work.
In January 2011, the BASIC project entered in its second phase. Throughout 2011 the project will build on and consolidate the work under taken in 2010. It will focus on promoting gender sensitive workplace practices, advancing ratification and implementation of the four key ILO gender equality conventions, and working to ensure that domestic workers have access to their rights as workers.
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