GENEVA - The world is full of working poor. But these people are not poor because they do not work - they are poor because they cannot earn enough money.

It has become clear that current policy prescriptions for tackling poverty, enhancing people's security and making the world a safer, more prosperous and fairer place to live aren't producing the desired results.

Roughly half the world's population still scrapes together a bare-bones existence on the equivalent of about US$2 a day. And in too many places, having a job doesn't guarantee the ability to escape from poverty. This slow and uneven progress mandates us to rethink and retool our economic and social policies aimed at halving world poverty by 2015 (the Millennium Development Goals). This responsibility can be summarized in a single phrase: working out of poverty.

We have not done enough to lay the foundations of peace by significantly reducing poverty, finding new ways to expand decent work and developing viable, job-producing enterprises.

Individuals, families and communities have a right to expect those in positions of public and private authority to come up with a set of policies that give them a fair chance at a decent job.

What does this entail? Right now, and for the foreseeable future if present trends hold, there are simply far too few new jobs for the growing world labour force and for those displaced by the fast pace of structural change that accompanies globalization. We are facing a global jobs crisis.

Although many new jobs have been created, the fact remains that the official unemployment has grown by 26 per cent in the last ten years. Yet, these figures mask the larger problem of underemployment and the billions of people who are unable to work in ways that maximize their productive potential.

Far too many people - especially women - are still underemployed or unable to obtain productive decent work. And the greatest failure of the current system concerns young people.

In fact, the real meaning of "MDG" may be the Millennium Development Generation, the world's one billion or more youth who face the prospect of unemployment and underemployment for years to come. Nearly 40 per cent of the world's population today is below the age of 20. Eighty-five per cent of young people are in developing countries where many live and work under conditions of poverty and inequality of opportunity.

The ILO estimates that nearly 86 million young people worldwide are jobless, accounting for 45 per cent of the world's unemployed. The global unemployment rate among youth is 13.8 per cent, up from 11.7 per cent a decade earlier. Throughout the world, young people are on average over three times more likely to be unemployed than adults. In addition, millions more cannot afford to be unemployed and are working long hours for low pay and eking out a living in the "informal economy". Yet most countries face an even more daunting challenge. For how can we find work for the young if we cannot even produce enough work for the adult workforce?

Latest ILO data shows that even strong economic growth has failed to generate a commensurate number of jobs. In 2004, for example, a healthy 5.1 per cent global economic growth rate resulted in a disappointing 1.8 per cent increase in the number of employed people. Simply put, trillions of dollars in growth produced just a trickle of jobs.

Considering that the global labour force will grow by over 400 million by 2015, even rapid employment growth of 40 million jobs per year would reduce the global unemployment rate by only over 1 percentage point in ten years.

Meeting the global employment challenge requires not just more but also better jobs. The majority of people in developing countries live and work in the back alleys of the marketplace, in the so-called informal economy. These are the workers who toil in the fields, on the streets and in other informal workplaces. Unprotected by law, they and their families subsist in precarious conditions.

We can do better and the global community took a significant step in the right direction at September's United Nations World Summit in New York where world leaders unanimously stated that they "strongly support fair globalization and resolve to make the goals of full and productive employment and decent work for all…a central objective of our relevant national and international policies." This represents a global commitment at the highest level to move forward on job creation.

Creating decent work opportunities through growth, investment and higher productivity provides the greatest potential for addressing the challenge. We can devise new approaches that give the working poor a chance to progressively become the working prosperous.

Poverty breeds a sense of powerlessness and indignity. Yet we must realize that people living in conditions of material deprivation also represent enormous reserves of courage, ingenuity, persistence and mutual support. Simply coping with poverty - and billions do it every day - demonstrates the resilience and creativity of the human spirit.

Imagine what could be accomplished if we could unleash these reserves. A successful drive to raise entrepreneurship, productivity and consuming power of the majority of the world's population, particularly those on the lowest incomes, is fundamental to the broadening and deepening of markets - the lifeline of enterprise and employment-rich growth.

How to do it? We have to begin by changing the policy paradigm to recognize that employment, and the promotion of enterprises that create jobs, is the most effective route to poverty eradication. The goal of a stable and prosperous world economy is possible only if the productivity and consuming power of all its citizens are realized to begin with, in local markets where people live.

Work is presently the missing link in the efforts to reduce poverty. Most policy prescriptions fail to view job creation as an explicit objective, seeing it rather as a hoped-for result of sound macroeconomic policies. While sound macroeconomic policies are of course essential to set the stage for desired growth, the key is ensuring that growth is balanced and employment-rich - in other words, that it creates as many decent jobs as possible.

Can we achieve this overall objective? We must. Let us rededicate ourselves to focusing on investment and entrepreneurship, employment, income generation and decent work for all. Let us strive to make sure that globalization is fair, and that it delivers its benefits to all, not just the few. Let us pursue a vision of political and social stability based on the prospect of prosperity for those who can and will work for it. If the international community, working together, can just deliver the convergence of policies that will allow every woman and man - no matter what their age - to work their way out of poverty, the rest will follow.

When so many are talking about UN reform, this is the "real life" reform that workers and their families all over the world are waiting for. Let's deliver it.