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The ILO Sub-regional Office in Eastern Africa provides technical support and advice to its constituents in the sub-region governments, national employers organizations and trade unions in areas ranging from promoting international labor standards, employment policy, training and skills development, investment for productive employment, promoting financial institutions that cater for to the financial needs of the working poor, including women groups and small and medium enterprises that create jobs. The choice of projects and programs as well as the policy issues tackled are demand-driven, determined in agreement with the governments and the social partners. The Sub-regional office provides technical assistance to countries in three area offices based in Abuja (Nigeria), Antananarivo (Madagascar) and Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania) as well as Djibouti and Ethiopia. The Abuja office serves four countries in West Africa; Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The Antananarivo Office serves four countries in the Indian Ocean : Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius and Seychelles while the Dar Es Salam Office serves four countries in the Great Eastern Africa, namely Kenya, Uganda, Somalia and Tanzania. The primary responsibility of field area offices is to manage Country Decent Work Programs with technical assistance from the Sub-regional Office.
Some of the activities have included the following:
- Provision of policy advice to ILO’s constituents on institutional strengthening, the application of ILO standards and the promotion of technical cooperation activities.
- Promotion of employment policies consistent with ILO’s Decent Work Agenda.
- Development and maintenance of linkages with various Active Labor Market policy areas, such as labor market information, vocational training, employment services, entrepreneurship and employment-intensive investment.
- Contribution to the further elaboration and implementation of the Global Employment Agenda at the national and sub-regional levels through policy advice and technical cooperation to the ILO constituents.
- Advisory missions, advisory reports, employment strategy papers, policy reviews, tripartite conferences, mainstream employment concerns into economic policies and programs.
- Development of tools to translate employment policies into action and pilot demonstration activities to show-case tools and knowledge of employment promotion methods and policies with special emphasis on gender and employment issues.
The ILO-SRO for Eastern Africa objective is to assist Governments', Employers' and Workers' Organizations of the Eastern and Western African countries in their efforts to reduce Decent Work deficits by ensuring that key elements of the Global Employment Agenda (GEA) are reflected in countries’ Employment Generation and Skills Development Strategy.
More specifically some of the key elements of the GEA and Decent Work Agenda that the office help mainstream in national employment strategies in member countries are: (i) making employment central in economic and social policy making, (ii) ensuring the quantity and the quality of jobs generated in the economy, (iii) increasing employment intensity of growth and creation of decent employment through appropriate macro, trade, labor market and sectoral policies, (iv) strengthening institutions to create an efficient and equitable labor market, (v) active involvement of employers’ and workers’ organizations and civil society in the formulation of employment policy, (vi) creating favorable conditions for growth of the private sector especially SMEs and other labor absorbing sectors, (vii) creating a competitive and productive world class labor force, and (viii) strengthening institutional machinery for employment policy making.
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