Areas of Work

• Advisory services
• Advocacy/sensitization
• Policy-related analytical work
• Capacity building
• Technical cooperation

Technical areas

• Labour Standards
  • Promoting ratification of International Labour Standards (ILS)
  • Supporting implementation of ILS 
  • Monitoring implementation of ILS 
  • Combating child labour
• Employment
  • Employment policies and programmes
    • Supporting employment policy development
    • Facilitating employment-friendly macroeconomic policies
    • Supporting employment-intensive technologies/investments
  • Labour market information
    • Upgrading labour market statistics
    • Developing labour market information systems
  • Enterprises
    • Developing an entrepreneurship culture among youth
    • Strengthening business development services
    • Strengthening microfinance
    • Stimulating a business enabling environment
    • Empowering Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs)
    • Addressing the challenges of the informal economy
    • Promoting competitiveness through decent work at sectoral level (Construction, Textiles, Tourism, etc.)
    • Stimulating social responsibility
  • Employability
    • Upgrading vocational education and training systems and institutions
    • Developing apprenticeship programmes
    • Modernizing employment services (including career guidance/orientation)
    • Facilitating the labour market integration of disabled persons
  • Post-crisis reconstruction
    • Developing income-generation activities
    • Facilitating socioeconomic integration of vulnerable groups
    • Rehabilitating and reconstructing crisis-affected communities and areas
• Social protection
  • Occupational Safety and Health (OSH)
    • Establishing OSH country profiles and policies/programmes to improve it
    • Raising awareness of workplace safety and health hazards, and their prevention
    • Strengthening OSH national monitoring capacity
  • HIV/AIDS in the workplace
    • Promoting HIV/AIDS prevention at the workplace
    • Facilitating non-discrimination of HIV/AIDS infected workers at the workplace
  • Working conditions
    • Introducing cost-effective methods to improve basic working conditions
  • Social security
    • Diagnosing the performance of social security systems
    • Upgrading social security structures, processes, institutions and officials
• Social Dialogue
  • Strengthening workers’ organizations
    • Upgrading the structure, processes and technical and management capacity of workers’ organizations
  • Strengthening employers’ organizations
    • Upgrading the structure, processes and technical and management capacity of employers’ organizations
  • Strengthening labour administration
    • Modernizing labour administration structure, processes and human resource management
    • Upgrading the technical and management capacity of labour administration
  • Developing social dialogue
    • Developing techniques and processes of social dialogue at enterprise, local and national levels
    • Fostering a culture of social dialogue

Cross-cutting themes

• Poverty reduction
  • Facilitating a deeper understanding of the growth-employment-poverty nexus
  • Developing programmes to demonstrate means of tackling poverty
• Gender
  • Mainstreaming gender concerns in all policy and operational activities
  • Prompting and facilitating gender mainstreaming in constituents’ policies and programmes
  • Developing programmes targeting specific gender concerns (legal or actual discrimination, etc)