ILO capacity building strategy and the role of the International Training Centre of the ILO in Turin

François Eyraud
Director of the International
Training Centre of the ILO

For many years now, the ILO’s assistance to its constituents has focused strongly on transferring knowledge and building up national institutional capacity rather than implementing technical cooperation projects directly. This focus will become even stronger in the future in the wake of United Nations system reform and country-specific inter-agency coordination.

At the same time, the consequences of economic globalization are enhancing the relevance of the assistance the ILO can give, especially in terms of acknowledging social dimensions. In this area, our constituents are very often ill-equipped to analyse the social consequences of specific trade agreements or specific investments. This makes it urgent for our organization to think about how to strengthen the impact of its capacity-building strategy on its constituents.

We should start by recognizing that the ILO’s technical cooperation policy employs three structures: the technical services at Headquarters, the field offices and teams, and the International Training Centre. It is by systematically increasing the synergy among these three pillars that we can significantly boost the ILO’s impact on the capacity of its constituents.

The stress on transferring knowledge implies a fundamental role for training. Training, however, is all too often not seriously integrated into technical assistance programmes for constituents. Instead, it consists essentially of awareness-raising or one-off expert advice. A more professional training approach and its integration into technical programmes would therefore allow our technical cooperation to make a much bigger impact.

In contrast, the professional training provided by the Turin Centre most often takes the form of one-off measures that are not integrated into longer-term programmes or objectives. Capacity building is not merely a question of training; rather, it requires more than training isolated from context if it is to have its full effect. It must be integrated into longer-term projects that produce reforms and strengthen institutions. Training techniques and content can be adapted, at each stage, in line with the final objective sought, thereby enhancing the project’s impact. This holds both for specific projects and, even more so, for the “Decent Work Country Programmes”.

The field offices and teams, together with the technical services at Headquarters, are clearly in the best position to deal with the context and to strengthen institutions. The International Training Centre, for its part, has two incomparable advantages within the United Nations system. It has the greatest capacity and its staff have a rare double skill: technical expertise on labour issues allied to regularly updated training expertise.

There are numerous further points of complementarity, synergy and convergence among the three pillars of the ILO’s technical cooperation. The next step in devising a capacity-building strategy should be to examine them systematically in order to arrive at a shared approach that maximizes the impact of our activities. To sum up, we must achieve more integrated planning among the technical services, the field offices and teams, and the International Training Centre of the ILO so that there is maximum synergy among the vocations and the comparative advantages of these three structures of the ILO. That will give our cooperation projects and programmes a relevance that will significantly boost their attractiveness to donors.