el Iraq

As part of the preparation of the International Conference on Employment in Iraq held in December 2004, a study was carried out to assess the employment implications over a number of selected on-going UN reconstruction and rehabilitation projects. The study came out with a report on Iraq: Opportunities for More Employment-Intensive Infrastructure which was broadly shared and discussed with Iraqi policy-makers at the Conference.

The Conference also recommended the creation of an inter-ministerial committee to guide the development process in Iraq on issues of employment creation, which has taken place in the form of a High Level Commission for Employment Creation. The committee is under the leadership of the Minister of Labour and Social Affairs and includes high level members from a number of ministries including the Planning and Development Cooperation. The Commission has established itself with an emerging process development of defining clear objectives, priorities of work and an action programme.

As a follow-up to the International Employment Conference, a Guidelines for Optimizing Local Employment in Infrastructure Reconstruction and Development Programmes in Iraq was developed, which are available in Arabic and English.

In August 2005, a workshop on Maximizing Employment-Intensity in Reconstruction and Infrastructure Investment in Iraq was held in Amman. High level government officials (Vice Ministers and Director Generals) from several ministries participated in this Workshop. The last day of the workshop included participants from donor agencies and the UN family working on Iraq from Amman.

The major outcomes of this Workshop were:

• An agreement to finalize the above Guidelines for submission to the Iraq’s High Level Commission on Employment for review, approval and adoption as its strategy to follow for regular infrastructure development work under the Government budget and for investments by the donor and financing agencies in infrastructure programmes;
• A request for further support to the proper establishment of the High Level Commission on Employment and support to the refinement and application of the Guidelines. Particular support is required to defining the practical implementation of the Guidelines in different infrastructure sectors. This request also included work on labour market information and statistical capacity development.

Subsequent to the Workshop, a meeting was also held with all Heads of UN agencies including the World Bank and the UN country team for Iraq. The UN agencies have recently been asked by the Government to include employment assessments (“labour”) in all their rehabilitation and reconstruction projects (now called RRL – rehabilitation, reconstruction and labour projects) to be submitted to the Government for their scrutiny. The outcome of this meeting included:

• Rehabilitation, reconstruction and employment generation (the RRL) as priority areas of work for the UN and the labour concerns (employment creation) of future infrastructure development projects in Iraq;
• The UN family placed a strong requests for technical advisory services from ILO in support of UN agencies programme and project development, services that would be based in Amman. This would be in the form of a help-desk to provide assistance on operational issues of employment-intensive approaches for a wide variety of reconstruction projects, initially for a period up to the end of 2005;

Given that the partners at the country level and those UN agencies involved in reconstruction and rehabilitation projects in Iraq have placed a high level of expectation that ILO would be helping turning the reconstruction process in favour of Iraq and Iraqis at large, an operational tool is being developed by EMP/INVEST and EMP/CRISIS to support stakeholders in their portfolio selection and project design with concrete guidance, to maximize the employment impact of reconstruction and development programmes for Iraq.

Más información

• Opportunities for More Employment-Intensive Infrastructure
• Guidelines for Optimizing Local Employment in Infrastructure Reconstruction and Development Programmes in Iraq
  
• International Employment Conference on Iraq adopts Plan and Declaration on combatting massive unemployment - www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/inf/news/2004/iraq.htm