Advancing social justice, promoting decent work
ILO is a specialized agency of the United Nations
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Decent work in calamity-prone area
Local development through infrastructure work: Generating decent work in calamity-prone areas
The ILO has utilised such methods for many years, as has the Country Office for the Philippines, initially developed under the office’s Employment-Intensive Investment Programme (EIIP).
Infrastructure is of great importance to local economies, local employment opportunities and ensuring communities have access:
to markets and means of production;
to water, electricity and telecommunications;
but infrastructure can also improve a community’s resilience, such as through reducing risk of natural disasters or calamities or disaster-proofing roads, drainage and irrigation. Infrastructure can also be a means of injecting much needed cash, through wages into a local economy: why pay for expensive machinery when that same money could cycle through local hands and businesses as wages, which are then used to pay for local goods and services?
Using community contracting and temporary employment approaches, the office worked with local governments to develop infrastructure projects in calamity-hit areas: Iloilo City in late 2007, in Dolores, Eastern Samar in February 2008, and in Quezon City, Metro Manila and Laguna lakeshore towns in September 2009. This has been carried out and continued in more recent disasters, such as Typhoon Washi or Sendong, Typhoon Pablo, or Bopha and Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda.
Projects organize local residents to develop or rehabilitate local social infrastructure, such as market structures, farm to market roads or pathways in urban poor resettlement sites, building or rehabilitating drainage canals to prevent flooding and irrigation canals to improve agricultural production. The workers received wages in accordance with local minimum wage rates or above. They also received social security insurance (Social Security System), health insurance (PhilHealth) and accident insurance and orientations on their entitlements to these services.
The technique is well established and has evolved to include local resource based works; again focusing on key local infrastructure and providing wages and often skills training for those involved in building/rebuilding it, but relying on in-kind donations from the community for materials, to ensure local buy-in for the projects. Knowledge products identifying how best to carry out such approaches have also been produced and the model is well known.
Local workers in Barangay Batad in San Remigio, Northern Cebu prepare materials for the road improvement work. The ILO with the local government unit (LGU) identified 2.6 Km of road for rehabilitation as it would improve one of the central trading routes for agricultural products in Northern Cebu. Rebuilding infrastructure creates employment opportunities while restoring access to basic services and market linkages to support enterprises in the local community.
The ILO with the local government unit (LGU) identified 2.6 Km of road in Barangay Batad for rehabilitation as it would improve one of the central trading routes for agricultural products in Northern Cebu. Aside from the patching and compacting works to the road, the project included four riprap and drainage canal components for a safer and more resilient road system. Rebuilding infrastructure creates employment opportunities while restoring access to basic services and market linkages to support enterprises in the local community.
Local workers in Barangay Batad in San Remigio, Northern Cebu carry out riprap and drainage work to improve road durability. The ILO with the local government unit (LGU) identified 2.6 Km of road for rehabilitation as it would improve one of the central trading routes for agricultural products in Northern Cebu. Rebuilding infrastructure creates employment opportunities while restoring access to basic services and market linkages to support enterprises in the local community.
The ILO with the local government unit (LGU) of San Remigio, Northern Cebu identified 2.6 Km of road in Barangay Batad for rehabilitation as it would improve one of the central trading routes for agricultural products in Northern Cebu. The completed road improvement has aided better connectivity to important trade routes within Cebu, while the additional wages and social protection coverage has also directly benefitted workers and their families.
