The country Director of International Labour Organisation (ILO) , Vanessa Phala, recently had an engagement with labour correspondents in Abuja. MOSES JOHN was there
ILO activities
We supported the assessment of what we call public employment services in Nigeria. So, we are now at where we are evaluating the National Employment Policy of 2017. And out of that evaluation and assessment, we will be able to provide the necessary support to revise and develop a national responsive policy to the needs and the demands of labour market in Nigeria. The other project that we are having under employment is what we call the ILO/ITU/AU joint programme. And this one is on boosting jobs and enhancing skills for young persons in Nigeria’s digital economy. We know that the digital advancements provide a lot of opportunities for young persons to take part and be innovative and startup IT or tech companies and really develop and contribute towards job creation. But we know that as the digital advancements are going, we still have a lot of young persons unemployed. So, this particular intervention is therefore very important and we are trying to understand the opportunities that are there in the digital economy and then be able to facilitate the jobs that will be required in order to support the advancement of that economy.
Last year, we presented a report that we did, assessing the digital demand and digital skills and try to understand what the labour market demands as far as the digital skills and what the workers have in terms of the supply. And of course, there’s a lot of room, especially some of those critical digital skills.
The other project that we are implementing; is largely also on employment and it is dealing more with macro, medium and small enterprises.
Partnership
We are implementing this project as a joint UN project. We are implementing it with UNIDO, UN Women and WHO. And basically this also came during the COVID 19 pandemic where we needed to implement innovative and creative solutions to support manufacturers of PPE during that part that period.
For the ILO, we’ve been working with a number of MSMEs from across the country. The entire project is working with around 174 SMEs and for the ILO we’ve provided different training to help people improve their business. We’ve also provided training on occupational safety and health. As we know, it’s a very important thematic area out of COVID but also for ILO since now OSH has become a fundamental principle and right at work.
We’ve worked with the Lagos Safety Commission, especially around the issues of Occupational Safety and Health. We’ve worked with financial service providers around issues of accessing finance by small and medium enterprises. Most importantly, out of their business development services or other capacity-building interventions and the training that we have provided, many of them have now developed their business plans in order to refine and reposition their enterprises to really strive and grow. So those are the specific interventions around employment.
The other intervention that is very important for the ILO is the work we are doing under labour migration. Basically, we’ve been working with the migrant resource centres to strengthen their role and their capacity in providing advisory services to returning migrants so that they are reintegrated into society. A lot of work has been gone into that including refurbishment of the migrant resource centres in Benin and Abuja.
Child labour
On child labour, another very important topic for the ILO, we’ve been doing quite a lot of work now since 2019 with the ACCEL African project. There have been other interventions in the past, but this particular project looks at issues of child labour in supply chains. And for Nigeria, we worked with two supply chains; cocoa and artisanal mining in Ondo and Niger States.
So, with this project, we’ve achieved a lot. Through our interventions in some communities on eliminating child labour in Akure, where we worked with civil society organisations to coordinate the invitations, worked with community members to establish community child labour steering and monitoring committees, working with parents of the children to make sure that they are allowing the children to go to school and stay in school, working with the teachers as well, and even providing some entrepreneurial skills to some of the young persons in the communities so that they can be able to start businesses and earn a living for themselves.
We are also implementing a new project. The GALAP project is called intensifying action against force and child labour through a number innovations. This is a new project that we are beginning also to be implemented in Ondo. But this one will rather provide opportunities to facilitate access to health insurance for vulnerable in rural economy and rural communities. We also look at establishing mobile one stop shops for child labour, monitoring and provision of health insurances and also support for informal workers.
The third one is the ACLAWA project. This is a more wider project. In Nigeria, we are also working in Ondo. What this project will allow us to do is to take the achievements of ACCEL Africa to now go lower in the communities and be able to do more work in the communities, developing the necessary action plans for communities, engaging with even more additional communities to achieve our work. So, this is a very big area for us, we will continue working as we know the issue of child labour is a very critical one not only for Nigeria, not only for Africa, but for entire Africa.
The last report that was issued by ILO and UNICEF showed that actually we have regressed as far as the number of children that are involved in work is concerned and therefore there has to be really concerted, dedicated effort and coordinated and collaborative effort in order to deal with issues of child. It will not just be ILO but requires the relevant ministries, civil society organisation on the ground, the parents, the teachers, the communities, the community leaders, and everybody involved. And I think we have begun to develop that comprehensive framework in Ondo and Niger States. I want to see if we can get more opportunities to also go in other states where child labour is also a concern.
The other project that we are doing in child labour is the Just Transitioning. And as we know, we are moving into green economy. There are opportunities just like the digital economy, there are opportunities in the real economy. How do we take advantage, how do we facilitate an environment that will allow us to realise the opportunities out of the green economy and the just transitioning to sustainable enterprises.?
The other project we are are doing is on women entrepreneurship, women economic empowerment. So, we, also, are doing a lot of work in this area supported by NACA (Nigerian Consultative Association), where we use the ILO wide assessment, (women entrepreneurship development assessment), to look at some of the challenges that are really creating this huge bottlenecks for women to start and sustain their business.
For the ILO, our work on social protection is established under Convention 102 which is convention on Social Security. And there are nine branches that the convention speaks to that needs to be in place in order to expand coverage, but also have a much more comprehensive coverage to social protection that will include things like medical care, sickness benefit, unemployment benefits, employment injury benefits, and so forth and so on.
The Convention also is very flexible as it did not prescribe step by step process on how to achieve the nine branches but in terms of the flexible way of achieving it, it says it can be done through social insurance schemes, social assistance schemes and universal access. For Nigeria, there has been some progress made, I think. Of course, the coverage is still low.
Commendation
I want to really commend the Government of Nigeria for its effort in terms of really taking seriously the work among the international legal standards. The government has since approved, deposited and ratified Convention 190 on violence and harassment and also Convention 187.
This, for us, is very important, because it actually means that the country will have at the convention of international labour standards, guidelines to domesticate the conventions’ international policies for implementation.
Again, the work that we are doing at the state level, for us it is important as much as most of our work is at the federal government level. And we are also beginning to do more work at the state level because that’s where the action is.
And I’m happy that we have done in Kaduna, we can also get some inspiration also to do it in other states.
Working with social partners
In addition to this, we’ve also continued to work with our social partners: the NECA, NLC and TUC, and have provided them with different capacity building interventions. I’m very proud and honoured that NLC now have what they call Labor Migration Policy for the workers, and also Agenda Policy. These two policies have been approved in their last Congress.
With NECA, we have been able to support them to establish an online training platform. With COVID the need to have this digital spaces for learning in order to reach as many persons as possible. So that will be the intervention so far.
