Social partnership and advocacy to tackle child labour

The ILO is pursuing a Global Action Plan to tackle child labour. The plan calls for the adoption of time-bound targets to meet the goal of eliminating the worst forms of child labour by 2016 – and eventually all forms – and identifies various means by which the ILO can support this process. This target would parallel and contribute to both the Millennium Development Goals on education and poverty, and to the effective abolition of all forms of child labour, which is a fundamental goal of the ILO. The Global Action Plan also focuses on the need for strengthening the role of social partners in the global campaign against child labour. Their organisational structures and their capacity to influence policy give them a potentially very strategic role in efforts to tackle child labour and the underlying causes of child labour. Therefore, this project will have as its core focus the strengthening of social partner capacity on child labour at the local, national and international levels, notably by exploiting a new momentum of IPEC technical cooperation which has been known as the “south-south initiative in combating child labour”. The project will build on the large scale programme of technical cooperation which ILO-IPEC already has in place and reinforce and support work implemented through the DWCP process. However it would add a distinct and strategic dimension to this work through its focus on enhancing the role of the social partners and in the framework of the South-South initiative, though which co-operation for sharing good practices, experiences and lessons learned will be fostered. This strategy may play a will be based on the replication of models (pilot-programmes) that worked well in a given country, and their adaptation to the local context of the other country. This learning and cross-fertilization experience should be done in a spirit of promoting equality, sharing of knowledge, supporting mutual assistance and building up solidarity. The partners for the project will be employers and workers organisations and their representatives. The main target group will be the representatives of these organisations at national, regional and global levels. The countries and organisations to be involved will be determined in consultation with the ILO Bureaux for Employers and Workers activities. For employers, key partners will be the IOE, national EOs and their local structures. For workers organisations key partners will be the International Trade Union Confederation, Global Union Federations, national trade union centres and sectoral unions. At national level the work of the project will be brought together with other activities of IPEC, ACTRAV and ACTEMP. As such the project will not operate in isolation, but will be integrated into strategic efforts by the ILO to tackle child labour. IPEC operates a comprehensive programme of monitoring and evaluation which will include an assessment of the impact of activities supported through the project, to ensure the eventual success in reaching ultimate beneficiaries. The basic idea is for employers and worker’s organisations to strengthen their capacity to be active in the movement of eliminating child labour within the international and national union movements and also in the business world. This would involve raising the child labour issue in conferences, production of special publications, and development of child labour web content. For IPEC, the strategy is to place social dialogue in the centre of work on child labour and have employers and workers play a prominent role in all activities undertaken in HQ and in the field. The project strategy will have three main components, improving the knowledge base and linkages between the work of ILO-IPEC and social partners, training for development of social partner capacity, and policy development and coordination. And for this, the ILO Training Centre in Turin can be an important actor in this process. The ILO

Project symbol

INT/08/72/IRL

Admin unit

IPEC

Start date

01/08/2008

End date

30/09/2011

Total allocation

1317666

Total expenditure

Status

Closed

1323757

Development Partners

Ireland, Irish Aid

Country/Countries

Global

Outcomes

Child Labour