Promoting the Right to Pay Equity and Childcare in Jordan

The proposed project builds on well-established partnerships with workers’ and employers’ organizations, government representatives, civil society and active women’s groups. It also builds on technical work delivered between 2015 and 2017 partially funded by the government of Norway. The project adopts a multi-layered strategy working at policy-level through the National Committee for Pay Equity as well as at grass root level through the engagement of workers’ unions and civil society organizations. The project applies a sectoral approach that involves in-depth research on sector-specific dynamics in relation to workers’ rights and in particular women workers’ rights. It then expands to community organizing, awareness raising and advocacy. The approach has been adapted to the private education sector where unacceptable forms of work have been identified in particular in relation to gender wage discrimination, social security coverage and maternity protection. While important milestones have been achieved in the previous phases of the intervention on the private education sector, issues remain to be tackled in particular in ensuring that more private schools are reached in Jordan and that the movement of private schools teachers is mature nationwide to achieve permanent change. In connection to this, the project will apply a gender-responsive human resources management system. This will follow the experience already undertaken in Irbid in 11 private education schools that went through a capacity building process of their human resources systems to make sure that they become gender responsive in particular on issues related to wage discrimination, social security coverage, maternity and breastfeeding. This experience will be expanded to 10 new private education schools in Amman, Zarqa and Madaba governorates. This will provide an opportunity to include the agenda of women in management and leadership as well as work on violence and harassment against women and men in the world of work . Furthermore, this project will continue supporting the work of government and civil society to promote the establishment of 3 childcare facilities concentrating on professionalizing the skills of 30 caretakers. Overall, throughout the project, a social dialogue approach will be applied by involving the social partners at every stage as well as applying a community organizing approach to increase awareness of women’s rights in the given sectors. The aim is to promote effective and participatory collective agreements, and raise women workers’ voices and representation in negotiation platforms.

Project symbol

JOR/17/10/NOR

Admin unit

RO-Arab States/DWT-Beirut

Start date

01/12/2017

End date

28/02/2019

Total allocation

320645

Total expenditure

Status

Closed

317898

Development Partners

Norway, Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Country/Countries

Jordan

Outcomes

Protection of workers from unacceptable forms of work