For Carlos Sere, IFAD’s Chief Development Strategist, securing decent and productive employment for millions of young people in rural areas of the developing world isn’t just important. It’s indispensable.

“We hope we can focus on the way forward,” he said late last week, introducing a workshop organized by IFAD and the International Labour Organization. “This cohort is absolutely critical for long-term food security.”

Held at IFAD’s Rome headquarters, the event launched an IFAD-ILO report reviewing employment initiatives for young rural women and men. As Sere framed the issue, rural youth have enormous potential as “engines of development,” but their potential can be unleashed only if they find attractive opportunities for a decent livelihood in agriculture and other rural sectors.

The ‘decent work’ agenda

Luigi Cal, Director of ILO’s Rome office, explained that the United Nations “decent work” agenda, initially developed by ILO, is particularly appropriate for empowering rural youth. “All four pillars of that agenda – creating jobs and enterprises, guaranteeing rights at work, ensuring good working conditions and basic social protection, and promoting workers’ and employers’ organizations, and social dialogue – are key enabling factors,” he said.

The IFAD-ILO report thus examines 23 rural youth employment projects and programmes worldwide through the lens of decent work. The bulk of the study concentrates on five IFAD-supported projects, which were also the main focus of the panel discussion:

• Egypt’s West Noubaria Rural Development Programme
• Madagascar’s Support Programme for Rural Microenterprise Poles and Regional Economies
• Nepal’s Leasehold Forestry and Livestock Programme
• Nicaragua’s Programme for the Economic Development of the Dry Region
• Senegal’s Promotion of Rural Entrepreneurship project.

The projects work with a small but fairly representative cross-section of the global population of 1.2 billion youth aged 15 to 24. More than half of these young people live in rural regions of developing countries. For them, most employment opportunities are in the informal economy, where they face low wages and unsafe, often exploitive working conditions that compel many to migrate to urban areas.

Meaningful results

In the context of such challenges, the IFAD-ILO report is based on interviews and focus group sessions conducted with rural young people involved in the five projects, as well as local entrepreneurs and authorities. At the workshop, various speakers highlighted the study’s findings in relation to each decent-work pillar.

All of the projects, they said, have made a positive impact on employment creation and enterprise development. More than 45 per cent of the interviewed youth said their employment situation had improved, and over half agreed that the projects had provided good training opportunities.

Results were more mixed for working conditions and social protection. While 39 per cent of youth respondents indicated that their income had increased and 24 per cent reported better working conditions, only 8 per cent noted improvements in social protection or benefits.

Progress on rights at work was slight. Just 15 per cent of the young interviewees felt their employment contracts had improved, and only a quarter believed their employers had developed greater awareness of – or respect for – workers’ rights.

The impact of the projects was lowest for workers’ and employers’ organization, and social dialogue, with only 2.7 per cent of interviewed youth reporting an increase in trade union membership or progress in collective bargaining.

Against this backdrop of varying outcomes, Nteba Soumano, Chief Technical Advisor for the project in Senegal, illustrated the successful approach used there. She said the project had incorporated elements of all the decent-work pillars through a set of ILO technical instruments: one on setting up micro and small enterprises, and the other on strengthening professional organizations. As evidenced by the data on impact, as well as interviews with youth involved in the project, this approach has led to strong and sustainable results.

Boosting rural youth employment

The workshop featured extensive discussion about recommendations for more effectively boosting rural youth employment. In fact, a major objective of the event was to agree on some key recommendations for following up the report. During the past few months, IFAD and ILO have also jointly conducted national workshops in Egypt, Madagascar, Nepal, Nicaragua and Senegal, discussing the respective national results and formulating recommendations accordingly.

The lead researchers for the study briefly outlined proposed action points based on the national reports and recommendations. To strengthen the impact of rural projects on decent and productive work for youth, they said, development agencies should:

• Support demand-based training for young people (including training in entrepreneurship and cooperatives), along with youth access to land, funding and other support for self-employment and local enterprise development
• Raise awareness and provide training, for both young people and employers, on the technical and legal aspects of occupational safety and health, and social protection – and make available relevant, cost-effective equipment and techniques to protect young workers from harm
• Help enterprises in the informal economy acquire legal status, and develop labour inspection systems to monitor rural workers’ rights
• Encourage young women and men, including self-employed youth and fledgling entrepreneurs, to see the value and mutual benefit of workers’ and employers’ associations
• Include all four decent-work pillars in the design or redesign of programmes and projects, establishing specific objectives, budgets and indicators – and monitoring their implementation.

To ensure that interventions are felt outside the immediate project area, the researchers further advised integrating decent-work results into national employment and rural development strategies.

Lively debate

The workshop audience actively participated in the debate that followed. Some made suggestions to analyse gender dimensions more fully, since work options available to young women and men differ markedly; to explicitly acknowledge the negative link between child labour and youth employment; and to promote public-private partnerships in support of youth training and mentoring.

In addition, various participants asserted the need for young people to participate directly in rural employment initiatives involving the decent-work agenda.

Others raised the issue of improving safety and health without hampering employment creation. They pointed to the importance of adopting decent-work standards without overburdening farmers and other self-employed and small entrepreneurs – or IFAD projects and project managers themselves.

In response, the ILO representatives and the advisor from the Senegal project explained how the decent-work pillars, and the instruments available to implement them, are adaptable to specific contexts and beneficiaries. As proven in Senegal, they said, the pillars bolster rural initiatives, rather than burdening them.

Recommendations for action

Two main recommendations for action emerged from the debate:

• Include the decent-work approach in a few more IFAD projects, as pilots, to extract lessons that can then be disseminated to other efforts
• Develop communication channels to help youth receive and transmit information and facilitate youth-to-youth exchanges.

In closing the workshop, IFAD’s West and Central Africa Division Director Idesbald de Willebois, reiterated the fundamental challenge at hand: how to keep young people in rural areas and make careers in agriculture and other rural industries attractive to them. It’s a big question that the new IFAD-ILO report, and its specific recommendations on promoting decent and productive employment for rural young women and men, have begun to answer.