Ministers gathered at the 15th Regional Seminar of Labour-based Practitioners in Yaoundé called for increased participation of local enterprises and people in infrastructure development in Africa as a key tool to tackle the un- and underemployment challenge.

Their Ministerial Declaration made in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, on 25th February 2014 includes nine commitments in which they pledge to put in place adequate institutions with coordinating functions made possible through political support at the highest level to accommodate the multi-sectoral character and ensure efficient governance of labour-based programmes.

They will furthermore strive for innovative financial mechanisms fed by specific national funding to increase substantially the scale and impact as well as the sustainability of labour-based programmes.

They call on Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and the African Union to endorse the conclusions of the Ministerial Meeting and Seminar as an action that contributes to poverty reduction and job creation, and ask them to make a large dissemination during upcoming events including the follow-up to the Ouagadougou Summit on Employment, Poverty Eradication and Inclusive Growth, the OUAGA+10.

The Ministers acknowledged with satisfaction that increasingly more countries have made firm commitments to initiatives with employment creation potentials. They call on development partners, particularly the African Development Bank for less conditionality, to continue their commitment and increase their funding of job creation components in all infrastructure development programmes.

They call on the ILO, in close collaboration with regional and sub-regional economic communities, to put in place a monitoring and knowledge-sharing mechanism to document and disseminate all known initiatives in Africa and in the world to countries and development partners with a view to improve knowledge sharing and advocacy of labour-based approaches in development programmes.

The 15th Regional Seminar of Labour-based Practitioners started on 24 February under the theme of “Labour-Based Approaches to Infrastructure: From Policy to Action for Job Creation”. The ministerial delegations (Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Liberia, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia and Uganda) and the 400 participants who were first reviewing the progress made on labour-based programmes since the Accra Declaration of 2011, continued to deliberate on the four themes of:

National Policies and Decentralisation
Capacity Building and SME Development
Application of Labour-Based Approaches in different fields
Innovations and Knowledge-Sharing; and
cross-cutting themes of gender issues and the challenges of HIV/AIDS.
Source: http://www.ilo.org/addisababa/media-centre/news/WCMS_236662/lang–en/index.htm