May marks both International Day of the Midwife and International Nurses Day – two groups of workers that play essential roles in any healthcare system. However, both professions – which are dominated by women – are characterised by long hours and low pay. So, what can be done to improve working conditions and help nurses and midwives deliver the best quality care to patients?
Data on labour market disparities between persons with and without disabilities are essential to inform transformative policymaking and programming. Yet, analysis of ILOSTAT datasets reveal that many countries do not collect population-level data on disability status, hampering efforts to disaggregate labour market indicators. Investment in national data systems is needed to advance disability inclusion. This blog focuses on Africa, where we see progress toward more inclusive data systems in many countries, but gaps remain.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of 17 global goals to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all. But with the COVID-19 pandemic upending the global labour market in recent years, progress towards achieving these goals has been disrupted. From rising unemployment and informal work to slowing productivity growth and persistent gender inequalities, the pandemic has highlighted the need for urgent action to build a more resilient and equitable world of work.
Quantifying how many people are employed in the forest sector is not a straightforward exercise. Nonetheless, the ILO, FAO and the Thünen-Institute of Forestry joined forces to estimate the global workforce in forest-related activities and provide insights on labour market trends in this sector.
Generating high quality statistics relies on eliminating gender bias at all stages of the production process. This blog looks at how gender bias occurs in statistics and what the ILO is doing to support efforts to minimize it.
There are an estimated 1 billion persons with disabilities around the world, or 15 per cent of the global population. Most of them are of working age. New labour market indicators are now available on ILOSTAT that reveal the many challenges faced by persons with disabilities compared with persons without when it comes to the world of work.
Improving the knowledge base in the area of labour statistics, particularly labour migration statistics, will contribute to a better understanding of the underlying causes of poverty and social exclusion. Accurate, robust and timely data, collected in accordance with international standards, is therefore necessary for devising effective labour migration policies, which are essential for improving the …
E-Learning course on measuring and analysing labour migration Read More »
The pandemic wreaked havoc on people’s lives and societies, but how far did it set the global community back in reaching the SDG targets related to decent work and economic growth?
Released today, new global data covering 189 countries and territories expose the motherhood penalty faced by millions of women around the world in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
How many men and women were employed last week? How many hours did they work in their main jobs? And how many hours did they work in unpaid activities such as caring for children? These are seemingly straightforward questions but measuring paid and unpaid work through household surveys is anything but straightforward. This holds true especially for women in developing countries, who are more often engaged in informal activities such as microenterprises or small-scale farming — activities that can fall through the cracks of traditional surveys.
