This Guidance document is developed in the framework of SO3-OO2 and aims to assist FAO Members in incorporating decent rural employment (DRE) interventions across different agricultural sub-sectors. The Guidance document is mainly designed for policy makers and staff responsible for strategic planning and programme development in the ministries responsible for agriculture and planning. It also addresses other public and private institutions involved in strategic planning for agricultural and rural development such as employers, producers and workers' organizations.
Covering Malawi's social cash trasfer programme "Lifting up families", this publication concludes that although the programme enables beneficiares to engage in different income-generating activities, it has no impact on youth employment opportunities.
This report addresses the subject of decent rural employment for youth in the forestry sector. It is based on case studies carried out across different processes in the value chain within the sector in Uganda, ranging from seedbed development through to plantation management, saw logging and trading. Findings indicate that a considerable number of Uganda’s legal and policy frameworks emphasize the participation of youth in the labour market, especially given that young people constitute a large majority of the country’s population. However, only a few of these frameworks focus on decent work, whether for young people or the country’s workers more generally. The case studies revealed that efforts to provide decent employment were mixed. Larger and more formally oriented forestry enterprises were more likely to focus on decent work provisions for their labourers. Smaller enterprises, while aware of most of their decent work obligations, were unable to implement them due to resource constraints. The case studies also revealed numerous opportunities for youth to participate in the forestry sector. These included tapping into existing government and NGO programmes ranging from tree planting to plantation management. Additional employment opportunities were provided by businesses in the sector and the management of woodlots for poles and fuel. The limiting factors for youth participation in the sector largely arise from the huge investment cost incurred by such participation, particularly access to and utilization of land and financial resources. Other limitations included a lack of relevant training and skills and poor working conditions. These conditions are compounded by few numbers and limited capacity of officers within the Labour Directorate to administer and enforce labour regulations.The report proposes decent work indicators and recommends both policy and implementation strategies to increase youth participation and decent work practices in the sector.
The purpose of the FAO’s framework is to guide the Organization and its personnel in the integration of measures addressing child labour within FAO’s typical work, programmes and initiatives at global, regional and country levels. It aims to enhance compliance with organization’s operational standards, and strengthen coherence and synergies across the Organization and with partners. The FAO framework is primarily targeted at FAO as an organization, including all personnel in all geographic locations. But the framework is also relevant for FAO’s governing bodies and Member States, and provides guidance and a basis for collaboration with development partners. The framework is also to be used as a key guidance to assess and monitor compliance with FAO’s environmental and social standards addressing prevention and reduction of child labour in FAO’s programming.
This paper analyses how the relationship between decent rural employment and agricultural productivity vary across production systems. The focus is on sub-Saharan Africa, taking Ethiopia and Tanzania as case studies. A latent class stochastic frontier approach is applied to identify different production systems and technologies for a sample of farms in the two countries. Subsequently, we estimate the efficiency of production for these systems and investigate in how far decent rural employment indicators explain different levels of efficiencies across different latent classes.
This report adopts a decent work perspective to approach the challenge of promoting employment and reducing poverty in rural areas by examining issues of employment, social protection, rights and social dialogue in rural areas in an integrated way.
Promoting decent rural employment, by creating new jobs in rural areas and upgrading the existing ones, could be one of the most efficient pathways to reduce rural poverty. This paper systematically investigates the impact of decent rural employment on agricultural production efficiency in sub-Saharan African countries, taking Ethiopia and Tanzania as case countries. The analysis applies an output-oriented distance function approach with an estimation procedure that accounts for different technological, demographic, socio-economic, institutional and decent rural employment indicators. Data of the most recent round of Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) for the two countries are used, and a set of indicators are derived to proxy core dimensions of decent rural employment. The findings of our analysis show that decent rural employment contributes to agricultural production efficiency.
New evidence this year corroborates the rise in world hunger observed in this report last year, sending a warning that more action is needed if we aspire to end world hunger and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030. Updated estimates show the number of people who suffer from hunger has been growing over the past three years, returning to prevailing levels from almost a decade ago. Although progress continues to be made in reducing child stunting, over 22 percent of children under five years of age are still affected. Other forms of malnutrition are also growing: adult obesity continues to increase in countries irrespective of their income levels, and many countries are coping with multiple forms of malnutrition at the same time – overweight and obesity, as well as anaemia in women, and child stunting and wasting.
Updates for many countries have made it possible to estimate hunger in the world with greater accuracy this year. In particular, newly accessible data enabled the revision of the entire series of undernourishment estimates for China back to 2000, resulting in a substantial downward shift of the series of the number of undernourished in the world. Nevertheless, the revision confirms the trend reported in past editions: the number of people affected by hunger globally has been slowly on the rise since 2014. The report also shows that the burden of malnutrition in all its forms continues to be a challenge. There has been some progress for child stunting, low birthweight and exclusive breastfeeding, but at a pace that is still too slow. Childhood overweight is not improving and adult obesity is on the rise in all regions. The report complements the usual assessment of food security and nutrition with projections of what the world may look like in 2030, if trends of the last decade continue. Projections show that the world is not on track to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030 and, despite some progress, most indicators are also not on track to meet global nutrition targets. The food security and nutritional status of the most vulnerable population groups is likely to deteriorate further due to the health and socio economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report puts a spotlight on diet quality as a critical link between food security and nutrition. Meeting SDG 2 targets will only be possible if people have enough food to eat and if what they are eating is nutritious and affordable. The report also introduces new analysis of the cost and affordability of healthy diets around the world, by region and in different development contexts. It presents valuations of the health and climate-change costs associated with current food consumption patterns, as well as the potential cost savings if food consumption patterns were to shift towards healthy diets that include sustainability considerations. The report then concludes with a discussion of the policies and strategies to transform food systems to ensure affordable healthy diets, as part of the required efforts to end both hunger and all forms of malnutrition.
