The International Labour Organisation ILO, has congratulated Nigeria for its election as the Chair of the Governing Body of the Organisation.
Making the commendation while interacting with Journalists in Geneva, Switzerland, the ILO Regional Director for Africa, Mrs Cynthia Samuel-Olajuwon, said the election was a recognition of the capacity of Africa, specifically Nigeria, to be able to help to steer the ship of the ILO.
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She described the time of Nigeria’s leadership at the ILO as apt “especially after the very important 111 conference that we’ve just held, where there was absolute great endorsement of the Global Coalition for social justice, which is an important initiative of the Director General Mr. Gilbert Houngbo.
And in the essence of the global coalition of social justice, is to make sure that issues related to social development and social justice are at the same level or receive the same level of attention as economic issues and environmental issues, and it is a key way as indicated by the Secretary General of the United Nations to ensure that we accelerate the achievement of the SDGs”, she said.
According to her, Nigeria has the responsibility to help translate the commitment and decisions reached at the ILC to the rest of the world.
Nigeria’s election as the Chair of the ILO Governing Body for the next year will also help to ensure that the country and the continent play a very significant role in moving the agenda of the Organisation forward.
Speaking on the work the ILO has done in Africa, Mrs Olajuwon said that “the work we’ve done in Africa in 2019, before COVID before Ukraine, the Russian Ukraine situation, before the kinds of developments that we’ve seen, where we have so many crises coming one after the other, and compounding the previous crisis, African at the very highest levels governments, business workers endorsed an agenda for the transformation of Africa in shaping the future of work, and we deliberately titled this agenda called the Abidjan declaration, advancing social justice.
“This was in 2019. It shows you how strategic the thinking was at that time because a lot of the issues that were prioritised have become so relevant, not just to the continental efforts to address the impact of this crisis, but at the global level”, she said.
The Regional Director listed some of the key things that were prioritised to include, addressing informality and creating decent work in the rural space, social protection and labour protection issues around skills development.
Others are seeing how the ILO can use technological pathways to facilitate skills development, and enterprise development in Just Transitions by looking at the entire gamut of standards, both in terms of ratification and implementation with a special emphasis on issues related to women and child labour.
“Then of course, to social dialogue, I’m just highlighting some of the key areas, there were several areas and if you look at even some of the decisions for the 111 ILC apprenticeship this is within the context of skilled and labour protection, this is within the context of what has already been articulated and of course, the issues around standards and different aspects of social dialogue”.
She said that one of the very significant achievements of the ILO in Africa has been in the area of social protection.
Social protection in Africa in 2019, 2020 when I had the privilege of being in Nigeria for the launch of the report, “The Global Social Protection Report, it was 17.2 or 17.4, the lowest in the continent but even in terms of statistics, we only have statistics for 17 countries. So there were just no statistics based on that.
Recognising that if we don’t address social protection, and this came out with COVID, will not be able to improve the resilience of our population.
We won’t be able to lift people out of poverty, and definitely won’t be able to achieve the SDGs, so we came up with a strategy for promoting social protection in Africa with the view, the goal, Yes, ambitious goal of doubling the figure and moving from 17 to 40% by 2025.
Just a few years from now, since that time, what have we done? The number of countries for which we have data, which was 17 in 2019, has increased to 37”.
The hope, she said is that by the end of this year, when the next survey will be finalised, they will have statistics for all 54 countries, particularly the example of Nigeria.
“Nigeria has already started moving the needle, their health insurance policy has been adopted in terms of data”, Mrs Olajuwon said.
