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| Sunday, 05 March 2006 |
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ILO in bold bid to replace livelihood losses by Elmo Leonard There are 200,000 job losses consequent to the Asian tsunami, the current data of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) shows. The total cost of livelihood losses estimated by the World Bank stands at $140 million, the ILO chief technical officer Doekle Wielinga told the media. One year following the tsunami, rehabilitation and reconstruction activities are in full swing involving government, civil society and the private sector. These activities ranged to a wide variety of interventions in different sectors, Wielinga said, emphasising, his focus was on restoring livelihoods. Livelihood recovery was now central and the rapid income recovery strategy of RADA, developed jointly with the ILO, the WB and UNDP. It is the governments' framework for an integrated approach, bringing together the many actors, Wielinga said. The greatest damage had occurred to the fisheries sector (60 percent) self-employed workers (14 percent) and small business (12 percent). The government in partnership with donors, civil society and the private sector was currently engaged in rebuilding the affected areas and restoring the livelihoods of affected families, of whom at least 30 percent were impoverished even prior to the tsunami, Wielinga told a media conference organised by the Chamber of Construction Industry of Sri Lanka. A recent study shows the increase in construction work has created a gap between the supply and the demand of skilled labour. Pre-tsunami, there were 36,500 skilled workers, with a gap of 39,500 and the gap has now increased to 66,000, Wielinga said. The challenge ahead, was not simply to recreate the pre-tsunami social and economic landscape, but to "build back better" with emphasis on the "human face" of the reconstruction process, generating jobs for those who can work and protection for those who can't; a principal application of what decent work means in times of crisis, Wielinga said. The new ILO director, Ms Tine Staermose said that the ILO is about the world of work and about decent work. One such aspect of the decent work agenda for Sri Lanka is to make people feel good about what they are doing. And, addressing the more subtle side of attaching status to certain categories of work, in particular manual work which is crucial towards more and better jobs for men and women. Wielinga said that ILOs Income Recovery Program places considerable emphasis on a multi-pronged and coordinated approach for providing urgently needed income support while simultaneously assisting the people in the affected areas to overcome poverty and dependency by embarking on sustainable income-generating activities. The key requirements in this regard are: social protection for those who are unable to work due to illness, injury, old age or loss of productive assets; temporary employment generating mechanisms; finances to replace productive assets; capacity building vocational training and other support services for the development of micro and small enterprises and temporary transfers to displaced families. The cash flow program designed to provide to cover daily expenses has been effective in providing a safety net to 250,000 families initially and 130,000 during the fourth round of transfers, Wielinga said. The cash-for-work schemes so far generated approximately 2.6 million days of temporary employment and there are planned or ongoing donor-funded infrastructure and community development projects of $185.5 million. Further, the-cash-for-work schemes need improvements in terms of productivity and the quality of physical outputs and should increasingly be integrated into the sector programs such as rural road programs, which will also provide significant employment in the near future, Wielinga said. Of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) support two big government finance schemes and over 40 organisations support SME and provide microfinance, with a combined credit line of $17 million. All these recovery efforts have increased the demand for skilled labour in a variety of trades, especially in the construction sector. The ILO technical advisor said that attention is also needed to address regional disparities of worker supply. With the heaviest impact of the tsunami being on the north and east, there is a migration of skilled workers from the south to the north and east. Urgent measures are therefore needed to build a more skilled workforce to improve the secondary conditions of workers and to look for local resource bases solutions in the reconstruction and rehabilitation works, Wielinga said.
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