An interest approach towards formal employment is addressing the issue as regards the benefits it provides for people and communities. A way to begin the analyses might be by studying the social costs of unemployment.

According to the International Labor Organization, unemployment causes a drop in production. Besides, when unemployment occurs, people’ skills deteriorate, activity levels drop and social divisions rise.  When such situation takes place for a long period of time, it generates a rise on lack of productivity throughout the employment life of the person affected. This may cause a lost in human capital for such person. Extended unemployment may also translate into a life of subsistence, personal autonomy lost, and feelings of frustration, anger and low self-esteem.

Therefore, unemployment social consequences are serious, as they destroy communities’ stability and threaten their social cohesion.

On the other hand, formal employment provides stability to communities, allows productivity improvements and enables people skills and abilities development. For these reasons, it is extremely important to promote formal employment, so as to fight against damages caused to society by informality and unemployment.

It is with this goal in mind that the ILO set a number of priorities in order to improve employment possibilities among population.

Priority no.1 is to delay the outgoing from formal education. In order to achieve this, several items must be mentioned. Firstly, it is very important to create policies aimed to promote the expansion of quality primary and secondary school education. Secondly, a higher cooperation between private and public employment services and the educational system must be stimulated. Thirdly, providing money or food to poor households may function as palliatives for the short-term impacts due to lack of incomes and their negative effects in the long term, such as school dropouts. Finally, formal education effects must be widened. This might be achieved using distance learning strategies which combine written material with distance study and face to face teaching.

Another important matter is to give a second chance to young people, particularly women, who never attended or dropout early from school.  If this segment of population goes back to school a number of social, health and economic advantages may be obtained, such as delaying marriage age, a descent of the domestic violence and children mortality rates, healthy behaviors, and a lower risk of catching sexual diseases, i.e. HIV.

The second range of priorities are summarized into strengthening the bound between training and education systems and the employment world. Diversity of education provided by credited training organisms is promoted in order to achieve such goal. Among these institutions we may find: public institutes; private providers; superior and technical education institutes; community organizations; school that seek to provide students with skills needed to get a job; employers that train employees inside their company.

Third group of priorities focuses on doing interventions aimed to specific groups. An example would be training programs developed within active employment market policies, which are been promoted to favor vulnerable young people population. Because of these interventions, it has come to eye that those programs which combine learning with monetary incentives intended to create comprehension on saving and investment and the benefits derive from them, have turned out to be more productive than those program focused strictly on learning. Therefore, it is important to provide a wide range of training possibilities that bring help to these vulnerable sectors.

Promoting these set of priorities is fundamental to enable a higher development of formal employment, which’s main consequence are social and individual progress. Both kinds of improvements directly impact on the communities where they develop and the people that are part of such communities.

*Anthropologist

Project Analyst

Trafwe LATAM HR Advisors