We often ask whether youth are ready for the future. But is the future ready for them? That’s the underlying theme, and the title of a recent, comprehensive book by the ILO on the youth employment challenge.

In 2019, around 430 million young people were working but some 68 million, or more than 13.6 per cent were unemployed. What’s more, and ILO estimates that some 22 per cent of all youth (or roughly 267 million) weren’t in education, employment or training in 2019.

The COVID-19 pandemic has only made matters worse. In this podcast, the editors of the book, Sukti Dasgupta, ILO Employment Department Chief of the Employment, Labour Markets and Youth Branch, and Juan Chacaltana, Senior Employment Policies Specialist, discuss these issues and how to transform traditional youth employment policies to help build a better future for them.

The field of responsible business conduct has come a long way but has failed to consider and engage SMEs. Laura Spence, Professor of Business Ethics at Royal Holloway, University of London, sets out why and how SMEs should be included in the conversation.

Samuel Lee Moh Chuan, Senior Group HR Manager at the Wen Ken Group (Malaysia), discusses the impact of COVID-19 on Malaysian businesses, and the need to connect top down and local action on forced labour to really make a difference.

Global job markets are changing rapidly, driven by increased automation, new technology and demographic change among other factors. And over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has injected new uncertainty into this changing labour market. What are some of the medium- to long-term solutions to meeting these challenges?

To address these trends and the policy response, the ILO Employment Policy Department has recently launched a new Global Employment Policy Review: Employment Policies for Inclusive Structural Transformation. Interview with Sangheon Lee, Director of the Employment Policy Department, and the co-editors of the report, Dorothea Schmidt-Klau and David Kucera.

Douglas Opio, Executive Director of the Federation of Uganda Employers and Chair of the ILO GBNFL Steering Committee, explains why responsible business conduct should be at the top of each SME’s agenda and how to achieve it in practice.

The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting labour markets and livelihoods in advanced economies. But what is the impact on the world’s least developed countries, or L-D-C-s, which together account for 1.3 per cent of the global GDP, 13 per cent of the world’s population, and 40 per cent of the world’s poor.

In this podcast, Aurelio Parisotto, Head of the ILO’s Employment and Economic Analyses Unit, provides insights from a new publication entitled “COVID-19 - Tackling the jobs crisis in the Least Developed Countries”, which draws preliminary evidence from a range of ad-hoc country studies intended to adequately capture the impact of the pandemic on labour markets in LDCs, and the policy responses needed to restart economies and promote a job-rich recovery that leaves no one behind.

Our natural world provides enormous opportunities for creating jobs and stimulating economies. More than half of the world’s GDP – some US$44 trillion – is moderately or highly dependent on nature. And globally, some 1.2 billion jobs in sectors such as farming, fisheries, forestry and tourism depend on the effective management and sustainability of healthy ecosystems.

But today, the natural world and our economies are experiencing multiple challenges, intensified by the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. This cascade of crises has had a dramatic and tragic impact on labour markets, eliminating hundreds of millions of jobs and livelihoods.

Unprecedented times call for unprecedented responses. This podcast is based on the new, ground-breaking report by the ILO and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) that urges policymakers to urgently explore the potential of Nature-based Solution and seek to integrate them in their crises responses. Interview with the report’s editors, Vanessa Pérez-Cirera, WWF’s Deputy Leader for Nature Global Climate and Energy Practice, and Maikel Lieuw-Kie-Song, the ILO’s Employment Intensive Investment Programme Technical Specialist.

How do we deal with the enormous crisis in employment during the COVID-19 pandemic? National employment policies play an important role in addressing this issue by providing a vital entry point for the crisis response and a way forward to a job-rich recovery. In this podcast, Chief of Employment, Labour Market and Youth Branch Sukti Dasgupta and Head of the Employment Strategies Unit Sher Verick of ILO Employment Policy Department explain the vital role of national employment policies in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID 19 crisis has laid bare the entrenched gender inequalities that, compounded with other inequalities, plague labour markets. As the latest ILO Monitor: COVID-19 and the world of work, fifth edition has shown, the employment of women is relatively at greater risk than that of men, due to their overrepresentation in the service sectors severely impacted by the crisis. In this interview, Valeria Esquivel, Senior Employment Policies and Gender Officer/ILO EMPLOYMENT Policy Department, discusses how the current crisis is different from previous crises in terms of its impact on women workers, and highlights some policy recommendations the ILO has to offer.

This is the second episode of the ILO’s Social Finance Podcast on financial inclusion, impact insurance and sustainable investing. The podcast brings you insights from around the world, highlighting how financial services contribute to social and economic development.

In Episode 2, we turn our attention to Eastern Africa for insights from Kenya. In a discussion between Lisa Morgan, Technical Officer at the ILO and Saurabh Sharma, General Manager of Britam Microinsurance, you can learn more about how inclusive insurers are dealing with and planning for the immediate and long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To all our listeners, this is your podcast! We want to cover the topics that interest you. Feel free to send us your ideas for future episodes and we will do what we can to include them. Email: [email protected].

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The transcript for this episode is available on the ILO website: https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/documents/article/wcms_749043.pdf

Background music: www.purple-planet.com

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