Generating employment is crucial to building peace. Employment and income generation are fundamental elements of the post-conflict solution. For communities and individuals, job creation and regular income can provide the means for survival and recovery. They are also keys to reaching out to young people and reintegrating ex-combatants and returnees.
This United Nations policy paper contributes to a common understanding and provides a United Nations approach to employment and reintegration, built around a set of guiding principles and programming guidelines designed to support programming at country level. The policy presented in this report proposes a practical ‘three track approach’: stabilizing income generation and emergency employment; promoting employment opportunities at the local level, where reintegration ultimately takes place; and supporting sustainable employment creation and decent work.
Key findings:
- Promoting employment growth requires a thorough understanding of the underlying economy and market. An immediate challenge is to restore markets and access to markets for goods, services and labour affected by the conflict. Sustaining reintegration of ex-combatants, (including former child combatants), refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) should involve continuous monitoring to avoid undermining or reversing early achievements from the stabilization phase. Creating youth employment that taps into the positive energy and skills of youth is a particularly difficult challenge, as youth often find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle of violence, poverty, illiteracy and social exclusion. There should be a balance between priority security concerns and equity considerations, especially when targeting specific individuals or groups, such as ex-combatants. It is essential to recognize the needs of specific target groups but such a focus can fuel resentment in communities, if not framed within an overall strategy that respects community-based expectations and equity. Urban and rural areas present different challenges (and opportunities) with regard to employment and reintegration. The characteristics of basic labour markets, the levels of organization and training of labour, and the potential for employment programmes to generate desired results, all differ significantly between rural and urban areas. Root causes of conflict, such as inequitable access to land and natural resources, need to be addressed.
- Transitions from conflict to peace create windows of opportunity for social and economic change. Socio-economic recovery should be managed to benefit, to the extent possible, the entire population. Employment should deliver the new economic benefits and peace dividends to the affected population. Peacebuilding processes should improve the rights of the affected population, with particular attention to reducing inequalities towards women and youth and to previously disenfranchised groups, through political, economic and labour market reforms. Substantial investments in infrastructure should optimize the use of employment-intensive and employment-friendly techniques, where this is economically and technically feasible.
- Coherent and comprehensive strategies for post-conflict employment promotion and reintegration should always include the three programming tracks, namely: stabilizing income generation and emergency employment; local economic recovery for employment opportunities and reintegration; and sustainable employment creation and decent work. While all three tracks promote employment, their focus is different: respectively stabilization, reintegration and long-term employment creation. Programmes in these tracks start at the same time, preceded by pre-peace accord planning. All three tracks are observed in any phase of the recovery but their intensity generally peaks at different times.
