DAVID ADAMS reports…
First, the good news: improvements in health and education and efforts to reduce levels of extreme poverty around the world have seen two billion people move out of low development levels over the past 25 years.
That said, as many as 830 million people still live on less than $US2 a day, more than 200 million people are unemployed and 21 million people are currently in forced labour.
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PICTURE: Tibor Fazakas/www.freeimages.com “Decent work contributes to both the richness of economies and the richness of human lives. All countries need to respond to the challenges in the new world of work and seize opportunities to improve lives and livelihoods.”– Helen Clark, UN Development Programme (UNDP) administrator |
These are among the findings of the latest landmark United Nations Human Development Report launched in Ethiopia yesterday.
The report, titled Work for Human Development, calls for governments around the world to act now to ensure no-one is left behind in a world where technological progress, deepening globalisation, aging societies and environmental challenges are rapidly transforming the nature of work. It calls for equitable and decent work for all.
Lead author Selim Jordan said that while human progress will accelerate when everyone who wants to work has the opportunity to do so under “decent circumstances”, in many countries people are still “often excluded from paid work, or are paid less than others for doing work of the same value.”
Other key findings of the report show:
• Women carry out 52 per cent of all global work but are less likely to be paid than men with three out every four hours of unpaid work carried out by women;
• women earn, on average, 24 per cent less than men, and occupy less than a quarter of all senior business positions worldwide;
• there are as many mobile phone subscriptions – seven billion – as there are people in the world;
• while 81 per cent of households in developed countries have internet access, only 34 per cent do in developing regions and seven per cent in the least developed countries; and
• the report quotes International Labour Organization figures which show 61 per cent of employed people in the world work without a contract and that only 27 per cent of the world’s population is covered by comprehensive social protection.
The report also contains the Human Development Index – a ranking of countries based on key measurements of human development including life expectancy, years of schooling and gross national income per capita. It shows that the countries with the steepest drops in rank between 2009-2014 were Libya, which slipped 27 places, and Syria, which slipped 15 places.
Meanwhile, the countries which ranked the highest were Norway, Australia, Switzerland, Denmark and The Netherlands while those which were at the bottom of the index, from highest to lowest, were Burundi, Chad, Eritrea, Central African Republic and Niger.
Helen Clark, former New Zealand Prime Minister and now UN Development Programme (UNDP) administrator, described the report as an “urgent call to tackle one of the world’s great development challenges – providing enough decent work and livelihoods for all.”
“Decent work contributes to both the richness of economies and the richness of human lives,” she said. All countries need to respond to the challenges in the new world of work and seize opportunities to improve lives and livelihoods.”
