Promoting Employment for Women

Results achieved as of the end of the project (October 2016) include: (1) 9 281 women from low-income backgrounds completed vocational training with over 80% of these graduates becoming employed; (2) over 1 500 women and men given specialized enterprise development training leading to increased business development opportunities and an increase between 100% and 500% of their incomes; (3) 331 journalists from 35 districts across Pakistan completed training on Gender Responsive Reporting resulting in over 100 news reports on women and labour issues; (4) advocacy from International Labour Organization and trained journalists helped push for the establishment of an online complaints mechanism to address workplace harassment under the Federal Ombudsman’s Office; and (5) five Gender Units were established under the provincial Department of Labour (DOL) in each of the provinces of Balochistan Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Punjab Sindh and for the territory of Gilgit-Baltistan. These units helped institutionalize gender-responsive budgeting and decent work and labour inspection protocols. As a result each provincial DOL was able to conduct gender-sensitive systematic labour inspections linked to relevant laws such as the law against workplace harassment. Additionally activities under the project (6) helped facilitate the registration of 200 home-based women workers with the Pakistan Workers’ Federation (PWF) where they learned about workers’ rights organizing and collective bargaining; and (7) approximately 367 DOL officials across all provinces were trained on gender mainstreaming concepts such as gender-responsive budgeting gender-responsive labour inspection participatory gender audit methodology and analysis of labour force survey data to generate reports on market information and trends. These results have contributed to improving the income-earning opportunities and employment conditions for women and men across Pakistan and to strengthen the capacities of provinc