Browse by Theme: Livelihoods

CARE International and the Fairtrade Foundation are hosting an event at this year’s Labour Party conference to bring together business, civil society and politicians – Inclusive chocolate? How can private sector partnerships ensure women farmers and workers get a bigger chunk of the benefits?

Earlier this year, I spent a few months in a village in Accham district in far-west Nepal in an effort to understand what motivates people to leave their homes and migrate to the towns and cities of India, writes Tahseen Alam from the EMPHASIS project. Documenting the lives and experiences of migrants as they made their way from Nepal to India was an eye-opening journey for me as well.

Today we launch our paper Making decent work a reality for domestic workers: civil society's experience of ratifying ILO Convention 189 in the Andes. Since 2010, we have been supporting domestic workers and their organisations in the Andean region to fight for their labour rights. The rights include a minimum salary, a written contract and social protection such as provisions for maternity leave.

An update from a CARE workshop on smallholder agriculture, climate change and food and nutrition security.

I can’t help but have lingering doubts about Davos’ legitimacy. Oxfam’s great report on inequality talks about the dangers of ‘power capture’ by the elite. Surely Davos is just another example of this - a group of mostly unelected actors setting the global agenda. But then again…

Increasingly seen as integral to sustainable development, the private sector is carving out a more prominent role for itself in a post-2015 MDG agenda.

The premise for this is that, by leveraging big businesses and the markets within which they operate, opportunities for the world’s most vulnerable can be unlocked. It’s a bold vision, but the truth is that those companies who have already entered the fray still have their hardest work ahead of them.

There are certain working conditions that most workers take for granted; established working hours, a minimum wage, paid annual leave, social security and maternity leave. Historically, domestic workers haven’t shared these basic rights but a major new piece of legislation could change this unacceptable breach of human rights. On the 16th June 2011, at the International Labour Organisation's 100th international conference, 183 countries signed Convention 189. This landmark legislation mandates state-supported protection to ensure decent work for domestic workers. However, to date, only eight countries have ratified the convention (Uruguay, the Philippines, Mauritius, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Italy, Paraguay, and South Africa). At CARE International, we believe domestic work is “real” work and it is time for domestic workers to be granted the same working conditions that other workers all over the world are granted without question.