Promoting Decent Work through Local Economic Development

The links between local development, decent work and poverty reduction needs more attention to help development planners and practitioners make better choices, integrating decent work issues into local planning and implementation frameworks. Integrating decent work issues into local development frameworks deals with a wide range of topics concerning local economic growth, job creation and job preservation, improvement of the quality of jobs, making local development benefit the poor, ensuring equal opportunities for all, protection of rights, and promotion of voice, representation and social dialogue in local governance. In this context, this book aims at examining the ability of LED to promote decent employment opportunities utilizing the ILO s LED Programme in Ghana. In an attempt to identify the fundamental pillars that sustain the LED experiences, the contribution to the decent work strategies, the main constrains and the learned lessons . The main questions to be tackled are: Why a local focus? What are the phases of the local development process? Why focus on work? Why the emphasis on decent work and what is it? How does local development contribute to decent work?