Inclusive Economic Opportunities

Ensuring individuals have adequate skills and capacities to access available livelihood opportunities, and that markets are able to offer decent employment or self-employment opportunities for unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled individuals. Inclusive economic opportunities mean that they should be in the sectors in which the poor work (e.g. agriculture); occur in places where the poor live (e.g. undeveloped areas with few resources); use the factors of production that the poor possess (e.g. unskilled labour); and reduce the prices of consumption items that the poor consume (e.g. food, fuel and clothing).

The standard activities under this thematic area include:

• Supporting technical and vocational education and training (TVET);
• Developing numeracy, literacy, digital and other life skills
• Career counseling, internships, job placement with a specific emphasis on youth and women;
• Stimulating entrepreneurship, incl. business advisory and financial services and advocating for an enabling business environment;
• Promoting a safe and dignified work environment (“decent work”);
• Value chain approaches, particularly in the informal sector in urban and peri-urban settings as well to help poor farmers to increase their production, capture market opportunities, obtain fair deals, and produce higher-quality products;
• Facilitating access to affordable credit and financial services, incl. in partnership with OXUS;
• Awareness raising and protection activities for potential economic migrants;
• Supporting social business;
• Supporting subsistence-based farmers to transform into market-based small-scale producers, e.g. by promoting production techniques and approaches that sustainably increase yields;
• Facilitating farmers to develop their organizational capacity for better collective action vis-à-vis service providers and market actors, for example through support to cooperatives;
• Developing agricultural markets, expanding trade and using mobile phone, radio, and other media channels, phones to provide real-time prices, so farmers can sell what they grow at a profit;
• Facilitating an enabling policy framework for pro-poor agriculture development (e.g. land reform, market access, subsidies).