This week the CCDP began collaborating with the Bureau for Worker’s Activities (ACTRAV) of the International Labour Organization (ILO) on the follow-up to Recommendation No. 205 on “Employment and Decent Work for Peace and Resilience” (2017).

The mandate involves accompanying a series of six sub-regional dissemination and consultation events with trade union representatives, as well as a regional African training course in Lomé, Togo, and an annual workers’ conference in Turin, Italy. The insights gathered from these meetings will form the basis for subsequently drafting a worker’s guide to R205 and produce an updated, global version of an existing ILO training manual on the prevention and resolution of armed and violent conflicts in Africa. The first of these sub-regional workshops is being held this week (7-9 May 2018) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in the presence of Janine Bressmer and Oliver Jütersonke.

The deliverables envisaged build on previous collaboration between the ILO’s Fragile States and Disaster Response (FSDR) Group and the CCDP, notably a joint reflection process conducted in 2014 and 2015 on the role of employment and decent work activities in fragile settings. At the time, an intense period of interviews and stakeholder consultations with ILO staff members and institutional partners, as well as with UN agencies, donor governments and civil society, led to the publication of a “fragility compass” to orient the world of work. It is the CCDP’s ambition to now continue this line of work with ACTRAV.

Through the pursuit of such applied mandates, the CCDP not only seeks to lend its substantive and methodological expertise to partners in International Geneva, but ultimately to better understand day-to-day challenges of knowledge sharing and decision-making processes within and across a variety of institutional settings. These insights then continuously feed into the development of teaching curricula, not least for professional audiences. A recent initiative includes the CCDP’s partnership with the Graduate Institute’s Executive Master in Development Policies and Practices (DPP), for which a new specialization in Conflict and Fragility Management will be launched later this summer.