BRUSSELS, Oct 17: More than 1.1 million jobs may have been lost as a result of the South Asian earthquake that devastated parts of Pakistan, the International Labour Office (ILO) said on Monday, adding that productive and labour intensive job creation programmes are urgently needed to lift millions of people out of poverty that has been aggravated by quake damage.
“Reports of widespread destruction show that the livelihoods of millions of people are threatened or have been destroyed”, said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia. “As humanitarian and reconstruction efforts proceed, we must begin working immediately to ensure that initiatives are established to monitor and create decent and productive employment and rebuild peoples’ livelihoods.”
The ILO said that the earthquake had caused the widespread destruction of most infrastructure and shops in the affected towns in the region — including the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Azad Jummu and Kashmir, with heavy loss of livestock and agricultural implements required for income generation in the rural areas. The assessment added that residents of the badly afflicted parts of Pakistan would require “substantial support to rebuild their income-generating prospects”.
Compounding the devastation was the fact that the areas affected are amongst the poorest in Pakistan, the ILO said. The ILO estimates that total employment in the affected areas was around 2.4 million at the time of the disaster and that over 2 million of these workers and their families were living below the poverty line of less than $2 per person per day before the disaster struck.
“By losing their employment, even for a short period of time, workers in the affected districts have likely already fallen into extreme poverty”, Mr Somavia said.
“Reviving the rural economy where most people in the affected areas live and work is both urgent and challenging”, the ILO said. “Prior to the earthquake over 1.4 million workers in the area were engaged in agricultural activities, an estimated 40 per cent or more of whom are now without work. Livestock which provides essential dairy products and the animal power to cultivate the land has also suffered badly.”
The ILO assessment also noted that while the medium- and small-sized towns in the area that provided jobs and incomes to almost a third of the population lie in ruins, the informal economy where most people worked in the urban areas had also been destroyed. Rebuilding the minimum of assets to revive the urban informal economy requires urgent support, the ILO said.
In total, the ILO estimates that around 730,000 workers were employed in the service sector (many in the informal economy), while 230,000 worked in industry (comprised of construction, manufacturing, utilities and mining). Taken together, more than half of these workers have likely lost one of their primary sources of income.
In order to meet the needs of the population in the afflicted areas, the ILO urged that programmes aimed at generating new employment and other income-producing opportunities be incorporated into the rehabilitation and reconstruction programmes that will need to be immediately undertaken following the relief efforts now underway.
These would include employment support services to provide both information and short-term training for the jobs that will be generated through the reconstruction effort; financial and institutional support to rebuild small businesses and income-generating assets in both the rural and urban areas; channelling of financial support from the outside world, including remittances from overseas toward meeting urgently needed basic services; and the creation of institutional mechanisms to ensure that this happens.
“Rebuilding the basic infrastructure — roads, utility services, schools and hospitals — can create employment”, Mr Somavia said. “This means ensuring that decent and productive yet labour-intensive methods are utilized.”