Tag: Inclusive Development

Asia’s rising middle classes champions for more inclusive societies
Asia, New social contract

Are Asia’s rising middle classes champions for more inclusive societies?

By Antoine Bonnet, Junior Economist & Alexandre Kolev, Head of Unit, Social Cohesion, OECD Development Centre

Wealthier middle classes are emerging across Asia. While they are highly heterogeneous across the region, their improved economic status could translate into greater ability to engage in public life, exercise voice, and influence decision-making. However, would these middle classes, if truly empowered, push for a policy agenda that is well aligned with the interests of the more fragile communities? Our recent research suggests this cannot be taken for granted.

Continue reading “Are Asia’s rising middle classes champions for more inclusive societies?”
Development Matters
Food security, Social Protection, Youth

Turning the changing food needs of a rising middle class into decent jobs for rural youth

By Alexandre Kolev, Head of Unit, Social Cohesion, and Ji-Yeun Rim, Co-ordinator, Youth Inclusion Project, OECD Development Centre

To read more on this subject, check out
The Future of Rural Youth in Developing Countries:
Tapping the Potential of Local Value Chains

banner-youth-inclusion-home-page.890wRural youth constitute the majority of the youth population today in most developing countries, and their number keeps growing. Most of them are low educated, engaged in low-value added farming, and struggle to find better jobs to escape poverty and hardworking conditions. Only a tiny proportion of rural youth want to keep their jobs, and few work in high-skilled occupations. What is becoming increasingly clear is that rural youth are turning their backs on subsistence agriculture; they have high expectations, do not want to farm like their parents and are lured by the thought of better jobs in urban areas or abroad. As a result, many rural youth end up working in urban areas in low-productive informal activities.

What could break this cycle is growing local and regional demand for processed food from a rising urban middle class in many parts of the developing world. This represents an untapped opportunity to achieve the triple objectives of decent job creation for rural youth, food security and sustainable production. In Africa alone, domestic demand for processed food is growing fast, more than 1.5 times faster than the global average between 2005 and 2015. These trends offer huge opportunities for developing food systems geared toward local and regional markets, much larger than for global markets.

So, what’s standing in the way of achieving this opportunity? Continue reading “Turning the changing food needs of a rising middle class into decent jobs for rural youth”

Development Matters
Policy

Can we leave no one behind in a world so unequal?

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By Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director, Oxfam International

To read more about this topic, check out the upcoming release
of the Development Co-operation Report 2018: Joining Forces to Leave No One Behind on 11 December 2018

Winnie
The author, Winnie Byanyima, embraces a member of a women’s group within the POC (Protection of Civilian site) in Malakal, South Sudan. Photo: Bruno Bierrenbach Feder / Oxfam

To say that the world’s poorest people are simply being left behind can sound like an unbearably polite understatement at times, designed not to offend the rich and the powerful.

I think of the girls I grew up with in Uganda who have worked hard all their life, paid their taxes and supported their communities, only to see themselves and their children remain poor, without essential services. I think of women in poverty like Dolores, who works in a chicken factory in the United States. She and her co-workers wear diapers because their employer denies them toilet breaks (Oxfam, 20161).

These women aren’t just left behind but trapped and exploited at the bottom of a global economy.
Continue reading “Can we leave no one behind in a world so unequal?”

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Policy

Equipping development co-operation to leave no one behind

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By Jorge Moreira da Silva, Director, OECD Development Co-operation Directorate

To read more about this topic, check out the upcoming release of the
Development Co-operation Report 2018: Joining Forces to Leave No One Behind
 on 11 December 2018

dev-cooperation-puzzle-handLeaving no one behind is a radically new level of ambition for governments and societies worldwide, for it implies that the Sustainable Development Goals will only be achieved if they deliver results for everyone and especially the furthest behind. By embracing the pledge in 2015 to leave no one behind, United Nations member states signed up to and entered a new era: one bound by the commitment to universal, equitable and sustainable development for all. Delivering on this agenda will require fundamental refocus and reform of systems, institutions and policies, from the global to the local levels.

Delivering on this central promise of the 2030 Agenda means lifting at least 730 million people out of extreme poverty – those who despite two decades of strong economic growth remain trapped in poverty, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and in fragile contexts. It also means addressing inequalities, discriminations and fragilities. According to the World Inequality Lab, inequalities leave less than 9% of global income to the poorest 50% of the world’s people. Intersecting discriminations and disadvantages afflict women and girls, minority groups and vulnerable populations around the world. An estimated 27% of humanity is expected to live in fragile contexts by 2030 due to the borderless reach of conflict, forced displacement, pandemics, violent extremism, famine and natural disasters. Time may already be running out: in some areas we are actually backsliding – for example, 40 million more people went undernourished between 2014 and 2017.

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Development Matters
Women in an Internally Displaced Persons in Abuja, the Federal Capital of Nigeria, 2018.
Building resilience, New social contract

Increasing income and resilience of the poorest: The role of economic inclusion programmes in social protection systems

By 1 : Aude de Montesquiou and Syed M. Hashemi (Partnership for Economic Inclusion 2 at the World Bank) and Alessandra Heinemann (ADB)

While the past two decades saw spectacular progress in the fight against poverty, more than 10% of the world’s population – 735 million people – still live below USD 1.90 per day. Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere as envisioned in Agenda 2030 will prove challenging. Reaching the poorest is in itself difficult, but even more so is getting them onto a sustained pathway out of poverty because of the need for carefully managed, multi-sectoral interventions.

What could help? The graduation approach is one example of targeted household-level economic inclusion approaches with a proven track record of ensuring sustainable pathways out of extreme poverty.3  The graduation approach is specifically defined as a time-bound multi-sectoral “big push” intervention designed to overcome the multiple barriers that prevent extremely poor and vulnerable households from earning enough income and building sufficient human capital and assets to break out of such extreme poverty. The graduation approach typically offers extremely poor and vulnerable households a sequenced package of consumption support, of access to savings services, technical skills, transfer of productive assets, seed capital or an employment opportunity, and of coaching.

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Development Matters
Human Development, Policy, Youth

Política 2.0. Combinando la protesta con la propuesta

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De Max Trejo, Secretario General, Organismo Internacional de Juventud para Iberoamérica (OIJ)

Aprenda más sobre este tema en el
Foro Global de la OCDE sobre Desarrollo
Regístrese hoy para asistir

Política 2.0. CombinandoLas formas de participación política juvenil son múltiples, dinámicas e interconectadas y demandan una comprensión de lo político amplia y flexible para no subestimar el compromiso de las personas jóvenes con la transformación. Por ejemplo, uno de los puntos destacados en los análisis sobre el tema es el bajo involucramiento de la población joven en los procesos electorales. En este sentido, el Informe Mundial sobre Juventud de la ONU (2016) señala que en los 33 países consultados sólo el 44% de la población joven “siempre vota”, frente al 60% de adultos.

En Iberoamérica, donde las juventudes representan más del 25% de la población, la situación no es diferente. Por citar algunos casos, en México, que tendrá elecciones presidenciales en 2018 y donde las y los jóvenes representan el 30% del padrón electoral, el registro histórico muestra que, aunque la participación de quienes votan por primera vez es del 69%, ésta disminuye al 53% entre los 20 a 29 años (INE, 2016). A su vez, en Chile, que experimentó el mismo proceso en 2017, la tendencia muestra que las juventudes tienen la participación electoral más baja de la población, aportando cerca del 34% del total de la abstención (PNUD, 2017).
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Development Matters
Green transition, Policy

We must co-create the future we want to see

By Emmanuel Faber, CEO of Danone 

Emmanuel Faber participated in the
2017 International Economic Forum on Latin America and the Caribbean

Danone
Photo credit: Lionel Charrier/Livelihoods Funds

In 1972, Danone founder Antoine Riboud made a speech to French industry leaders in which he declared that “corporate responsibility doesn’t end at the factory gate or the company door” and called on them to place “industry at the service of people.” Today his words seem self-evident; at the time they were revolutionary.

Now more than ever, we know that we can only thrive as a business when people and planet thrive. It’s simple: If we don’t protect the environment, we won’t be able to secure resources to make our products. If we don’t empower people and support decent living conditions, our supplier and consumer bases will shrink. We cannot escape this interdependence. So, at Danone, we embrace it. This means that, wherever we operate, we work to foster inclusive and sustainable development through co-creation — that is, working with coalitions of actors on the ground to develop hybrid solutions to concrete problems.

Continue reading “We must co-create the future we want to see”

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