CEB Toolkit Application: Tanzania

The Toolkit has been adapted to be used at country level to assist UN Country Teams, national constituents and stakeholders, and other development partners to mainstream employment and decent work in national development frameworks. A checklist for use specifically at country-level was developed.

The country level checklist was used in 2008 to assess the employment and decent work implications of the One UN programme 2007-2008 through a desk review. The report of the assessment made suggestions on how mainstreaming employment and decent work could enhance coherence and improve efficiency and effectiveness of delivery both across and within the joint programmes beyond 2008.

Two training workshops were held in 2009 to show how the Toolkit could be used to evaluate policies and programmes and to promote employment and decent work. The first workshop was held for directors of policy and planning from the ministries of Labour, Industries and trade, Infrastructure, Water and Livestock, Agriculture, Defence and National service, Energy and Water. The second workshop – complementary to the first one – was held for planning officers.

The directors of policy and planning are key actors in the planning processes of ministries in Tanzania. They have the essential task of ensuring that employment creation targets are articulated in the annual budgets. They were also keen to operationalize and implement the 2008 National Employment Policy which is supported by the One UN Joint Programme 1 “Wealth Creation, Employment and Economic Empowerment”.

However, it was felt that knowledge was still lacking in order to mainstream decent work. To facilitate this process, a local training and research institution was hired to work with key ministries, using the Toolkit. This helped to “domesticate” the Toolkit, as did the translation of the Toolkit in Kiswahili. Specifically, the objective of this activity was to raise awareness on how employment and decent work could be taken into account in the preparation of budgets.

The following ministries participated in this project:

• Prime minister’s Office, Regional and Local Government

• Ministry of Works

• Ministry of Finance

• Ministry of Home Affairs

• Ministry of Industry and Trade

• Ministry of Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives

Ministerial Assessment Teams were set up and training was provided to help them go through the self-assessment of policies, plans and budgets for Employment and Decent Work outcomes.