Promoting Gender Equality for Decent Employment in Pakistan Promoting Gender Equality for Decent Employment Executive Summary: Promoting Gender Equality for Decent Employment aims at accomplishing two interlinked intermediate outcomes that will contribute in providing working women of Pakistan have better income, better working environment and increased participation in household decisions. These intermediate outcomes are: • Pakistani women have greater equal employment opportunities and decent working conditions in selected economic sectors; and • Increased understanding and favorable attitudes of stakeholders towards working women issues. Project has been designed by drawing upon experiences, resources developed and lessons learnt during the implementation of ILO’s CIDA funded national project “Women’s employment concerns and working conditions in Pakistan (WEC-PK)”. Project approach includes upstream work focusing on policy/ law revision aimed at creating conducive environment; and developing institutional capacity for effective policy implementation at the national, provincial and district level. The approach also entails strengthening and dissemination of knowledgebase through research and analysis that will result in raising awareness and mobilise public action. At the downstream level, the project seeks to leverage national programmes and plans to enhance employability of poor women in selected areas. The thrust will be towards institutionalisation and national ownership for sustainability. This project is a nation wide project of 60 months duration with Canadian $ 8 million funding by CIDA. Promoting Gender Equality for Decent Employment focuses on three components. First, is to strengthen national mechanisms to promote equal employment opportunities for women in the country. Under this component project activities will be geared towards enhancing the capacity of stakeholders to design and implement policies and programmes for working women at all levels. This will include developing capacity of stakeholders in designing and implementing gender sensitive policies and legislative frameworks in line with international labour standards and in implementing programmes reflecting needs of working women. Furthermore, based on ILO’s experience it has been observed that adequately resourced structure strategically positioned in constituents’ organisations with support from the highest levels has a positive impact in terms of influencing decisions and agendas. Therefore, coordination and implementation mechanisms will be established at federal and provincial levels, existing cells will be strengthened with gender expertise, women facilitation centers in collaboration with MOWD will be set up, and coordination mechanisms among Provincial Cells in Labour departments, Women Facilitation Centers (WFCs), Career Development Centers (CDCs) and Media will be developed. Second, to enhance skills and employability of poor in rural and urban areas of selected districts, 6,300 women and men will be trained in employable skills based on training methodology derived from ILO’s TREE methodology. In addition, capacity of training providers and other actors for implementing programs on TREE methodology will also be developed. The TREE approach is implemented in three phases; an aassessment and capacity-building phase; then a training design, planning and delivery of the training phase and phase three is post-training support stage. For improving the process of job search and employment exchange, linkages will be developed between trained women and training providers, private sector companies and career development centers along with facilitative meetings and exposure visits to various markets for the women. Third, capacity of media will be strengthened to enable them to take an active role in raising awareness on issues related to working women. Under this component it is envisioned that capacity of journalists/ reporters will be enhanced for gender sensitive and rights based reporting;