Building technical and institutional capacity to collect and analyse information on the labour market, establish a labour market profile, use the diagnosis to design appropriate policies and evaluate such policies is critical to accelerating progress towards “full and productive employment and decent work for all”, which was recently introduced as a new target within Millennium Development Goal 1.

While this objective establishes the centrality of decent work in the fight against poverty and exclusion, it also brings new challenges. Most notably, countries need to establish or maintain sound labour market information (LMI) systems to produce accurate and comparable data on decent work and labour market conditions, and use them to develop evidence-based policy making.

To enable LMI systems to monitor and assess progress towards decent work, the ITC-ILO, in conjunction with the ILO Department of Statistics, has devised a new programme on LMI systems and decent work monitoring.

Training topics include:

• introduction to labour statistics and labour market concepts, indicators and information systems
• planning and implementing household surveys and labour modules to monitor progress towards decent work
• analysing survey data to monitor labour market conditions and decent work supporting the analysis of child labour data.