Capacity Building

The Sustentar project aims to increase private sector stakeholders’ accountability to uphold core labor standards consistent with Mexican labor laws and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement’s (USMCA) Labor Chapter, with a specific focus on addressing child labor, forced labor, and acceptable conditions of work.  The project will include a focus on states that produce chile peppers and tomatoes, including Baja California, Baja California Sur, and Chihuahua.

This project will enhance the effectiveness of the Government of Mexico to combat child labor and forced labor at the federal level and support specific interventions in the southern states of Chiapas, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo. The duration of the project will be five years (60 months).

The Madagascar Shines project aims to reduce child labor in mica-producing communities in the Anôsy region of Madagascar through community engagement, coordination, and capacity building.

The project will work with civil society and workers' organizations in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to strengthen their capacity and bolster their collaboration with government agencies, the private sector and other stakeholders to protect labor rights and reduce child labor and forced labor. The project will focus on organizations that represent indigenous, Afro-descendant, and Garifuna populations, while promoting gender and racial equity.

The ALFA project will strengthen the capacity of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) sectoral bodies and member countries to coordinate and collaborate to address forced labor and abusive working conditions in the region’s fishing industry. ALFA will focus on ASEAN regional policy implementation, and increased engagement with the private sector, worker organizations, and civil society to mitigate forced labor and trafficking, and improve working conditions for a more sustainable, responsible and resilient fishing sector.

The Gender Equity in the Mexican Workplace project works to empower women to gain representation in union leadership in order to strengthen protections, address discrimination and harassment at work, and augment wages.

ILAB’s Global Accelerator Lab project will support broader and more effective action under Alliance 8.7, a global partnership to assist United Nations (UN) member States to end child labor, forced labor, human trafficking and modern slavery by 2030. 

The Mexico Awareness Raising project aims to support the government of Mexico, including the federal and state-level Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare, to design, execute, and sustain effective communication strategies that inform workers, unions, and employers of the legal ramifications of the country’s labor law reforms.

To build the capacity of workers, support worker engagement and organizing, and strengthen democratic worker organizations in the aerospace, mining, and call center industries, such that they become protagonists in fulfilling the potential of Mexico’s historic labor reform. The project will offer workers and their organizations expert technical assistance, ongoing skills development, and pro bono advisory and legal services. Additionally, the project will create spaces for analysis, exchange, reflection, and the development of recommendations to improve labor law reform implementation.

The goal of the UNDP’s MICA project is to eliminate child labor in four communes in Madagascar and to promote environmentally- and socially-responsible mica mining by bolstering the resiliency of vulnerable households in mica producing communities, building government capacity, and increasing engagement with stakeholders.