Country Office Dar Es Salaam Director: Why the future of work in Tanzania is promising

The sitting ILO Director Country Office Dar Es Salaam, Ms Caroline Khamati Mugalla calls the regional supervision role ‘a work in progress’ rather than a key achievement since her appointment to the office, responding to a question that required her to highlight key milestones for the region.

She issued such a remark during an exclusive one-on-one with the Citizen Editor, Mr Mpoki Thompson at the Citizen video cast, Tabata, Dar es Salaam.

Going into details on her assertion, she pictured her success woven into resource mobilization among others in the pecking order for the last six months of her incumbency.

“We’re pretty busy in terms of ILO Visibility in the region, resource mobilization and growing the portfolio across East Africa as you may notice that we’re not a funding agency but more a technical UN Agency.”

Clarifying the mandate of the ILO across the world, the Director Country Office Dar Es Salaam stated that the agency works toward advancing social justice through the decent work agenda.

Staying with the latter, she said that for decent work to be realized, all the four pillars must be considered, highlighting rights as one of the major pillars. To exercise those rights, she said that they work around standard settings which lays a foundation of formation of different conventions that defend decent work.

“We work through tripartite structure, trade unions, employers, and the respective Governments. As I said earlier, our role is centred on conventions setting and creating awareness to the social partners about the conventions, supporting ratifications, implementations of the accords of the conventions by the countries and reporting.”

She also mentioned employment as a second pillar and unveiled the agency’s duty of promoting employment, skills development, entrepreneurship, diversity and inclusion, gender, occupational safety, and health in the region. Strengthening social dialogue institutions and social protection come third and fourth in the order.

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Speaking of social protection progress in Tanzania, Ms Caroline hopes that the Government of Tanzania will ratify the pending social protection convention to have a standard document that will catalyse for the building of strong social protection policies for its people.

“Tanzania is doing well in the social protection area looking at workers particularly around occupational safety and health through OSHA and workers’ compensation through WCF compared to other countries in the region. Who have come to benchmark on countries institutions, policies around OSH”

Briefing about the accords of the International Labour Conference held in Geneva, Switzerland and its relevance to the region, the director said that the conference deliberated on two issues; hazardous biological conditions in the world of work and the care economy. 

With the care economy, which looks to supports the 5R Framework for decent care work on recognition, reduction and redistribution of unpaid care and reward and representation. With an aim of improving the economic status of care workers. Also considering the climate crisis to the people’s livelihoods, she said that discussions are ongoing to see what the standard settings would suggest against these challenges.

In the case of child labour, Ms Caroline shared that the new EU directive on corporate sustainability due diligence sets obligations for companies to mitigate their negative impact on human rights including child labour in their supply chains. In fact, any product with traces on child labour will find it tough to access markets in the EU once the directive comes to force.

“It is becoming very urgent for us to look at the pandemic of the child labour that has surged in the recent past and aggressively work on reducing the numberst. For three decades in addition to supporting countries to implement the conventions on child labour the ILO has spearheaded global efforts against child labor, fostering collaboration among constituents, businesses, NGOs, and civil society organizations. 

She reveals that they face challenges of monitoring enforcement of the labour laws for curbing child labour at peripheries and some local authorities but admits it has become an easy-going directive for the most businesses that are members of employers federation in the region.

Asked about the core energy transitions initiatives for the region, she said that the ILO is working around just transition and unveiled that Tanzania was named among the countries with higher potential for green energy employability in the studies that involved 10 African countries.

The research also saw Zanzibar becoming one of the major blue economy hotspots in the region.

“In Africa and East Africa region, ILO has done much in terms of just transition at a regional level. In Kenya, we’re working with geothermal power company under the Private-Public Development Partnership model and on biofuels with the Eni company focusing on Skills, social protection, and Market systems development. We are also working in Kigoma on entrepreneurship and one of our tools being advocated there has been Green Your Business”