Unemployment and underemployment lie at the core of poverty or one can say one of the factors leading to poverty. For the poor, labor is commonly the sole asset they will use to boost their well-being. Hence the creation of productive employment opportunities is crucial for achieving poverty reduction and sustainable economic and social development. It’s crucial to produce decent jobs that both secure income and empowerment for the poor, especially women and younger people.

The rapid economic process can potentially bring a high rate of expansion of productive and remunerative employment, which might result in a discount in poverty. Nevertheless, the contribution of the expansion process to poverty reduction doesn’t depend only on the speed of the economic process, but also on the flexibility of the poor to reply to the increasing demand for labor within the more productive categories of employment.

Given the required importance of employment as too for poverty reduction, job creation should occupy a central place in national poverty reduction strategies. Many employment strategies are often associated with agricultural and rural development and include using labor-intensive agricultural technologies; developing small and medium-sized enterprises, and promoting micro-projects in rural areas.

Many strategies and policies aim to promote self-employment, non-farm employment in rural areas, targeted employment interventions, microfinance and credit as means of employment generation, skill formation and training.

Such strategies, however, often address the amount of employment while the qualitative dimensions, like equity, security, dignity and freedom are often absent or minimal. In general, national poverty reduction strategies including Poverty Reduction Strategies don’t touch upon employment programmes, social protection or rights at work. Neither do they provide in-depth analysis of the results of policies on poverty reduction.

A social perspective on development emphasizes the view that the simplest route to socio-economic development, poverty eradication and private wellbeing is thru decent work. Productive employment opportunities will contribute substantially to achieving the internationally agreed development goals, especially the Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015.

There should be a spotlight on creating better and more productive jobs, particularly those who can absorb the high concentrations of working poor. Among the required elements for creating such jobs are investing in labour-intensive industries, especially agriculture, encouraging a shift within the structure of employment to higher productivity occupations and sectors, and upgrading job quality within the informal economy. additionally, there should even be a spotlight on providing poor people with the mandatory skills and assets which will enable them to require full advantage of any expansion engaged potential.