ilo.org (23.04.2025) Digitalization and automation are transforming millions of jobs worldwide, creating powerful opportunities to enhance occupational safety and health. Automation and smart monitoring systems can reduce hazardous exposures, prevent injuries and improve overall working conditions. However, these advances also bring new potential risks that require proactive and adaptive policy responses.

worldbank.org (17.04.2025) This brief provides insight into how Ethiopia increased the duration of paid maternity leave from 90 to 120 days and introduced three days of paid paternity leave in 2019. While ensuring job-protected leave of adequate length and pay for both parents is critical for a variety of health, economic, and social development outcomes, just slightly more than half of economies in the Sub-Saharan Africa region provide paid maternity and paternity leave. The brief highlights specific characteristics of Ethiopia’s socioeconomic environment that incentivized the reform.

International Labour Organization (24.12.2024) This paper outlines the perspective and approach of the ILO’s Universal Social Protection Department to enhancing the gender-responsiveness of social protection policies, anchored in international social security standards and guided by a life-cycle approach to system-building.

Social protection goes well beyond cash transfers; it includes policies and programs that bridge skill, financial, and information gaps, aiding people in securing better jobs. The three pillars of social protection—social assistance, social insurance, and labor market programs—support households and workers in handling crises, escaping poverty, facing transitions, and seizing employment opportunities. But despite a substantial expansion over the past decade, 2 billion people remain uncovered or inadequately covered across low- and middle-income countries.

HelpAge International (22.03.2025) A practical guide to developing and using country profiles on the rights and wellbeing of older persons in the Arab region, based on HelpAge and UNFPA’s experience across 18 countries.

Social services play a crucial role in supporting individuals and communities across Europe, but ensuring consistent quality standards remains a challenge.

eurohealthobservatory.who.int (03.04.2025) Long-term care often falls by the wayside in national policy dialogues. In some countries cultural norms compel families to look after older people at home. Some pundits may look at rising health care costs and argue that the public sector cannot shoulder more care responsibilities by expanding access to long-term care. Public long-term care systems are best placed to meet the needs of the present and the future than families.

eurofound.europa.eu (25.03.2025) The scale of undeclared care work (paid care work that is lawful but not declared to public authorities) in the EU is considerable. Recent estimates suggest that 6.8 million undeclared workers provide care or household services across the EU, with 2.1 million specifically in the care sector. Undeclared care workers are predominantly women and often are migrants.

worldbank.org (01.03.2025) This policy note consolidates the highlights of a study funded by the Sahel Adaptive Social Protection Program (SASPP), exploring the role and operationalization of dynamic social registries in low-income and shock-prone contexts, including in the Sahel.

worldbank.org (24.03.2025) The World Bank estimates that closing the gender gap in employment would increase long-run gross domestic product (GDP) per capita by 20 percent (Pennings 2022). Realizing this achievement, however, depends not only on removing gender barriers to employment but also and most emphatically on improving the quality of women’s employment. Women’s labor force participation has been stagnant since 1990, at around 53 percent for women compared to 80 percent for men, with the largest gaps in lower-middle-income countries (World Bank 2023).