The global Employment Intensive Investment Programme of the ILO has supported member States for over 40 years in the design and implementation of policies and programmes aiming to address unemployment and underemployment through public investment, typically in infrastructure development.

EIIP uses an approach which aims to optimize the employment content, meaning the labour content is usually is lower than in the Cash-for-Work approach. Focusing on infrastructure and employment the approach requires a longer lead time and more technical input in planning, design, procurement and supervision.

An employment intensive approach is development oriented as it includes capacity development of government counterparts and construction contractors, safeguards and decent work principles.

• Development oriented approaches rather than humanitarian interventions
• Sustainability and ownership. Working through and with national partners
• Mainstreaming and upscaling through improvement of national systems, programmes and funding

In Lebanon, the EIIP approach aims to build capacity to develop and maintain priority infrastructure that has an economic, environmental and social impact, where a key objective is the creation of immediate jobs, productive decent work and generation of income for Syrian Refugees and Lebanese host communities, including to assist in regulating the employment of foreigners (assisting in legality of status).

EIIP target the most vulnerable localities and most vulnerable individuals (men, women, Syrian and Lebanese) for livelihood support, following a conflict sensitive approach.

Geographical targeting is guided by LCRP vulnerability mapping, including prevalence of vulnerability in the community and presence of Syrian refugees, suitable priority infrastructure, coordination with other organisations working in the area and safe access to the location.

The starting point for targeting individuals is to make information about the job opportunity widely available coupled with awareness sessions in the community, clearly explaining the nature of work, terms and condition.In EIIP, Contractors are responsible for their workforce - and they have outputs and deadlines to adhere to and expect to make a profit. Thus, they have to be responsible for recruitment.

The EIIP will hence not provide them with certain individuals but will help with outreach strategies and facilitate coordination with municipalities to identify the most vulnerable households and individuals.Workers are offered 40 days employment. This job rationing methods is used in order to fairly distribute the benefits of employment and income opportunities.

Another key approach is limiting worker registration to one labourer per household.EIIP feedback and complaints mechanisms is a critical part of accountability and conflict sensitivity and important for building trust and ensuring positive relationships with local communities.

EIIP Lebanon focus on basic infrastructure interventions in vulnerable communities, benefitting Lebanese and Syrian refugees. Priority infrastructure interventions, suitable for the EIIP approach, are identified, designed, procure and implement in coordination with government partners participating municipalities and farmers. See Project Briefs and EIIP Lebanon Project
MapMunicipal infrastructure the identification and selection takes into consideration vulnerability and availability of suitable projects in the municipalities. The final selection for Phase IV includes agricultural roads, school block, cultural center and pedestrian networks Agricultural infrastructure. Green Plan receives requests and proposals from small scale farmers for agricultural infrastructure to reclaim land that has been unproductive and to increase yields. EIIP will support more than 800 farmers with infrastructure works including terracing, retaining walls and water cisterns.
Road Maintenance including routine maintenance and spot improvement is coordinated through MoPWT. Phase IV includes 6 clusters with a total of around 180 km of road maintenance.
Response to the August 4 Beirut Port explosion. Directly after the devastating explosion in Beirut, the ILO was one of the first organizations to mobilize its resources and provide a rapid response in the city, supporting in clearing rubble and generating decent job opportunities. The ILO continues to support Beirut through rehabilitation of police station & pedestrian network in Karantina and customs building affected by the blast.

At the centre of the EIIP is local resource based technology, which favours and optimise the use of local resources in delivering and maintaining infrastructure. Local labour and materials are used to the greatest possible extent, but without adversely affecting the costs or duration of the specified works. Appropriate (light) equipment is used for support activities for the sake of time or quality.Labour on site is effectively organised, supervised and motivated, including fair and transparent recruitment and payment procedures. LRBT methods can if well organised be a cost-effective, viable and sustainable delivery means for infrastructure.LRBT aims to optimize the employment content, meaning the labour content is usually lower than in the Cash-for-Work approach, but significantly higher than for conventional construction. The key differences between LRBT vs CfW are:

• Optimise employment rather than maximise to avoid non-productive labour
• Quality of construction works and importance of assets
• Quality of work (and duration)
• Productivity and task rates and output based pay become more important in EIIP
• More technical inputs are required in preparation and supervision (engineering)
• Skills development and employability objectives
• Private sector engagement
• Procurement processes differ between the approaches

Decent Work is at the core of implementation and means opportunities for work that are productive and deliver a fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for the workers and their families and equality of opportunity and treatment for all women and men.
All actors involved in the implementation of employment intensive projects have a responsibility to ensure compliance with Lebanese labour law, core international labour standards and decent work principles. This includes fair wage (min $7 per day), payment procedures (bi-weekly), occupational safety and health (OSH), child labour (no one below 18), protection, working days and hours (6 days a week, 6-8 hours a day), supporting legality of status, employment contracts and accident insurance.
ILO trains contractors in the EIIP Environmental and Social Safeguards Framework (ESSF), assigns trained Social Safeguards Officers (SSOs) to each project to ensure adherence to decent work principles and local resource based approaches.
Occupational safety and health (OSH) All appropriate precautions must be taken to ensure that the workplace is safe and without risk of injury to the safety and health of workers. Safety and health measures in labour-based activities tend to be straightforward because work operations are simple and the risks are limited because few machines are involved. Although there is a cost associated with OSH measures, healthy and safe workers are more productive and this can be recovered over time. Specific COVID-19 procedures must be followed.

A well-organized and happy workforce is usually a productive workforce.The labour force on an EIIP work site is naturally quite large. It is the responsibility of the Contractor to manage the labour force and to ensure adherence to labour regulations and quality production. The LRB site operations have to be split into single and simple activities to be able to manage and control the labourers, their tasks and quality of works. Each activity is therefore assigned to a separate worker group with its own Group Leader. The worker groups have to be balanced in terms of numbers of labourers to ensure that each activity can be carried out without interfering with other activities.

• It is essential to carefully plan the labour requirements for a particular project in terms of numbers and timing through all work implementation phases.
• Recruitment of labour must be fair and transparent, targeting the most vulnerable, and based on an detailed labour work plan
• Instructions must be clear and provided in a language labourers can easily understand and newly recruited unskilled labourers must be trained on the job. Explain what is expected in terms of output and quality
• Appropriate incentive scheme for labourers is fundamental for ensuring fair and effective work outputs. Tasks must be fair! – the average worker should be able to complete a task in 6-8 hours.
• Workers must be provided with good quality tools, benefit from health and safety provisions and be paid in full and on time.

To achieve gender equality in the workplace employers must implement concrete measures to increase the participation of women, achieve gender equality in the workplace and to ensure and protect women’s rights. This is particularly important as female-headed households are often significantly more vulnerable than male-headed households.Projects must promote the equal participation of women in paid work opportunities. Employers must not discriminate between men and women at any stage of the employment process, including in regard to the type of work, remuneration or recruitment.EIIP has an equal-opportunity approach for women and men, to be engaged either in labour-intensive works or as contractor (company owner or staff), advocating with contractors for employment of women in the work-force, harassment sensitisation and gender awareness. The project aims to employ a minimum of 15% women and 2% people with disability. These targets are included as special clauses in contract documentation, and are generally being achieved.A range of measures are implemented to encourage the participation of women in line with the EIIP Lebanon Gender Strategy, including outreach strategies, ensuring a safe working environment, zero tolerance for harassment, separate toilets and accessible drinking water, equal pay, establishing women-only work teams, offering on the job training, safe transport and childcare.

Employers must not discriminate against PWD by paying them less than able bodied persons or avoid recruiting someone because of their disability.It is a misconception to think that disabled people cannot be involved in construction. Instead employers should implement concrete measures to increase the participation of persons with disability.The EIIP aims to employ a minimum of 2% people with disability. These targets are included as special clauses in contract documentation.In order to accommodate the needs and increase the participation of persons with disability in EIIP activities, the following are examples of measures that are practiced by the EIIP:

• Consulting community representatives to find out if there are PWD in the community who would like to work
• Encourage persons with disability to apply via outreach activities
• Provide basic disability awareness training to contractors in charge of recruitment
• Use a time-based work system instead of task rate system for Persons with Disability, where appropriate
• Ensure that measures promoting gender balance take into account women with disabilities
• Where relevant ensure that any infrastructure developed or rehabilitated meets appropriate accessibility standards
• Ensure that project staff, employers’ staff and other workers do not make inappropriate comments or jokes about anyone’s disability

The Environmental & Social Safeguards Framework (ESSF) has been designed to guide implementation of inclusive and rights based practices in the infrastructure upgrading and maintenance programmes, and to prevent and mitigate negative social or environmental impacts of employment intensive programmes in Lebanon. It has several objectives:

• To increase the likelihood that the outcomes of the projects would be inclusive and equitable;
• To ensure that the concerns of different stakeholder groups are adequately addressed, and;
• To establish mitigation practices and policies to social and environmental risks.

The ESSF is based on Laws and regulations of the Government of Lebanon, together with social and environmental safeguards related policies and guidelines of International Labour Organization (ILO) as well as relevant International Conventions of the ILO and the United Nations.This ESSF is meant to be used as a manual that explains the legal background, importance and process for safeguard screening, assessment, the institutional arrangements, and processes to be followed for employment intensive projects from design, to construction, to operation and maintenance.The ESSF is developed for the guidance and use by Contractors and Contracts Supervisors, for MoL labour Inspectors in charge of monitoring the legal compliance with the Lebanese Labour Law and for use by designated Social Safeguards Officers (SSOs) on employment intensive projects.

The main objective of the SSO is to facilitate, support, coordinate and monitor Environmental & Social Safeguard Measures and community engagement activities of the EIIP. The SSOs are present on the assigned project site(s) on a daily basis. The SSOs undertake his/her assignment in close collaboration with the municipalities, contractors and the EIIP Engineers and Decent Work Advisor and liaise as needed with local officials of MoL and MoSA.

• SSOs are the Key link between the office and the field
• SSOs facilitate communication between municipalities, community members and Contractors
• SSOs monitor that ESSF is is put into practice throughout the EIIP program.
• SSOs assist in the monitoring of recruitment and payment processes for workers and promote women's involvement in the infrastructure works.
• SSO facilitate transfer of employment information from contractor’s muster roll to ILO the Office.
• SSOs support the Project Engineer and provide technical support and on-the-job training on decent work principles and local resource-based technology, and monitor that outputs are delivered by contractors on time, to the agreed quality and within budget
• SSOs help identify and address issues, blockages, misunderstandings or other possible misgivings
• SSOs facilitate the complaint mechanism for workers and people involved in the project

A key objective of the EIIP is to enhance capacity for job creation and asset management through institutional development and contractor training and improved employability of workers through on the job training.Contractors must participate in a pre-tender training introducing them to LRBT and Decent Work approaches and to the overall aims of an EIIP approach. ILO uses FIDIC Short Form of Contract with tailored conditions and ILO eTender for its procurement. This basic training package is supplemented with additional mobilisation training and coaching during implementation. Training is provided to company directors, engineering staff and supervisors.Training topics includeLRBT | Decent Work principles | Environmental and Social Safeguards Framework | Costing and Work Plan for LRBT projects |How to submit an ILO tenderGovernment staff are oriented on the EIIP approach, Decent Work Principles and LRB methods and local communities in the vicinity of the project are oriented on the nature of the project.Workers recruited for the project are given a pre-implementation orientation on proper handling and safe use of tools to enable them to carry out their assigned work to the correct standard and quality, application of OSH measures, Decent Work Principles and their rights at workSelected workers are invited to On the Job Training on common construction activities such as concrete works to gain skills to increase their employability after project completion.