Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), in partnership with the Open Society Foundation (OSF) kicked off the Inception phase of a three-part global research project titled Life after Life in Post-COVID-19 World: Exploring the Policy Choices and Agenda for Global South in January 2023.

In the backdrop of consequential changes taking place in the global landscape, the project recognises that the compounding effects of these consecutive crises have the global labour market facing substantial uncertainty. This is, especially so, for the medium to long term outlook for the future of work of youth, women and the disadvantaged communities in the Global South.

In this connection, this project sets out to explore what the future of work would look like in the Global South in the next decade. The research objectives include (a) collecting evidence and consolidating experience and knowledge to develop contours of contrasting scenarios for decent work in the Global South by 2035, (b) spelling out policy changes, in the short to medium term, required at the country-level, and (c) delineating the specific role of different actors through consultations with said actors.

To this end, an ‘Integrated Foresight Approach’ involving the Delphi method, has been designed and incorporated into the methodology of the project. Specifically, to identify key drivers of change through iterative rounds of survey, build alternative scenarios for the future of work across six countries in the Global South, and to identify contextualised policy interventions.

This research project is led by Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya, Distinguished Fellow, CPD. Other team members include Mr Towfiqul Islam Khan, Senior Research Fellow, CPD, Ms Najeeba Mohammed Altaf, Research Associate, CPD, Ms Mamtajul Jannat, Research Associate, CPD and Ms Salsabil Hayat, Executive Associate, CPD.

Life after Life research project: Inception phase EGM held

Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), in partnership with the Open Society Foundations (OSF), organised a two-day expert group meeting (EGM) on 13 – 14 March 2023 in Bangkok, to give shape to a new global research project titled “Life after Life in Post-COVID-19 World: Exploring the Policy Choices and Agenda for Global South”. The meeting was attended by 20 strong multidisciplinary group, drawn from four continents. The study is being led by Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya. Taking note of the consequential changes taking place in the global landscape, the project sets out to explore what the “future of work” would look like in a decade. This is important for the Global South, especially as the continually evolving circumstances and discourse on its implications remain ambiguous. With the understanding that there is a need to examine the future of work, particularly for youth, women and left behind communities, the objectives of the EGM were to gather insights concerning production of hypothetical “future of work” scenarios for 2030 (the terminal year of SDGs), gain consensus regarding “key drivers of change,” obtain feedback on a methodological approach for conducting country case studies, and identify domains for policy interventions by specific actors. Deploying Foresight Analysis techniques (Link: https://lnkd.in/gBZdrX9u ), the study would develop scenarios and institutional interventions at the national and global levels. This is to move forward with developing the most “desirable” scenarios from the “most likely” scenarios in each of the six sample countries.