Over the past few years, Jordan has made remarkable leaps in facilitating the Syrian refugees’ access to formal employment and issuing thousands of work-permits in specific sectors. Nevertheless, whilst shouldering the Syrian refugees’ crisis, Jordan faced significant economic challenges, including the closure of major trade routes, rising energy prices, growing debt levels, exhausted infrastructure, among others.

Having said that, the Jordanian government has been embarking on a project, funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) and implemented by the ILO, called ‘Formalizing Access to the Legal Labor Market for Refugees and Host Communities in Jordan’. The project is currently in phase III and has contributed to achieving Jordan’s pledge to shouldering the refugees’ crisis and providing them with the support needed to lead decent and resilient lives.

The project will build on achievements made under the first phase “Formalizing Access to the Legal Labor Market Through Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) and Certification for Syrians and Jordanians Working in, Construction, Confectionary and Garment Sectors ,” which helped train and certify 5,000 Jordanian and Syrian refugee job seekers through the use of Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) methodology in the construction sector. In this phase of the project, RPL models will be applied to seven new occupations in the construction and manufacturing sectors. Jordanian and refugee women who were trained in confectionary and garments during the first phase of the project will be incorporated into a tracer study, in efforts to develop and implement a package of support to help women enter and stay in the labor force. A batch of 100 Syrian and Jordanian women will also be trained using ILO’s Women Do Business training methodology.

The project is part of the cohort of several interventions that comprise the ILO’s Program of Support to the Jordan Compact (PoS). The program aims to address the decent work needs of Syrian refugees and Jordanians by strengthening labor market governance, improving private sector capacity to export goods and create jobs, and supporting the immediate creation of decent jobs for Jordanians and Syrians.

The project is incorporated under the umbrella of ILO’s Program of Support to the Syria Crisis Response and the Decent Work Country Program of Jordan (2018-2022), primarily under Priority I, “Employment creation contributes to economic and social stability.” It also contributes to the objectives of the Jordan Response Plan (2020-2022), mainly to the Livelihood objective: “to ensure dignified inclusive sustainable livelihoods creating economic opportunities for Jordanians in host communities and Syrian refugees”.

Integrating this project under this program is conditioned under the provision of online capacity building programs and adaptation of working modalities to accommodate to the new situation. This directly affected the delivery of the partners to deliver skills development activities, Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) and certification, entrepreneurship and issuance of work permits to refugees.

The objectives of the project are divided into three sub-objectives, which are:

Objective I: Enhanced employment readiness of Syrian refugees and vulnerable Jordanians through targeted and demand-driven skills development approaches.

Expected outputs include:

• Output 1.1: Beneficiaries benefit from access to specialized career counseling & guidance services.
• Output 1.2: Target beneficiaries benefit from the provision of demand-driven & market responsive vocational training & Work-based Learning (WBL) programs
• Output 1.3: Beneficiaries with previous knowledge, work-experience, or training provided access to formally recognize their skills & competencies through the application of Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) that leads to the issuance of occupational licenses or a track for life-long learning.

Objective II: Expanded livelihoods opportunities for Syrian Refugees and vulnerable Jordanians with emphasis on women, through specialized entrepreneurship and business development services.

Outputs include:

• Output 2.1: Syrian and Jordanian women who are eligible and interested in pursuing self-employment/entrepreneurship paths benefit from capacity building.
• Output 2.2: Trained beneficiaries who exhibit promising potential for entrepreneurial endeavors extended with direct support for their businesses.
• Output 2.3: Target women-owned enterprises to benefit from additional capacity building, business support services and access to markets, in collaboration with industry associations and established women entrepreneurs.

Objective III: Improved access of Syrian refugees to formal employment through facilitating and supporting the issuance of work permits and social protection inclusion.

Main expected output includes:

• Output 3.1: Beneficiaries of Syrian refugees provided with facilitated access to formal employment through the issuance of work permits and social security coverage.