Leading international financial institutions convened at the ILO headquarters in Geneva on 1–2 December 2025 for the IFI Symposium on Measuring and Assessing Quality of Employment. The event focused on practical ways to assess not only the number of jobs generated by development finance operations but also their quality. Participants included major development banks such as the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, African Development Bank, European Investment Bank, EBRD, and IFC, alongside academics, ILO specialists, and other stakeholders. The discussions emphasized the need for transparent, practical indicators to capture both the quantity and quality of employment supported through development initiatives.
The symposium opened with a focus on wages as a starting point for measuring job quality. The World Bank’s new scorecard indicator, using labour earnings as a proxy, was highlighted as a practical approach where comprehensive data are lacking. ILO experts provided guidance on international wage standards, living wage methodologies, minimum wage adequacy, and gender pay gap analyses, noting progress made as well as persistent gaps in global wage data.
A second session explored complementary indicators, including informality, social protection, and working time. Participants highlighted the challenges posed by informal work, where workers often lack contracts, social protection, or stable income. The discussion also addressed the impacts of platform work and digital labour markets, noting the influence of algorithmic management, blurred work-life boundaries, and emerging entitlements like the right to disconnect, which complicate job-quality assessment.
Methodological considerations were central to the symposium, with participants distinguishing between measuring current employment conditions and assessing prospective impacts using modelling or counterfactual analysis. Speakers from ADB, IFC, EBRD, and IDB Invest shared practical experiences, illustrating how job-quality considerations inform project design, implementation, and reporting across different time horizons.
Practical applications were discussed, including fiscal and financial interventions such as tax incentives, wage subsidies, stimulus programs, and MSME financing, which have supported employment and protected livelihoods. Regional and continental dashboards were presented as tools to operationalize job-quality measurement, capturing earnings, informality, NEET rates, social protection coverage, and gender disparities. These multidimensional metrics provide governments and institutions with a more complete picture of labour-market progress beyond headline employment numbers.
The symposium concluded with a call for harmonization and collaboration. Participants agreed that no single institution can tackle job-quality measurement alone and emphasized the need for aligned methodologies, improved data-sharing, and ongoing dialogue to ensure emerging metrics are coherent and operationally useful. A proposal was made to convene a broader meeting of technical and operational teams to strengthen links between measurement methodologies and project implementation, enhancing the collective impact of development finance on employment quality. The event was supported through the STRENGTHEN2 project, co-funded by the European Union.
