Maternity protection is more than protecting the health of the mother and the child. While these are crucial, maternity protection needs to go beyond them. It also needs to prevent discrimination against women at the workplace. It is also an important component in ensuring gender equality by safeguarding women’s employment and income security before and after childbirth. International Labor Organization (ILO) mandates that maternity protection should extend to all employed women, regardless of occupation or type of undertaking, including women employed in atypical forms of dependent work. It also defines 5 core elements of maternity protection.- maternity leaves; cash and medical benefits to replace the income lost during pregnancy and childbirth; employment protection and non-discrimination where a woman’s employment security is guaranteed; and a woman does not face bias while searching for work because of her reproductive role.
Currently, only 34% countries fully meet the ILO requirements on maternity protection, including leave benefits, employment protection and income replacement, health protection, breastfeeding arrangements at work, and childcare. The conformity is lower in countries in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean and is alarmingly low for countries in Asia and the Middle East. However, many countries have established some legislative provisions to protect and support maternity and paternity at work, even if those provisions do not always meet the ILO standards. The persistent challenge is the effective implementation of legislation to ensure that all workers are actually able to benefit from the rights provided without discrimination. The challenge is more pronounced when it comes to implementing the policy for the informal economy workers. To this end, important priorities include efforts to raise awareness among governments, workers, and employers about the socio-economic benefits of maternity protection and work–family measures and expand the fiscal space for the effective and inclusive implementation of the maternity protection policy.
To this end, the next assignment of my World Bank internship was to work on a study to advise the governments in developing countries on improving the implementation of maternity protection policies, especially with respect to expansion of benefits to their informal economy women workers. The study also aimed to introduce a framework for analysis of formal and informal sector maternity protection schemes across the world. This was done by analyzing maternity protection policies and practices across 10 developing economies, laying out the policies for the formal and informal workers, its coverage estimates (both in law and in practice), systems in place for financing, challenges to successful implementation, and impact on the larger population and economy. This analysis was then used to identify the gaps in the current administration and further guide recommendations to build capacities of countries to improve the protection for both formal and informal economy workers in developing economies.