While participating at the spring meetings of the 2014 IMF and World Bank, ILO's Director-General, Guy Ryder, pointed out that if pre-crisis trends in employment growth had continued, 62 million more women and men would have been working in 2013 when global unemployment reached 202 million. Unless growth picks up, the jobs gap will widen to 75 million by 2018.

The international maritime community has adopted measures to protect abandoned seafarers, and to provide financial security for compensation in cases of death and long-term disability.

The ILO and the EU join forces in an innovative project which uses education to help kids build new lives.

An ILO project in Zimbabwe is helping improve the quality of apprenticeships in the informal economy. The programme helps young people, particularly those living with disability, find decent work and escape the vicious circle of marginalization and poverty.

"In some countries, key elements of the ESM have been radically transformed, and sometimes dismantled, even though they clearly were not the cause of the crisis or the budgetary deficits," says ILO Senior labour economist Daniel Vaughan-Whitehead.

Globally, an estimated 500 million people have microinsurance, up from 78 million in 2008. Craig Churchill, head of the ILO’s Microinsurance Innovation Facility, discusses the growing value and viability of this insurance mechanism aimed at low-income people.

Streamed live on 25 March 2014 - On the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery, ILO hung out with the descendants of Solomon Northup, whose life and memoir inspired the film "12 Years A Slave". ILO's expert on modern slavery, Beate Andrees, also joined the discussion to talk about forced labour today and the battle to stamp out. The Guardian's Holly Young moderated.

In Myanmar everything is being reformed, says Steve Marshall, the ILO's liaison officer in Myanmar. From tackling forced labour and helping discharged child soldiers, to supporting the capacity building of labour organizations and the creation of new labour legislation, the ILO is working closely with the government and newly emerging employers' and workers' organizations in Myanmar as the country moves towards greater democracy. The ILO's activities in Myanmar were one of the topics discussed at the 320th Session of the Governing Body of the Organization.

Employing people with disabilities – a huge and largely overlooked market segment – makes a lot of sense for companies. But that requires overcoming a fear of the unknown and looking at abilities rather than disabilities.

An ILO assessment of Syrian refugee employment in Lebanon finds that low wages, high unemployment and lack of labour market regulation pose serious challenges to livelihoods for both residents and refugees in host communities.