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tions and responsive mechanisms that couldprotect the poor from shocks and contingenciesthat can impoverish, and measures thatguarantee access to medical care, healthinsurance, old age pensions, and socialservices. These mechanisms must not besolely dependent on the evidence of employmentstatus but must be open to all types ofworkers. From a systemic perspective, rightsto pensions and health protection should begranted to the people as citizens rather thanas workers, and they should be awarded onuniversality principles.We also recommend the following specific actionsfavouring legal empowerment:• Ensure that legal empowerment becomes adriver for gender equality. Poverty has a genderdimension, and legal empowerment can helpdrive gender equality. A key challenge is toensure that ILO labour standards which promoteequality of opportunity and treatment areeffectively extended to informal sector workers.78 The starting point for this process may befound in the core labour standards on genderequality, namely, the Equal RemunerationConvention, no.100, 1951; the Convention onDiscrimination (Employment and Occupation),no. 111, 1958. Much useful guidance can befound in the 1996 ILO Home Work Convention79 which mandates the extension of legalprotection and legal empowerment to homeworkers, who are predominantly women. Genderis already a mainstream priority in the integrationof Decent Work in the PRSP work. Specificcapacity-building efforts have in particularbeen made in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Ethiopia,Honduras, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay andYemen to influence Poverty Reduction Strategies(PRSs) at the formulation stage. A morein-depth process has been recently launchedto further consolidate gender and employmentin three country PRS processes, namely inBurkina Faso, Liberia and the United Republicof Tanzania. This integrated approach includesenhancing the capacity of constituents formainstreaming gender equality in employment;facilitating gender budgeting of projected employmentprogrammes in the PRS action plans;building partnerships with other organisationsat national and international levels, which areinvolved in promoting gender equality in PRS.• Support legal empowerment for indigenouspeople. The ILO Indigenous and Tribal PeoplesConvention provides guidance and strategiesfor legal empowerment with respect not onlyto labour rights and protection of employment,but also with respect to land and propertyrights. Special efforts for their legal empowermentare demonstrated in an ‘ethnic audit’undertaken of 14 PRSPs as well as casestudies of country processes in Bolivia, Cambodia,Cameroon, Guatemala and Nepal. Theresearch clearly showed that, although indigenouspeoples are disproportionately representedamong the poor, their needs and prioritiesare generally not reflected in the strategiesemployed to combat poverty. Another contributionis research produced by the ILO anddebated at the United Nations PermanentForum on Indigenous Issues and within theInter-Agency Support Group. Subsequently,the World Bank organised an InternationalConference on Indigenous Peoples and PovertyReduction (New York, May 2006) and committedto work towards the practical inclusion ofindigenous peoples’ concerns in the PRSPs ina selected number of pilot countries in Africa,Asia and Latin America.172