CHAPTER FOUR

CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR EMPLOYMENT

The Challenges:

Unemployment is the greatest hindrance to our development at all levels – in families, regionally and nationally – in our country. Long years of economic decadence, dilapidated infrastructure and unfavorable macro economic policies have led to least job creation for the freshly-trained youth and other skilled as well as semi-skilled population.

Furthermore, the systematic policy of downsizing by the private and public sectors due to the economic turn down of the 1990s and pressure from international financing agencies, respectively, made the already bad state of unemployment in the country worse.

The foregoing challenges are compounded by a very unstable, under-developed and under-funded small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) sector.The successive governments have made little well-spelt-out and sustained efforts to promote and tap the potential of SMEs. This has been the case despite SMEs’ important role in the creation of employment opportunities and promotion of innovation and entrepreneurship, particularly among the economically marginalized – youth and women.

In addition to the ambivalent SMEs official policy, high levels of illiteracy, especially in the countryside, limited retraining opportunities for people who want to change their skills from what they already have and lack of viable structures to assist job seekers make our unemployment situation extremely complex.

Finally, the prohibitive cost of doing business in the country due to the high cost and unreliable supply of electricity as well as underdeveloped road and railway networks have thwarted any attempts at job creation by both domestic and international investors.

Our Commitments:

We will implement policies that reduce barriers to work – including education, skills and training – to create an adaptive, flexible and productive workforce.

We will pursue active labour market policies – providing tailored and appropriate help for those without work, to prevent long term detachment from the labour market.

We will help youths and adults without work and with poor employability skills move into sustained employment.

We will provide basic employability training for jobless people with severe literacy and numeracy problems to remove their barriers to employment and enable them to gain employment.

We will promote the role of SMEs in sustainable job creation and provision of goods and services which are better adapted to local market needs through progressive reform to boost production and distribution capacities of SMEs.

We are committed to transforming activities in the informal economy (JuaKali) into decent work fully integrated into mainstream economic life. We will implement policies and programmes to create decent jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities to assist JuaKali workers and employers to move into the formal economy.

Your ODM Government will:

• Collect national data on the SMEs sector, covering, interalia, quantitative and qualitative aspects of employment.

• Ensure fair taxation of SMEs.

• Give SMEs priority in access to public and private procurement to increase market access.

• Create venture capital and other organizations that assist in promoting innovation in SMEs.

• Adopt and pursue appropriate fiscal, monetary and employment policies regarding, in particular, interest and exchange rates, taxation, inflation, employment and social stability to promote an optimal economic environment.

• Establish and apply appropriate legal provisions on property rights, including intellectual property, location of establishments, and enforcement of contracts, fair competition as well as adequate social and labor legislation.

• Improve the attractiveness of entrepreneurship by avoiding policy and legal measures which disadvantage those who wish to become entrepreneurs.

• Provide a range of direct and indirect support services for SMEs and their workers by involving the public and private sector through, for example, organizations of employers and workers, semi-public organizations, private consultants, technology parks, business incubators and SMEs, themselves.

• Create and strengthen an enterprise culture which favours initiatives, enterprise creation, productivity, environmental consciousness, quality, good labour and industrial relations, and adequate social practices which is equitable.

• Open “Jobseeker” offices in major cities and towns before going nationwide for assisting those that have completed secondary school education and graduates. This will be our new government strategy to deal with unemployment. It will provide an active service to help people move from joblessness into work. The offices will be manned by job advisers who will register jobseekers, provide training and individual guidance in job searching techniques, including providing training, interview skills and assistance in the preparation of curriculum vitae.

• Ensure polytechnics become “Skills Academies” as these institutions will be a key driver in improving vocational education at a national, regional and local level. They will provide training programmes for young people and adults aimed at meeting potential employers’ current and future skills needs: As such, the academies will be employer-led.

• Promote an active marketing campaign to promote apprenticeships and boost take-up among employers and the trainees. Apprenticeships should offer a combination of on-the-job training with the chance to gain qualifications. There will be no age cap.

• Pilot a Career Development Loan (CDL) which is a deferred repayment commercial bank loan designed to help fund up to two years of vocational education. CDL will be run in partnerships with the interested banks. The Government will provide an incentive to borrowers by paying the interest on the loan during the period of training and for up to two months afterwards and guarantee a proportion of the loans to make it easier for the banks to consider lending for vocational training. The loan is then repaid to the bank over an agreed period at a fixed rate of interest. All loans will be “subject to status” as per the Bank’s criteria.

• Rename the Ministry of Labour and Human Resource Development to the Ministry of Employment, Skills and Labour Relations where the above mentioned functions will be co-coordinated.

This chapter has to be read in conjunction with the one on “Investing of Infrastructure” and others that follow which all are geared to creating opportunities for employment.