UNDP alarmed by lack of sustainable jobs
Bame Piet | Thursday April 16, 2015 12:30
The 2014 Human Development annual report has raised a concern about lack of sustainable jobs, noting that local tertiary institutions do not produce graduates that the job market requires.
“This may also be a reflection that education is not producing graduates with the required skills especially vocational type of education. Employment creation to absorb these youth and also make the youth employable from an appropriate training are key challenges to the current Botswana economy,” says the report released last Friday.
It added that: “This is an area that requires efforts in many forms from development partners. Despite the country being classified as upper middle income, this challenge seems to be one that is elusive in terms of solutions and clearly requires appropriate policies and programmes that can be developed by government and other stakeholders with the assistance of development partners”.
The report also found that there is high levels of poverty in places where there is high unemployment, especially in rural areas in the northwest, southwest, and the north east of the country. The report says that the only way to beat poverty is for the government to create sustainable jobs.
“This clearly indicates that a key means to fighting poverty is in terms of employment creation. Employment creation also has a key advantage of fighting poverty in a sustainable way especially if the jobs are decent and provide a wage that is adequate to avoid having a class of workers classified as the working poor. “There is therefore need to focus Botswana towards creation of sustainable employment.
As indicated earlier this is a key area that requires assistance from development partners and may if not tacked expeditiously undermine all efforts made in terms of human development and even undermine the middle income status of the country,” says the report which was released at a time when government does not seem to be committed to job creation. For the past four years, government has frozen recruitment, and only calls for youth and graduates to volunteer their service, or engage in part-time and menial jobs.
The UN agency however says not all is lost, praising the Economic Diversification Drive (EDD) as a good initiative that has potential to boost growth of the informal sector and small micro enterprises. UNDP called for beneficiation as another area that the government should explore fully, especially after the relocation of Diamond Trading Company from London to Gaborone two years ago.
“The relocation entails that more beneficiation of diamond is made locally such as cutting and polishing of diamonds and additional activities, such as diamond jewellery manufacturing, can be undertaken in the future. In fact, since 2007, 3,200 manufacturing jobs have been recorded resulting from joint venture operations with experienced foreign companies”
UNDP advises for the beneficiation to be successful there is need to provide the industry with the relevant skills and deal with the general work ethic problems that are found in the workforce.
Poverty and Income Inequality
While Botswana has achieved quite a commendable status in terms of growth of national income and macroeconomic management, the country has had a lot of challenges in terms of the social dimension, says the UNDP.
“While growth has been impressive it did not translate into adequate poverty reduction. Poverty, even though declining has remained relatively high for an upper middle-income country. The biggest decline of poverty with a drop of 21 percentage points (93/94 and 2003/04) is in the rural areas with the smallest decline being for cities/towns. Poverty is still however highest in the rural areas at 24.3 percent in 2009/10 compared to 19.9 and 8 percent for urban villages and cities/towns respectively, says the UNDP.
The report found that Ngamiland West, Ngwaketse West, Central Bobonong, Kweneng West, and Central Boteti are the hard hit.
While poverty has been declining between the two periods, unemployment has not been declining. Poverty reduction may therefore have been driven by social safety nets and other entitlement programmes such as Ipelegeng.
“These programmes are however not sustainable poverty reduction means especially given the nature in which they are designed in Botswana. While the change in policy may be in good spirit it is however always advisable to precede such programmes with a well-developed policy which could adequately guide the implementation,” argues the UNDP.