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How to stave off artificial unemployment
2005-12-07 08:29:16
By mireny john
The brand of unemployment that besets Tanzania is typically involuntary. This implies that job seekers are unable to find placements for gainful work, though the economy is roaring at an average of 6.2 percent a year.
An expanding economy should, under normal circumstances, be able to absorb an increasing number of job seekers, especially the fresh minds from the country’s school system.
On average, the number of school leavers in Tanzania is 800,000 annually, and all these want gainful employment in the formal sectors of the economy.
In a demand-driven job market, it may not be possible for the economy to absorb all school leavers, owing to short-term structural problems, which need longer-term medication.
Yet, given our fragile transition to a market-led economic model, it is frightening to hear complaints from the emerging domestic private sector about the glaring incompetence of our graduates.
Both local and foreign investors share these concerns, and they blame the inability of the country’s education curricula in producing skilled manpower.
Apparently, this problem has reached chronic levels, because the overall perception about the quality of indigenous labour is said to be negative.
The immediate result of the mismatch between national education outputs and the market labour demand is involuntary unemployment. We lack training in special skills while school leavers are inflexible, as they find it hard to cope with changing and challenging environments.
Looking at education as a production process involving the harnessing of inputs with the aim of obtaining end products, then the environment becomes a perfect sensor for relaying feedback.
One has to be alert reading and taking stock of things emanating from the feedback mechanism.
Then these become feedstocks for policy makers and planners engaged in shaping the future of things to come.
So, the private sector has provided the feedback about the quality of the country’s education outputs, that its not demand-driven and by extension, neither is it end-user oriented.
Foreign investors for instance, are not fond of employing expatriates, as some of us would tend to imagine.
Managers working in Africa are aware that foreign manpower is expensive to import. It is possible to cut down labour overheads by a third if similar skills are available locally.
Over the last ten years, both government and private educational investments focused overwhelmingly on expanding the ability for enrolling more students, more or less based on old approaches and curricula.
Little has been done to invest in specialized skills by reading the demand side of the labour market.
Taking the mining sector as a typical example, its 17 percent annual growth is meaningless to domestic job creation if indigenous mining engineers are lacking, information and communication experts and efficient equipment and site managers with some experience are nowhere to be found .
Any skilled person in mining operations will readily find a job, either in big mines or provide consultancy services to artisanal miners.
Unfortunately, an overall skill deficiency besetting graduates across the board is in communication, in spoken and written formats, regardless of the language factor.
Effective communication is a powerful asset to any undertaking conditioned by globalization. So, it is no longer an option, but a basic skill obligatory to all professions.
The challenge ahead is how to pull our school system out of the abyss of the blind alley in conformity with the demands of the global market.
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