The government plans to spend Rwf12 billion to implement a new National Employment Programme (NEP) in the next fiscal year that starts in two months.

The Minister for Public Service and Labour, Anastase Murekezi, announced the programme at a two-day national labour forum that opened in Kigali yesterday.

Public officials and other stakeholders at the meeting are sharing information on ways to confront issues of unemployment and under-employment in the country.

Over the next fiscal year, the NEP will focus on skills development for mostly the unemployed and under-employed youth, entrepreneurship and business development in the country, labour market interventions programmes such as paid high intensive public works to employ the poorest in communities, as well as a better coordination and monitoring and evaluation of national employment interventions.

Calling for innovation in creating jobs, Murekezi detailed Rwanda’s job creation plan of  generating 200,000 off-farm jobs every year.

"It calls for our continuous joint efforts in devising innovative approaches to employment promotion and job creation,” he said, adding that the youth must be equipped with the right skills and then empowered with funds in order to enable them to participate in the economy.

Fund to facilitate loans

According to François Ngoboka, the director of labour research and employment promotion at the Ministry of Labour, nearly half of the Rwf12 billion to be invested in the NEP will be channelled through banks to enable access to loans for new entrepreneurs.

Ngoboka said the rest of the money will be used in capacity building interventions planned under the programme as well as funding new business start-ups whose capital will be raised through donations of both money and equipment for start-ups.

Rwanda’s 2012 Population and Housing Census revealed that unemployment rate is at 3.4 per cent in the country but the issue is tougher in urban areas of the country at 7.7 per cent, and among the youth as about 67 per cent of all unemployed people are youth aged 16-34 years.

Tackling under-employment

Anna Mugabo, the director-general of employment at the Ministry of Labour, said far from unemployment, the issue of under-employment requires innovative investments to address.

"We don’t want to have just jobs. We have to get productive jobs,” she said.

Officials at the ministry said the country’s employment programme has received the support of development partners such as the United Nations.

Lamin Manneh, the UN resident coordinator, said his organisation would keep supporting the country’s employment programmes not only because they are well-planned, but also the cross-cutting nature of interventions to deal with unemployment.

"Employment promotion can’t be left to one or two government institutions only, neither to the private sector alone. It is a cross-cutting issue which needs to be mainstreamed into the programmes and plans of every sector and every concerned institution in the economy,” he said.

Manneh said the One UN family in Rwanda is in the process of finalising a five-year programme worth $30 million (about Rwf20 billion) that will boost government’s efforts of creating jobs for the youth and women.

One of the expected results of the country’s NEP for the next fiscal year is the increase of integrated crafts production centres, locally known as Udukiriro, which will be scaled up in all the country’s districts.

The centres will provide venues and means for the youth and women to get decent employment and develop labour market oriented skills.