The Minister of Public Service and Labour (MIFOTRA), Anastase Murekezi, has said that the harmonization of labour and workforce data from all the sectors is crucial in job creation.

The minister said this yesterday during a strategic planning meeting that brought together officials from the ministry and development partners to set specific priorities on how to improve service delivery this year.

"If we can bring together all the categories of data we have on labour, it would be easy to analyze them and ascertain available skills that are not being utilized. This would help us create jobs in line with the skills available,” Murekezi underscored.

According to the Minister, it is not all about collecting the data, but also setting initiatives of making it useful in order to create big employment promotion programmes in the country.

During the meeting, it was stated that the ministry lacks a systematic employment tracking and assessment scheme to help it keep abreast with the labour market patterns.

"We cannot establish how many unemployed skills we have on market since there is no tracking system in place to help catch up with labour market trends yet the market is changing day-by-day,” said Francois Ngoboka, the Director General in charge of Employment and Labour at MIFOTRA.

According to Ngoboka, there is need to for a framework to capture changes and trends in the employment and labour in all the sectors.

Speaking at the meeting, Dr. Peter Butera Bazimya of the Public Service Commission said that the lack of skills across sectors in the country would only be solved by bringing on board universities and other institutions of higher learning.  

According to Bazimya, these institutions, which he called the producers of skills, should sit down and align their curricula to the demand on the job market in order to stop producing skills that are not needed.

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