Country suffers 40% skills gap - Report

KIGALI - The overall skills situation in the country displays a 40 percent gap in the skills expertise required to achieve its development goals, a new report by the Public Capacity Building Agency has suggested. A ‘National Skills Audit Report’ to be presented to stakeholders next week found out that Rwanda is in critical shortage of professionals especially in the sectors of education, hospitality industry, and construction. The Director of Multi-Sector Capacity Building Programme, Charles Karake, revealed yesterday, that the general situation of services has a ‘direct impact’ on the pace of Rwanda’s development. “The current situation can create impediments to the realization of EDPRS goals,” he warned in a telephone interview with The New Times yesterday. EDPRS is the country’s five-year Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy, a government medium term tool towards the achievement of the Vision 2020 by developing key sectors on which the country’s economy hinges to prosper. The skills audit was conducted in both the Rwandan Public and Private sectors by the Ministry of Public Service and Labour in collaboration with the Human Resources and Institutional Capacity Development Agency (HIDA) and the President’s Office. The draft report will be presented to stakeholders next week on Thursday for validation. Karake said the assessment found out that the Private Sector lacks hands-on labourers like technicians in different areas while the Public Sector needs middle level managers instead of having only planners. “If you have a development programme and you have such a gap, it means that it will take longer time to accomplish it or you will just never realize it,” he said as he explained what the gaps observed mean. The provisional report found out that the education sector is the hardest hit where the gap observed stood at 84 percent. Karake said that government needs to train more people who are able to manage the country’s nursery education and open up borders to let science teachers in the country. “Government should address problems of skills in the education sector and early childhood development should be a priority,” he said. Rwanda seeks to have built a knowledge-based economy by the year 2020 and raised the per capita income of its citizen at that of a middle-income country. Ends