East African legislators urged to tackle unemployment

East African lawmakers and other partners should tackle unemployment and under-employment, which are key crises that need immediate attention, the speaker of a regional parliamentary assembly has said.Speaker of the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA), Abdirahin Abdi, said this during a meeting that brought regional lawmakers together with their counterparts from the Association of European Parliamentarians for Africa (AWEPA) in Nairobi on Friday.Abdi pointed out that 72 per cent of the unemployed population in Kenya is below 30 years of age.“In Burundi, for example, the youth stand at 51.1 per cent, 14 per cent of whom are unemployed. Statistics further reveal that only 11 per cent of school graduates can acquire jobs in the public sector,” Abdi noted. The speaker lauded the five EAC member states for enhancing Universal Primary Education (UPE) but urged them to put more effort in supporting secondary education.“Uganda, which was the first country in the region to initiate Universal Primary Education in 1993, has moved a notch higher and is well considering free secondary education – a move that should be replicated across the region,” he said.In Rwanda, through the recently introduced 12-year basic education, which was improved from the Nine-Year Basic Education, students will still have chance to access free education until one completes secondary education. Abdi told the two-day seminar themed “Towards Parliamentary Action for Integration of Children and Youth in East African Societies” that the East African region and the globe should ensure that issues of children and the youth are at the fore and remain central to development.Such a move, he said, shall trigger progress towards the realisation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).The Political Co-ordinator of AWEPA, Holger Gustafsson, noted that his organisation would continue to build the capacity of legislators globally to enable them to carry out their mandate more effectively.“As children become older, they need to access the labour market to enable them to progress,” Gustafsson noted.He added that the presence of youth underscored the need for training and harnessing of skills. Gustafsson called for the enactment of legislation on youth and the harmonisation of policies across East Africa.The Clerk of the Pan-African Parliament (PAP), Zwelethu Madasa said the continental assembly would, at its global congress on the Diaspora scheduled for May 21-30, consider and discuss issues affecting the youth.Deputy Speaker of the Economic Commission of West African States (ECOWAS) Parliament, Sere Saran Sereme said the continent’s population constituted over 60 percent youth, terming it a potential for Africa.However, strategies in place undermine the exploitation of the same, Sereme lamented, calling for help the re-engineering and adoption of new laws that protect the youth.The Deputy Speaker noted that unemployed young create chaos and social crises adding that it was imperative for legislators to put up policies that safeguard the youth.The unemployment rate in Rwanda is estimated to be below two percent. Recent reports obtained from the former Social Security Fund of Rwanda (SSFR) indicate that 51,162 people were registered as newly employed Rwandans in the year 2011, compared to 47,162 and 28,435 of 2010 and 2009, respectively.According to the information from the department of labour and employment promotion of the Ministry of Public Service and Labour, the workforce has grown at an average of 125,000 jobs per year in the last five years. The government has over time put in place various mechanisms to address unemployment, especially amongst unskilled and semi-skilled people.For the case of skilled people, especially fresh graduates from higher institutions of learning, internship programmes to orient them to the job environment are in place, organised in partnership with the Rwanda Development Board (RDB).Over 1,500 have benefited from the programme.According to Prime Minister, Pierre Damien Habumuremyi, the government’s target is to add more value to agricultural products to create off-farm jobs.The government has also turned focus on vocational and technical skills to cut unemployment levels with a target of creating 200,000 new jobs a year.Rwanda is promoting Technical and Vocation Education Training (TVET) as a way of fighting unemployment among the youth, through mainly graduating from school as job creators instead of being jobseekers.

National

East African legislators urged to tackle unemployment