ADDIS ABABA, Nov. 1 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) has said Africa should improve the quality of basic education to ensure a skilled workforce that will create more and better jobs to drive economic transformation on the continent.
Creating suitable jobs for its youth is one of the biggest challenges facing policymakers in Africa, a UNECA statement issued late Tuesday quoted Sweta Saxena, acting director of UNECA's Gender, Poverty and Social Policy Division, as saying.
She highlighted that a growing young and working-age population requires jobs if Africa is to benefit from a demographic dividend and meet its development aspirations.
Saxena said the African continent is challenged in terms of providing jobs for the youth. She cited the lack of adequate skills by the young population in Africa.
UNECA data show that nearly a quarter of the children enrolled at the primary level do not complete primary education, while less than 50 percent of young boys and girls complete lower secondary education, compared to around 80 percent in South Asia and Latin American countries.
"The quality of education is also very low, and so as a result, young people in Africa enter the formal labor market with few employable skills," Saxena said, commenting that it was no wonder that nearly 90 percent of the youth start their working life in informal employment and almost a quarter of businesses name lack of skilled workers as among the main constraints.
According to the UNECA, one of the big challenges for Africa is having significant numbers of their trained people ending up unemployed and working in areas unrelated to their training or immigrating to other countries, which is a misallocation and waste of resources that African countries can ill afford.
The UNECA recently hosted a two-day experts group meeting, which has drawn technical experts from 16 countries including experts from government, academia, think tanks, and the UN system to review the key findings of a draft report titled "Jobs in Africa or Jobs for Africans."
The report aims to inform and stimulate debate, contribute to better policies, facilitate further research, and identify prominent knowledge and data gaps.
According to the UNECA, properly managed migration presents an immense opportunity for alleviating the challenge of job shortages for skilled workers in Africa with development benefits for all parties.
"Creating a skilled workforce requires improvements in both access to, and quality of, basic education," Saxena said, urging for rethinking education under a new social contract. ■
