Job Summit amidst unemployment tensions
Baboki Kayawe | Wednesday August 24, 2016 15:07
Disgruntled job seekers were early this month sjamboked by riot police for assembling in front of Parliament to submit a petition on lack of employment opportunities in the country.
Spokesperson of the #UnemployedMovement – the group that held a peaceful demonstration intended to hand over a written petition citing all of their concerns to the relevant Ministers – Kesaobaka Maruping, said the summit was a “personal event used to advance the interest of founders”.
“It is not for the unemployed people. It is basically for the well off who can afford to pay the entrance fee,” he said.
Further, Maruping said at the end of the day events such as this one never bring pragmatic solutions. He added that they fail to implement whatever findings they come up with.
“The problem in this country is that there is no political will to create opportunities. There was a time the Vice President, Mokgweetsi Masisi met with the private sector to discuss their contribution toward employment creation, but we never got feedback from that meeting,” he said.
The Job Summit, which is a partnership between Human Resource Development Council (HRDC) and OneSource Consulting promises to come up with “a clear job creation strategy”.
Managing Director of OneSource, Mpho Pheko said that, as the country does not have a clear job creation strategy, they are working towards a common plan of action to solve this phenomenon.
She said this at a media briefing in the capital on Monday.
“There is currently no strategic and single focus in Botswana that brings together shareholders to facilitate discussions and specific strategies that can create jobs. This has resulted in situations where stakeholders with similar mandates operate in silos,” she said.
The initial installment as explained by Pheko, emphasised the need for existence of sound policies, strategies and programmes in Botswana and also highlighted the challenges relating to implementation.
Moreover, she said young people were hard hit by unemployment. As a result they hope to attract as many young people as possible having learnt from their low representation in the inaugural event.
Of the more than 200 participants, just about 40 were young people, Pheko said.
According to the 2011 Population and Housing Census, the prevalence of unemployment constitutes 52.7% among the age bracket 18 to 19 years, followed by age group 15 to 17 at 49.1%, while for persons aged 15 to 34 it accounted for 28.3%.
The upcoming event, billed for October 10 to 11 will be held under the theme, ‘Maximising Job Creation through Effective Policy and Strategy Implementation’. Its objectives are to discuss the findings, recommendations and resolutions of the first summit.
The first summit suggests the country needed to identify a clear vision and goals for job creation to enable the development of plans, the allocation of resources and the tracking of performance.
Such strategy could allow for job tracking, which would ensure the country has centralised systems for tracking the jobs created against formulated policies and initiatives.
“It will bring stakeholders together to assess the current status of policy and strategy implementation and identify critical opportunities for effective policy and strategy implementation in Botswana,” she said.