Tackling unemployment using technology

Muzammil Arif from Gujranwala dropped out from school after Matric. With no resources to continue his education, he was forced to work as a lab attendant at a private institute on a salary of Rs2,500 a month. While working in the small lab, he learned about a platform called oDesk. oDesk is a marketplace for outsourcing of small tasks, such as making a website, customising a blog, maintaining a ledger, writing and copy-editing content, designing logos, social media marketing, translations, voice-overs, transcriptions of medical records, etc. He signed and started bidding for small tasks between $5 to $10 on oDesk. In the next few months, he became a full-time freelancer, working eight hours a day online freelancing tasks. Today, his clients are spread across four continents and he employs nine people, making over $3,000 a month. He also runs a service where instructors in a madrassa give Quran lessons on Skype to overseas Muslims.

Muzammil’s story is not unique. Hamid Nasir from Mandi Bahauddin is the youngest of eight siblings. He started freelancing as a student at the University of Engineering and Technology Taxilla and earned $1,200 from his first project. He now earns thrice as much as he would if he took up a job after graduation. Mir Rawtah, a female student at FAST Lahore, paid her entire university fees by freelancing as a student. Despite financial challenges at home, freelancing enabled Rawtah to cut across gender and socio-economic barriers. Online freelancing is not just limited to people with formal education or programming skills. Platforms such as Fiverr enable people to earn $5 for any creative skills they have such as photography, video editing, making illustrations, drawing caricatures, etc.

If not harnessed properly, Pakistan’s biggest strength — its young demographic — is also its Achilles’ heel.  Every year, over 250,000 students graduate from universities in Pakistan, but there are only 50,000 new jobs available. The public sector is already bloated and giving more jobs creates an additional burden on the non-development budget of the government.

Pakistan is currently the 4^th largest provider of freelancers in the world. A conservative estimate would put the number of online workers from Pakistan at 150,000 with an average annual income of approximately $10,000 each. This implies that freelancers in Pakistan earn a combined revenue of over $1 billion. Currently estimated at approximately $1 trillion, the size of freelancing in the global economy is expected to rise substantially in the near future.

We, at the government of Punjab, started exploring how freelance industry can provide opportunities for reducing unemployment in the province. In 2014, we established Pakistan’s first publicly-funded co-working space for freelancers under the banner of PITB TechHub Connect. It became a breeding ground of talented freelancers, growing to a community of over 700 freelancers.  This also led to several high-tech startups incubated by PITB. The co-founders of the famous music app Patari, Humayun Haroon and Khalid Bajwa, were both housed at TechHub prior to starting their company. Freelancers housed at TechHub have brought close to $2.5 million in foreign remittances in this time.

This week, we launched the Chief Minister’s e-Rozgaar Programme in Punjab. Through this programme, 40 e-Rozgar centres are being established across 36 districts of Punjab, where more than 10,000 graduates will be trained annually. Our community of freelancers from TechHub is becoming the master trainers for the programme and we have consulted leading freelancing platforms such as Crossover, Upwork, TopTalent, Fiverr, etc., in helping us devise strategies to create top-class freelancers. The first 10 centres go live in a few weeks. Five e-Rozgaar centres are dedicated for females, as freelancing is especially empowering for females, enabling them to work from home on flexible hours. We have also partnered with Facebook’s women empowerment initiative “She Means Business”, training females to run businesses online using Facebook. If each freelancer we train makes only $50 a day, our 10,000 freelancers will bring Pakistan $182,500,000 annually! Pakistan’s future is bright and our youth holds the key to our economic growth.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 3^rd, 2017.

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