Youth Development Programme fails to achieve results?

Despite a billion-rupee budget, youth trained in the programme have been unable to secure suitable employment

KARACHI:

In simple words, unemployment is the direct result of a demand and supply imbalance in the labour market. Either the workers do not possess the skills and expertise required by employers or there aren’t enough jobs to accommodate a cohort of workers with a specific skillset.

The regrettable outcomes of the Youth Development Program (YDP) indicate that the government neither deliberated over the skillsets imparted to the trainees nor worked towards creating adequate job opportunities for workers with those skillsets.

In 2008, the Benazir Bhutto Shaheed Youth Development Program (BBSYDP) was launched by the Sindh government with the aim of battling unemployment by providing skills training to youth aged between 18-35 years in the province. However, despite a whopping budget of Rs1 million, it appears that the program has failed to achieve the desired results, with a significant percentage of trained youth either unemployed or dissatisfied with their job, remuneration and skillset.

According to a survey conducted by the Benazir Bhutto Shaheed Human Resource Research and Development Board (BBSHRRDB) on 3,677 youth trained over the last five years, 68 per cent of the youth managed to secure employment in various sectors including education, health, information technology, agriculture, fishing, textile and beauty however, 27 per cent of the trainees remained unemployed, with many attempting to find employment but unsuccessful.

Furthermore, 21 per cent of the trained youth preferred to pursue further education and training over seeking employment, indicating that the education and training they received had shortcomings that needed to be addressed. While on the other hand, 17 per cent of the employed youth were not satisfied with their income or job location, which often required them to commute nearly 50 kilometers per day in return for a monthly income of just Rs15,000.

In a conversation with the Express Tribune, Dr Kaiser Bengali, a renowned economist, revealed that he was a part of the Sindh government at the time when the BBSYDP was first launched and had opposed the program even then.

“The real issue was of supply and demand, which continues to persist even today. Most of the trainees in the program belonged to districts of interior Sindh, where there were no industries at all. Similar was the situation of an industrial city like Karachi, where instead of setting up new factories, the old ones were shut down. In this case, where would the trained youth get employment? Training the youth alone is not enough since employment opportunities have to be created for them. However, no work has been done in this regard,” regretted Dr Bengali.

On the other hand, Naseer Memon, a development expert stated that although the concept of the Benazir Bhutto Shaheed Youth Development Program was a worth appreciating, its effectiveness had decreased over time due to the biased selection of youth for training, which was based on political connections rather than merit,” claimed Memon.

Concurring with Memon, Syed Muhammad Ali, Deputy Director of Research and Development at the BBSHRRDB, acknowledged that the potential for political interference in government projects could not be dismissed. However, he maintained that the majority of youth in the training program were still selected based on the basis of merit.

“Overall the past 15 years, more than 525,000 youth of the province have been trained in various fields. The trained youth include 56 per cent men and 44 per cent women. The majority of the trained youth, 79 per cent, were from rural areas, while 21 per cent were residents of urban areas,” asserted Ali.