We need jobs and more jobs

The world has encountered so many crises since creation. Some come and go and some just come to stay. There was leprosy and swine flu amongst others and both found cures and are no longer that much of a shock.

Then there was HIV/AIDS that found a lifelong treatment because no permanent cure was and has not been found yet. This is one virus, unlike the brute Covid-19, that people, especially the youth no longer dread but have started treating it like any other disease in the lowland cities of Lesotho because giving it some deep thoughts will throw you into the deep end of depression.

Similar to this deadly virus is unemployment. We have lost many of our youths to depression, drugs, fraud and petty crimes as a result of being without jobs or any means of income. Here are some interesting facts about unemployment:

Unemployment affects young women more than men with an estimated 40% in the Northern African countries. Some women resort to invisible domestic work which is poorly regulated and exposes them to exploitation and violation of rights.

A couple of years ago the World Bank predicted that in the next decade an estimated one billion of youths “will try to enter the job market but less than half of them will find formal jobs”, a report stated.

The majority will however be left unemployed or experiencing work poverty. This is a result of the predicted rise in the economic inequality and inadequate job opportunities that has the potential to negatively impact young people globally.

And hopefully with news that certain ministries will be merged to cut down funds and create jobs, I wonder how many unemployed youths will be lucky enough to join the work world.

An initiative was implemented in around 2018/19 to hire the youth of Lesotho in different ministries according to their qualifications and the ministries’ needs. The aim was to offer them training for an estimated six months period. But where would one work with six months experience when the minimum experience always required is 2/3 years?

What causes high numbers of youth unemployment?

Of course lack of job opportunities contribute to the skyrocketing numbers of unemployment but the biggest barrier to this is the limited work experience and high qualifications demand. An increase in population size can also be counted as another factor to this. But how do we at least work on finding solutions to these?

This is where we start implementing projects, thus creating more jobs. Skills offering projects or programmes can be implemented that will work on identifying needs of companies with vacancies.

The programme or project runners will then play match makers by placing trainees with necessary skills in work places that will require what they have been equipped with.

This is because they would have equipped trainees with different skills (hard and soft) that are often required in the labour market.

This way it will make it easier to find job placements for those without jobs because they would have received training and it would be easier for companies to trust their new placements for they would have been trained by trusted professional recruiters.

But then again the employee’s journey with the programme should not end here, their progress should still be monitored until the recruiters are satisfied with their progress in the work place. This will be beneficial to the country, companies and the youth that have for a long time been trying to battle unemployment.

But many youths over the years have made it a thing to resort to entrepreneurship immediately after acquiring a college or university certificate because of scarce job opportunities in the country and globally.

A portion of them relocate to other countries and this is bad for the country’s economy but then again nobody wants to just sit around and wait for both the Messiah and a job that they might not even score.

However, nothing is being done to motivate the entrepreneurs. The government does not have any funds specially allocated to entrepreneurs when they need cash injections or funds to help boost their businesses or to help rescue them in times of crisis.

What happened to private businesses during the outbreak of Covid-19 needed some serious intervention from the government not promises which were not even fulfilled.

Here we are talking about the same businesses that pay tax thus contributing towards boosting the country’s economy and employing many youths with and without qualifications and or experience.

But also, even though entrepreneurship really is a lifesaving field to dive in, our youth lack creativity, they do not think of out of the box. If one starts a certain line of business and it succeeds, we all join the queue and copy exactly what they did.

We gather in one space and crowd it. But if we could all do something different, leave farming, couriering, beverages production and the famous likes to those that have already created a brand in those fields, maybe we could forget about government jobs and grow the private sector.

There’s so much that’s not being done in this country, so many projects that we do not even think of implementing because we are not confident enough and lack funds.

I have already cited a training programme project for example. We could have solution-oriented consultancy projects, we could have skills bridging programmes, we could have our colleges and universities offer co-op education, we could have everything we wanted to stop outsourcing services and skills from other countries.

All that is possible but the only thing we lack is support, financial support and confidence in the people who hold the power to give us a go ahead.

But maybe, if maybe we had ambitious people holding power in offices that support such initiatives, we wouldn’t be here organising bachashutdown marches and waking up every morning to parade town streets in our graduation regalia and placards outlining our qualifications and candy in the other hand to sell so that we can survive another day.

Bokang Masasa