A new World Bank study has suggested that Nigeria needs to create an estimated 40 to 50 million additional jobs between 2010 and 2030. The study, which was released in Abuja, noted that creation of that amount of jobs is imperative to avert a nationwide market crisis, that may result in possible economic collapse. According to the reports, majority of adult Nigerians are employed, but locked into low productivity and low income work, with no job or income security.
“To reduce poverty and promote inclusive growth, the jobs to be created need to be more productive and provide higher incomes than the country’s jobs provides today” said the three new reports. The reports also noted that beyond basic skills, better policies and programmes would improve access and market relevance of technical vocational education and training. One of the reports titled: “More and More Productive Jobs for Nigeria” provides a detailed overview of jobs, workers and employment opportunities, while the other titled “Understanding and Driving Private Sector Growth in Nigeria” shows constraints and drivers of firm-level growth and implications for employment. The third report, “Skills for Competitiveness and Employability” examines the demand in priority economic and job growth sectors and how to ensure that Nigerians have the right skill sets.
Read Also:
“Understanding where people work, constraints to firm growth, and the skills needed is fundamental for formulating appropriate policies, and the detailed diagnostics in these reports are critical inputs to developing education and job strategies for Nigeria,” said Rachid Benmessaoud, Country Director of the World Bank in Nigeria. According to the reports, two Nigerias seem to be emerging, one in which high and diversified growth provides more jobs and more income opportunities, and the other in which workers are trapped in traditional subsistence activities. The reports also show a geographical divide, with Danorthern Nigeria having low levels of education access and high youth underemployment than southern Nigeria.
They further explain that although skills required in Nigeria remain mostly manual, the south is experiencing more demand than the north for the cognitive skills required by the new knowledge economy. It has also been shown that half of working Nigerians are smallholder farmers, and another 30 percent of them self employed in small or micro household enterprises in the non-agricultural sector, whose work is not enough to escape poverty, or attain middle class status for their households. This bad economic situation is worsened by the fact that some 30 percent of Nigerian youth have not completed more than primary education, according to current World Bank statistics.
The bank’s reports call for attention to key areas of the country’s education, competitiveness and jobs agenda, further offering a number of solutions, one of which being the improvement in basic skill levels, as transition into more productive employment requires more skills. Secondly, the reports say that the biggest productivity gains would come from reducing crime, improving access to credit, reducing losses due to power outages, and increasing Internet use.
Thirdly, the reports said that raising agricultural productivity by incorporating smallholder farmers into value chains, increasing access to markets, inputs and technology would both help raise income opportunities for smallholder farmers and simultaneously tap into the significant potential for domestic agriculture and agribusinesses in Nigeria. The reports also regard agriculture as critical, saying it will remain the largest employer of labour for the forseeable future, as the sector contributed just 22 percent to GDP in 2012 but employed half of the Nigerian working population.
Source: National MIRROR