‘Govt should have programme that gives jobs to young people’
What does your report say about unemployment in Nigeria?What you see in West Africa is that most people have work, most adults work with very low productivity; they are not making much money from their work. We talk about small holder farming, the husband and wife who have a hectare of land in rural area. […]
What does your report say about unemployment in Nigeria?
What you see in West Africa is that most people have work, most adults work with very low productivity; they are not making much money from their work. We talk about small holder farming, the husband and wife who have a hectare of land in rural area. We really want to focus on how we can make their farming productive. How do we make them grow more and engage maybe in cash crops, to have higher proceeds at the end of the day? Entrepreneurs like a carpenter who has his own business, a woman who is a tailor, how do we give her the infrastructure and the equipment that she needs to make more from her work? That’s a big challenge, one that all governments are struggling with everyday and our report says a lot of the solutions are going to be in the private sector, in enabling the private sector to grow.
How do you enable them to grow?
I think traditionally when we have discussions people talk about infrastructure, reliable electricity, with all this ideas and institution, if people want to start business how do they begin that process, how do they get access to finance to get equipment but there are also fundamentals. In our report, we talk about if the people don’t come out of school with numeracy and literacy; it’s going to be a limitation to how productive they can be on their work. There is not one single solution, you have to look at an array of areas to focus on and that’s a big challenge for every government.
You are saying that if government does deliberate policies to enhance standard of living, ability of entrepreneurs to create jobs across boards will be certain?
We believe that investment in education, investment in rule of law; macroeconomic stability better infrastructure; electricity and roads are part of the solution. It won’t be a quick solution. There is not going to be a quick fix, there is not one policy. When we talk about jobs we also talk about public works, the government should have a public works programme that give jobs to young people but in a country the size of Nigeria, the ability for the government to actually hire workers is going to be quite limited. 90 percent of all jobs are in the private sector. The fact is that the core role of the government is enabling everybody to have productive work and that means being educated, good infrastructure, a rule that everyone follows and institutions that function.
There are wonderful recommendations from the report, how do you intend to make them available to governments and key policy makers, in especially in, Nigeria?
This global report is posted online and we have it in Ipad apps and all that but that’s not enough because no one is going to go on the website and read the report. What we have been doing since the report is out is that we are engaging with country teams through the World Bank structure to think about what the report mean on the ground. In the case of Nigeria, the plan in the next one to two years is to think about what this report means in the Nigerian context; that means engaging with an array of development partners in Nigeria both the government, the Civil Society Organizations, the private sector to come up with specific recommendations based on the framework of the report. That is a process that is starting now, and we are doing this in few other countries too, we can’t do it in every country but we are targeting countries where there is a lot of demand by the government.
So far, what has been the response from the government and the private sector in thinking about what we should about jobs in Nigeria?
I think the response to thinking about what we should do about jobs in Nigeria is tremendous and positive from every policy maker and stakeholder in Nigeria. I joke that after football it is the number one thing that people care about in Nigeria, even more important than football maybe. Everyone recognizes it’s a problem; Nigerians have seen good growth, but we have not seen improvement in the labour market. The bank is now just starting a process of engagement with the Nigerian government for the next three years and part of that is going to focus on how we think about policies for a better job.
Based on your experience and your travels across Nigeria and the African continent, skills or jobs-like the chicken and the egg, which comes first, which do you think is important?
I think it is very hard to be a young adult with no skills at all. I think basic primary and secondary education is critical, particularly, primary education. At the same time a lot of the important skills for work are the ones you learn outside the classroom. I don’t think it’s a lot competition. We have to think about how people build skills when they are working, apprenticeship is a powerful option but at the same time a lot of people are self employed. We still don’t know how to make vocational training successful, all the studies in the world that looked at vocational training don’t always show that the government knows how to deliver vocational training very well; the bank has struggled with this in a lot of country. I think it’s one or the other, you want skills from school and you also think how do build skills on the job and that may be certification processes; you giving people a way to get certified with some sort of certificate that recognizes a skill set because they can take it to another job.