New initiatives to reduce unemployment

Zambia's labour ministry on Wednesday said greater efforts would be made to create jobs for millions of unemployed youth, as the country grapples with widespread joblessness. With around 65 percent of Zambians without formal employment, job creation remains a key challenge to President Levy Mwanawasa's government. Mwanawasa promised this week to tackle youth unemployment by providing training opportunities to graduates and school dropouts. He said the lack of programmes for placement, self-employment schemes and start-up capital for young people wishing to enter the business sector had further contributed to spiralling unemployment. A senior labour official told IRIN that plans were underway to conduct a labour market survey, which would help the authorities identify ways of creating opportunities for the youth. Sixty-eight percent of the country's estimated 10.8 million people are under the age of 25, according to the Central Statistics Office. "At the moment a number of government ministries are working together to ensure that the young, especially graduates, are trained within the civil service sector," Josephine Mapoma, the labour ministry permanent secretary, told IRIN. Mapoma explained that one of the planned interventions was the establishment of community centres to provide workplace training throughout the country. "The focus is to provide skills the young can use to start their own small businesses. The ministry of technology has already provided apprenticeships to many, but much more needs to be done," she said. There were also moves to encourage young people to opt for training in agriculture, she added. With the government keen to diversify away from copper, Zambia's main source of foreign currency, attention had turned to boosting the agricultural sector. Over the past two years the country had become an exporter of maize to neighbouring countries. Observers support economic diversification, but argue that more needs to be done to reverse the effects of large-scale privatisation in the 1990s on the struggling economy. "Within 10 years 259 key state enterprises had been privatised as part of the government's liberalisation programme. This had an enormous impact on employment - thousands of people lost their jobs and have since been without work. Now we have the additional problem of the youth, who, although educated, cannot find employment," said Joyce Nonde, president of the Federation of Free Trade Unions. She claimed that even though there had been an increase in foreign investment in recent years, companies had recruited "very few Zambians", preferring to hire staff from abroad.