Monday | 13 January 2025 | Reg No- 06
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Monday | 13 January 2025 | Epaper

Youth unemployment and work culture

Published : Saturday, 5 October, 2019 at 12:00 AM  Count : 235
Haradhan Ganguly
My elder sister, running 75 of age, suddenly had met stroke attack and brought to Dhaka from Barisal to get admitted to a private hospital which is attached to a private medical college. She was successfully operated upon by a renowned neuron surgeon. But we observe, his team means he is only one, remaining an Atlantic like gap with other doctors who lack efficiency in every sphere to follow up the next doings. As if a culture of negligence, inattentiveness is the go of their jobs.

Even on duty rotation file was not read to update advice of previous doctors and followed up. As a result unnecessarily we had to compel doing the same diagnose twice with a little gap of the same thing. What we saw all are very young doctors just passing out one year before and all are passing in gossips, altercations and always in waging. Even in minimum corporate work culture and discipline are not being followed up.

You go to chain shopping, you revisit the same experience where youths are engaged. Always an unsophisticated gestures, negligence of caring to customers, lack of promptness, as if being vexed with repeated customers' inquiries. The same is in transport sectors. That means, in all service delivery, there lack corporate discipline particularly in youths.

Exception is there also. But in majority there lacks NEET, that is ,youth who are "not in education, employment or training". So we need youth employment and at the same time enriched work culture. Their acquiring is a must to be preceded before stepping in a developing economy and culture or will go parallel. Otherwise demographic dividend we are enjoining would go in vain.

The national unemployment rate is 4.2 per cent according to labour force survey 2016-17 of BBS. However, youth unemployment rate is 10.6 per cent, more than two and a half times the national average. The share of unemployed youth in total unemployment is 79.6 per cent.
A daily referring BBS, told us unemployment rate seems to be high among youth with higher education. For example, unemployment rate is 13.4 per cent among youths having a tertiary level education and 28 per cent among youths having secondary level education. What it indicates, our education is not apt for empowering youths to do jobs for a decent living. With their education they cannot cope with changing technology giving rise scope for foreigners to supplement in job markets. Entrepreneurs in their doing business are more cautious about marginal efficiency of capital invested. Improper deployment of manpower would bring in inefficiency and distortion in prudent investment.

The other aspect of youth employment is the existence of NEET that is youth who are "not in Education, Employment or Training". Youth NEET is as high as 29.8 per cent. Now where is the dilemma? Employers are eager to recruit best suited candidates for the posts needed for. But they are not finding suitable candidates. In desperation, they choose to hire from abroad providing high benefit packages.

Youth employment is facing two faced edge. One it suffers paucity of sufficient avenues of youth employment due to lack of needed private investment. Secondly, due to lack of NEET, those employed lack corporate discipline or work culture followed by not up to the mark prompt and efficient delivery of services.

The Government of Bangladesh (GoB) formulated its first National Youth Policy (NYP) in 2003. In its latest NYP 2017, the GoB emphasizes that empowerment and development of youth are necessary steps for achieving equality, human dignity and social justice (Ministry of Youth and Sports,2017). A number of objectives outlined in the NYP 2017 are closely related to youth unemployment.

These include, creating conducive conditions for the youth to be able to achieve their inherent potential, developing youth into human resource, ensuring quality education, health and security for youth, providing youth with employment opportunities so that they are able to choose profession and career according to their ability and promoting youth entrepreneurship and innovation. Additionally, unemployed youth is recognized as the category which would be given top most attention for whom the government would undertake special measures (Ministry of Youth and Sports, 2017).

In general, the policy measures mentioned in the NYP 2017 are well intentioned. For example, the decision to teach information and communication technology (ICT) as part of the regular curriculum and measures to bring all youth under banking and insurance are clearly steps in the right direction. A number of intended steps mentioned in the NYP 2017, including the need to discourage youth from over indulging in junk food and warning them about the addictive nature of the social media are quite modern and far-sighted.

These are undoubtedly some of the major threats that young people are facing today, undermining their physical and mental well-being. So it is a laudable step. But NYP 2017 is still in draft-phase and it needs data based articulation. After five years when it is said to be evaluated its status of implementation, then we would understand the reality.
Still youth employment requires pre-fixed steps such as the improved education system, availability of technology and internet, skill development through technical and vocational training, fair opportunity for all in the job market, access to information at national, regional and local levels, students to employers' connection, career counselling from an early stage, enabling environment for female youth and employment opportunities abroad.

How to bring off this successful? Definitely a dynamic and pro-productive private investment is the demand of time for youth employment. But here we have dismay. In the name of infrastructural impediments and lack of governance issues, private investment is lacking far behind of other indicators of macroeconomic performance. It is modest at best. Between 2009 and 2018, private investment in real terms has increased from BDT 1259 billion (21.9 per cent of GDP) to BDT 2378 billion (23.2 per cent of GDP).

In contrast, public investment growth was robust, 20 per cent per year. While per year private investment saw the increase in 9 per cent only. However public investment failed to crowd in private investment and had a crowding out effect instead. Many researchers have found it out. Even our super growth has little impact on private investment. Even present scenario of internal private investment fails to encourage foreign direct investment (FDI).

We are proud of having 'demographic dividend'. No sooner have we used it in enhancing the size of the quality cake, unemployed youths would pose a threat to our basic ethos of social fabrics. We are waiting with hope that the implementation of largely committed 100 EPZ will bring off our thousands of unemployed youths' golden dreams today and tomorrow. Far-sighted planning is the take of the hour.

Writer is the freelance contributor




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