Al-Ahram Weekly | Special | 'Decent Work is Good Business'

Ahead of the launch of Egypt's Youth Employment National Action Plan, 2008-2012, Beyond's Samia Farid Shihata speaks to the head of the International Labour Organisation in Cairo, Loretta De Luca, about the role of the organisation in solving Egypt's employment challenges.

What is the main focus of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in the context of Egypt's efforts to reduce unemployment, particularly youth unemployment?

In 2003, at the Youth Employment Network, established by the ILO, the World Bank and the United Nations, Egypt committed itself to be a lead country in developing a national action plan for youth employment. Since 2006, the ILO has supported Egypt in its development of that plan. While Egypt's Youth Employment National Action Plan (YENAP) is being prepared under the leadership of the Ministry of Manpower and Migration, for the first time there is the participation of all main decision makers and stakeholders relevant to youth employment. We have the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Higher Education, the economic ministries (Ministries of Investment, of Finance, of Trade and Industry, fro example), the Social Fund, international agencies, the donor community, as well as youth groups that have been trained to play a role in the formulation and implementation of YENAP. The importance of this broad participation cannot be underestimated given that the big challenge in Egypt, as it is in many other countries, is coordination among different parties: setting goals and organising activities to reach those goals. Over recent years a lot of efforts have been made to promote employment. They have been characterised, however, by fragmentation, repetition, lack of coordination and sometimes contradiction. They also needed to be evaluated lessons might be learnt. YENAP intends to come up with one plan with a number of axes, a division of responsibility and accountability.

A Technical Commission composed of different working groups undertook a background analysis to examine the causes of youth unemployment and what has been done in recent years -- to find out what worked and what didn't and why; and based on this analysis it undertook the development of the Plan. The plan will be presented to a national Steering Committee some time in April or May. The Steering Cmmittee is composed of 25 main stakeholders: you have the key ministries, the Social Fund, the High Council for Youth, youth groups, employers' organisations, and workers' organisations. It is understood that the private sector needs to play a key role at all stages, be it in education and training, entrepreneurship development, and so forth. International agencies and the donor community are also playing an important role. Indeed, the orientation of the international community now is to focus its support on national initiatives that are well integrated and that are formulated and owned by the country, because that is the best way to ensure success and sustainability over time.

How do you ensure that a Steering Committee made up of 25 entities avoids becoming yet another unwieldy bureaucracy?

YENAP has a Coordination Unit, which will be located in the Ministry of Manpower and Migration. It will be small and dynamic and will be directly linked to the Minister herself. We also have the Technical Commission and its working groups, composed of representatives from a subset of stakeholders, which will only come together to work on specific technical matters whenever needed. The Steering Committee itself should only meet two-three times a year, but it is necessary to ensure policy coordination and exchange of information.

The government's efforts as reported in the national media are mostly portrayed as focusing on the rehabilitation of graduates, be they of technical schools or universities, via the provision of new skills. Why not focus on providing those skills while students are still in schools and universities, rather than waiting until they graduate?

You're right. Indeed, we have to act within the educational and training system and not just wait for young people to finish school and become unemployed. We call this "increasing youth's employability". One way to prevent young people from becoming unemployed is by helping them choose occupations and trades that are more promising in terms of employment. How do we intend to do this? By improving the labour market orientation and information which students receive from an early age. So we intend to bring employment services to youth, from the first year of secondary and vocational schools and the first years of university,. Employment orientation should become part of general curricula, to help young people make career choices that will help them find jobs.

Another way is to develop entrepreneurship education . Young people now are typically waiting to get a job in public administration, or other white-collar sectors. One initiative is to explain to young people what it is to be an entrepreneur: to plant the seed of entrepreneurship in their mind so that they consider it when they graduate. Last January, the ILO started introducing in Egypt its "Know About Business" programme, which it has already introduced in some 25 countries worldwide over the past 10 years.

In Indonesia, for example, where we started a few years ago, the country has officially included this programme in the curricula of its educational institutions. This also helps young people understand what an enterprise is, what a manager is, and what the duties and rights of the employer and of the employees are. They will have a clearer idea of it means to work in an enterprise, which many of them lack. In addition, the approach is highly interactive. It teaches a sense of initiative, the development of new ideas, analytical skills, and how to work in teams, and these are important skills in today's world. A system of training of trainers will be set up. Trainers will then train teachers, professors and instructors. This has a multiplier effect.

Another way to increase employability is through developing apprenticeship, because there is a need to cater for school dropouts too -- to give them the possibility of getting decent, productive jobs. In 2002-03, we initiated a dual apprenticeship system in six governorates. This is composed of formal training in training institutions and on-the-job training in an enterprise. This initiative is based on tight cooperation between local authorities, employers' and workers' organisations, the specific employers offering internships and the families of the apprentices. Together they identify the occupations in high demand and skills needed, together they sketch the curricula needed to acquire those skills, as well as monitor progress made. Apprenticeships have included practical skills such as plumbing, maintenance work, carpentry, sewing, etc. At the end, the large majority of young people involved ended up finding employment with the same employer that trained them. Some also started their own businesses, as young people were given small toolkits related to their trade that allowed them to practice their acquired trade.

We recently heard about jobs in the textile sector going unfilled and that the training programme to train workers in this field was not successful. How can this be explained?

The problem is quite complex. In the textile sector, the training programme was supposed to train tens of thousands of young people. It managed to train just a few thousands, and even out of those only a few actually accepted to work in textile factories after that training..

Two factors were involved. Culture: society still does not value blue-collar work, and manual work in general, even if it is skilled work. This culture needs to be changed. I strongly believe that the Egyptian media, including the movie and television industries, which are very advanced and popular in Egypt, could stimulate this change. And quality of work: a number of the available jobs in employment intensive industries like textiles, construction and even tourism, have low salaries, poor working conditions and low occupational safety and health. The lesson is that if available jobs are not employee friendly then young people will avoid them. For instance if they don't feel they can earn a living then they may as well stay home and wait.

The ILO strongly believes in the importance of Decent Work, and that "Decent Work is Good Business". This really is one of my favourite slogans. There are practical ways to improve the productivity and competitiveness of a specific enterprise by improving working conditions, by improving working relations between employers and employees, by seeing employees as human resources not as costs. If well trained and motivated, human resources can really grow and help the enterprise reach its full potential.

The ILO has been working for many decades on improving occupational safety and health. Improving it will reduce accidents and illnesses, improve morale and attract high-quality persons and young people to these occupations.

Although women have a set of skills that complement those of men, a lot of industries don't make an effort to attract or keep women in the labour force. There are a number of industries that are not women friendly. They may require long distances commuting, long working hours, or the wages are so low that the trade-off for leaving home is just not worth it. In 2006, labour force participation for women was only 22 per cent , while for men it was 77 per cent, women's unemployment rate was twice that of men and their salaries were five times lower than those of men. This is quite astonishing. There is a big gender gap that needs to be addressed.

Of course, there is a gap between Upper and Lower Egypt and between urban and rural areas in terms of employment. The areas with the highest unemployment and poverty rates are in rural Upper Egypt. A lot of youth in those areas, both men and women, are found in unpaid family work, for example helping with the crop or in helping sell vegetables on the streets, which means there is also considerable underemployment. These young people will also have a hard time to find a proper job afterwards because they will have lost years in unproductive work. So the solution is really to attract enterprises that are employment intensive to those areas, and where there is a potential labour force ready to work. A set of policies and incentives is needed to attract worker friendly jobs in areas with high unemployment and underemployment.

It is central. The plan has three axes: employability; increasing demand for youth employment; and capacity building of labour market institutions, on employment services and labour market information, for instance. Within the employability axis, education is crucial. Course content, motivation, class size, and teaching methodology are all components of this. For instance, students need to be taught interactively; their capacity to analyze, provide constructive criticism and come up with original ideas must be stimulated and encouraged . They should learn to work in teams and should be taught responsibility.

You were stationed in Egypt in the 1990s as a labour market specialist. Have things changed? Have the problems changed?

The main difference is that in the 1990s I really had to exert considerable effort to work on unemployment and underemployment. There was denial. Few officials wanted to admit that there was an unemployment problem and extensive skills mismatches.

Things have changed considerably. Today's government is more open, action-oriented and many of its members have strong technical backgrounds. There needs indeed to be commitment at the highest levels if 4.5 million jobs are to be created in six years as set in the 2005's Presidential campaign. The government now has to decide how to do that, take action and divide responsibilities. This is a major challenge, but Egypt has no choice but to tackle it The way to do that is to have all the stakeholders around the table; examine together the various facets of the challenge, identify a set of remedies, establish a division of labour, enforce coordination and monitor progress.

Youth employment remains a big issue. A lot can and should be done taking advantage of the impressive economic growth that Egypt is now experiencing. This makes it possible to invest more resources productively to make sure that young men and women can find or create decent jobs.

There has to be an acceleration of policy reform. The private sector must also be actively involved. It needs to play a greater role in pushing for reform and it must participate actively in setting the education and training agendas and programmes.

The ILO is tripartite. It assists governments, employers' organisations and workers' organisations. The role of the ILO here is to say to the private sector, "You have to be more proactive." It tells private sector employers' organisations that it is their responsibility to guide universities and schools to become more market relevant. The private sector also needs to provide work experience, not only lectures in universities on enterprise employment. It needs to offer students internship opportunities to allow students to see what it's like in an enterprise. The ILO also helps build the capacity of workers' organisations to take part in decisions and to represent the interests of workers. For the first time, trade unions asked the ILO's support to encourage entrepreneurship among workers, for example, among those who lost their jobs due to privatisation. ILO is also working to strengthen the capacity of national institutions such as the Ministry of Manpower and Migration.

There is much change occurring and I am now more optimistic. . We should not see the glass as half empty but rather as half full. Nonetheless, it is still a big glass! There is a long way to go. But Egypt has potential. It has a vibrant research community, a vibrant private sector community, and decision makers more open and more determined to introduce change. What is needed is to build bridges between all those communities to achieve maximum effectiveness.

We also need to have efficient monitoring and evaluation as part of YENAP. We will be working to develop a culture and capacity of evaluation in the various ministries. It is essential to be transparent about the various programmes.

To conclude, I am optimistic because the key actors in Egypt now really recognise the challenges related to youth employment, because they "mean business", and are increasingly willing to work together to tackle them; this is the secret of success. ILO will be providing all the technical support and worldwide expertise needed to advance in that direction.