Bridging gaps in the labour market

This year is the 128th time that the world observes the International Labour Day. The world commemorates past labour struggles against worker’s rights violations, including lengthy workdays and weeks, poor working conditions and child labour. While huge strides have been made, the struggle against these issues is far from over.

In 2020, the World Bank published Uganda: Jobs Strategy for Inclusive Growth, the organisation’s second report examining the state of the job market in Uganda and how the country can increase the demand for labour or create jobs for a fast-growing labour force. The report states that at least 700,000 youth enter the job market every year – making human resources one of the country’s most abundant assets.

However, the employment prospects for all jobseekers, particularly the youth, remain low, as reported in the Uganda National Bureau of Statistics (UNBS) Annual Labour Force Survey 2018/2019. UNBS reports that nearly 40 percent of Ugandan youth between 18 and 30 years of age are neither in employment nor education/ training, while about 57 percent of the employed youth work in vulnerable employment that is as own-account workers or as contributing family workers.

The reasons for unemployment are multifaceted and range from low levels of economic activity in certain geographical locations, a lack of commercialisation of industries that employ large swathes of the population such as agriculture leading to low productivity, to the lack of employable skills. The Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated the situation, with companies laying off workers due to disrupted revenue flows, closures, supply-chain disruptions, and many other challenges.

This calls for a holistic and multi-layered approach to improving the employment situation in Uganda. The German Development Agency’s (GIZ) Employment and Skills for Development in Africa (E4D) programme, with funding from the German and Norwegian governments and the European Union, is contributing to these efforts by addressing gaps on the supply and demand side of the labour market.

In one such supply-side intervention, known as ReadyToWork, job seekers with a specific focus on youth who are studying in vocational institutions, technical colleges or universities are benefiting from work-readiness skills, training, and internship placement support to improve their employability. So far, 2,423 graduates from 11 partner vocational training institutes and three universities nationwide have been trained with work readiness and soft skills. In the first phase of the project, 540 youth were placed in internships and 960 found decent employment, including 261 women. The project’s second phase, which started in January 2021, aims to train 3,500 vocational students and place 2,200 in internships.

Additionally, E4D partners with stakeholders in the sectors of construction, agribusiness, tourism and hospitality, manufacturing and the green economy to upskill Ugandan youth to both national and international levels and provide them with demand-driven and contextually relevant skills, making them attractive to employers. In the construction sector for example, E4D is working to train 2,000 youth in the trades of welding, plumbing, masonry and electrical work from six vocational institutions nationwide.

On the demand side, E4D is enhancing the competitiveness of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to ensure local businesses, benefit from foreign investment inflows and other value- and supply-chain opportunities and in turn create more demand for local labour. For this to happen, there is a need to build capacity within local SMEs to improve their compliance with local and international standards, thus leading to improvements in their overall competitiveness.

In pursuit of this objective, E4D has over the years implemented multiple projects aimed at strengthening SMEs in the areas of bid management, occupational health and safety, environmental management, general business management and entrepreneurship development in partnership with both the public and private sector.

The integrated approach to improving the employment situation implemented by the German Development Cooperation’s E4D programme helps provide a high quality of labour that is suited to industry demands.

Competitive SMEs, the backbone of Uganda’s economy, need, and are made more productive, by this skilled labour pool. This holistic approach that builds both the capacity of Uganda’s workforce and its SMEs can positively contribute to bridging the gap between the supply and demand of labour, thereby improving the employment situation in Uganda.

- Donald Agaba  is the GIZ Employment and Skills for Development in Africa (E4D) Uganda, Head of Programme