Maputo — Mozambican Labour Minister Mario Sevene said in Maputo on Monday that the government is committed to promoting employment through professional training in order to reduce poverty.

Addressing the opening session of a seminar on "Analysis of Employment Strategy and Professional Training in Mozambique", Sevene said that this effort is directed both to the formal and the informal sectors of the economy, covering urban and rural areas.

The strategy in question, to be implemented between 2003 and 2009 envisages the promotion of self-employment, and continuous upgrading of the active workforce. Sevene said that the draft strategy is still under discussion, and the final version will be submitted to the government in October.

Sevene believed that government policies had helped increase the supply of jobs. Nonetheless, the consequences of unemployment are still worrying, particularly the degradation of family structure, drug addiction, psychiatric illnesses and growing anti-social behaviour. Fighting against these ills implied eliminating underlying causes, but poor countries lacked the necessary resources for this.

The draft six year strategy is costed at 109 million US dollars. This money is to be spent on job creation, on turning the unemployed into "micro-businessmen", on restructuring the network of professional training centres, on increasing the effectiveness of public employment centres, and on improving information on the job market, among other initiatives.

The country's main trade union federation, the OTM, also expressed concern over the growing numbers of unemployed people. A trade union source said that this problem became particularly serious as a consequence of the country's first structural adjustment measures, known as the Economic Recovery Programme (PRE), introduced in 1987, that pushed the rates of unemployment to a critical point.

The OTM argued that the fight against poverty should necessarily be based on job creation, increased productivity, and improved and advanced agricultural techniques.

"We think that employment strategy in Mozambique should be founded on the creation of small and medium-sized undertakings because these will absorb most of the workforce", the source said.

The OTM also reiterated that reducing unemployment calls for more investment in the industrial sector, and support from the banking system in the shape of low interest loans for the creation of small companies.