The Minister for Labour, Betty Amongi has called for more investment in research around identifying skills to tackle unemployment globally especially among the youth.
Among made the call at 346th session of the governing body of the International Labour Office, being held at the International Labour Organization (ILO) headquarters in Geneva.
Given the high unemployment rates among the youth globally, the minister called on the ILO to emphasize skilling to support youth to transition from school to work.
Globally, the total global number of unemployed youths is estimated to reach 73 million in 2022, a slight improvement from 2021 (75 million) but still six million above the pre-pandemic level of 2019.
In Uganda particularly, the youth unemployment rate is estimated to be 4.33 percent as of 2021.
World Bank report shows that most of the youth in Uganda are engaged in activities that are low-skill, low-earning, low-productivity, and low-value-added. This is particularly so in agriculture, where 72% of the youth are employed in "traditional" agriculture.
Previously, President Museveni noted that although the people of Uganda are better educated today, the country is still grappling with the skills gap.
Museveni said the skills gap was a deliberate creation of the colonial education system which Ugandans inherited as a country.
"It seemingly designs to produce clerks and administrators to support the colonial government. This type of education creates people who only want white collar jobs with no skills to enable them to produce goods and services for the market either as employers or as workers," Museveni said in March.
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To tackle such challenges of unskilling, ILO has proposed the "Strategy on skills and lifelong learning" which emphasises on skilling that promotes human development, productive employment, and decent work for all.
According to Amongi, while the strategy addresses the supply-side challenge of making the labour force employable, efforts to promote skilling should be complemented by employment-generating demand-side interventions and supporting ILO constituents to build capacity to develop job growth strategies.
The programme will benefit no less than half a million direct beneficiaries by 2028 - at least 40% of them women, and close to 60,000 teachers, trainers, managers and tripartite constituents from nearly 6,000 organizations/institutions in 61 countries.
The budget required to deliver ILO support to the 61 target countries including Uganda from 2022 to 2028 is estimated at US$ 492 million.
However, resource gap is US$280 million to service member states' demands on skills and lifelong learning.
