At this week’s launch of the Skills for Employment Investment project, the finance minister commented that the expenditure by businesses in Bangladesh on overseas workers to make up for shortages of skills in the local workforce is estimated to cause an outflow of $4bn a year.
It is a telling indicator of the urgent need to help make our growing workforce more widely skilled and productive. Boosting skills is absolutely essential if the economy is to become more globally competitive and take full advantage of the potential of our demographic dividend.
In this regard it is welcome to see the $8.5 million of support being given by the Korea International Cooperation Agency to establish a new academic building and workshops at the government’s Technical Training Centre in Rajshahi. This is a welcome addition to the initiatives being taken by the government to scale up skills training initiatives for the country’s workers.
Building capacity to strengthen vocational training is a vital priority for Bangladesh. Less than 3.5% of boys and only 1.2% of girls in Bangladesh choose to undertake vocational education.
On a national scale, the Ministry of Finance is working with the Asian Development Bank and business organisations to spend over $1bn to equip over 1.25 million young people with employable skills by 2021. It aims to focus on supporting skills training in 15 priority sectors, starting with garments and textiles, leather, construction, light engineering, information technology and shipbuilding.
Such training is essential to help equip the workforce with the skills it needs for future economic growth and job creation.
While technical schools and colleges are more expensive than conventional high schools, they are cheaper than universities and offer a proven path to employment for students who want to avoid more expensive higher education.
Improving vocational training will allow the country to create more higher value jobs at home. It will also increase choice for workers who go abroad by equipping them with more marketable skills.
The government should work with businesses to increase awareness of and participation in vocational training.
