Transparency International Bangladesh on Friday called for the creation of a suitable environment to effectively utilize huge unemployed youths in the national development.
One-fifth of the total population of the country is youth, but the unemployment rate among the youth groups is twice of the national unemployment rate, said a press release.
On the occasion of the International Youth Day (August 12), TIB placed a nine-point recommendation for ensuring the leading role of the youths in making sustainable development and building well-governed and corruption-free society.
The recommendations include providing youths with work-oriented education and skills as per the demand of the international labour market; allocating fund for the education sector as the recommendations of United Nations; ensuring that the recruitment process for all posts is corruption-free and merit-based; and creating employments through short-term, medium-term and long-term special plans alongside providing special intensives to restart the small and medium industries where many youths lost jobs.
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Among other recommendations, ensuring uninterrupted education for girls and financial insolvent youths through special incentives, and the youths with disabilities, indigenous communities and socially disadvantaged groups through special measure; arranging special incentives for youth entrepreneurs and making the jobless youths fit for alternative professions through special trainings; and reopening immediately the recruitment, examination and verification process of all public and private jobs which now remain closed.
The remaining two suggestions are taking special initiative to bring back the Covid dropped out students to the classrooms; and ensuring privacy and freedom of expression of all citizens including youths and bringing necessary reform to the law and policy framework to this end.
TIB Executive Director Dr Iftekharuzzaman said the country’s traditional education is failing to create work-oriented skilled manpower.
"A recent survey says that 47 percent of educated people are unemployed in the country. The major reason is that the necessary skills to join the workforce can’t be acquired with the knowledge gained from formal education,” he said.
Although this problem is getting serious gradually, there is no concerted effort to address it, which is really a matter of worrying, said Dr Iftekharuzzaman.
He said the most alarming is perhaps the attempt to deny or conceal the true number of unemployed among the country's youth population. To come out of this trend, it is the demand of the time to introduce the employment-oriented educational system and take initiatives to formulate and implement policies, and allocate budget to create employment for the youths, he added.