Niveen Wahish speaks to Luca Azzoni, skills and employability senior ILO specialist on what good training could do With the support of the International Labour Organisation Decent Work Team for the North Africa Region, Cairo office, a consultation workshop was recently held to reach common understanding and agreement among stakeholders on the basic features of the Employment and Training Fund to be established by the Egyptian government and for which LE1 billion has been set aside in the 2011/ 2012 budget. Some 45 participants representing various ministries as well as employers and workers and youth took part at the workshop where they discussed the mission, objectives, target groups and sectors, structure, sustainability and role of the fund. The consultation was also an opportunity to learn from the experiences of other countries. Is training the answer to unemployment? When you analyse the reasons for unemployment and the possible solutions and what has been done over the years, you cannot possibly say that training is the only response. And you cannot possibly blame the fact that there is just a skills mismatch; employment and unemployment, especially youth unemployment, are multifaceted issues. How can the Fund help? These resources of the fund have to be used to put people at work. Training is a means to do that. We listened to employers and they say they do not find people with the skills they need so the answer is: participate to form the people with the skills you need. Give your contribution; give the youth the possibility of coming to the enterprises to learn. In other words, offer on the job training, the apprenticeship type. That gives youth exposure to being in your company and they have the chance of picking up the last segment of learning which is exactly what you need in your enterprise. But is learning the skills enough? In return for this [the effort exerted by the new employees], you [the employer] must give a salary that satisfies the expectations that come with the job and the working conditions. But more than that give those new entrants perspective; if they enter at a certain level and put their heart in the job, where will it lead them? There is a need to correspond value in money to the time and commitment of the people. Salary is in return of the performance they give. The performance is made up of an individual's talent and capacity, their time and their personality. Employers have to remunerate. You cannot be paid something you feel is not fair. In that case, you will question why you should do it, if by doing something which apparently looks much less demanding, such as driving a Tok Tok [a three-wheel motor rickshaw], you could earn the same money, although even the latter requires a skill. Driving in traffic and bearing the responsibility of transporting someone from one place to another in a safe and timely manner is not easy. Can training work for everyone and on any job? If we restrict the concept of training to the acquisition of manipulative capacities and practical skills and transformation of materials into something else, then not all society should do that. We do not want all society to be polarised to becoming a service rendering type of hub. Vocational training is not the response to everything; it is part of it. When deciding what to do with the fund, we are at the level of principals. We are narrowing down ideas to find together the best solution with the fund. I do not envy the ministers in charge. What issues must be considered when creating this fund? When you plan an instrument like that, it is not for one year, but for years to come. It is not an instrument that responds to a crisis. It is an instrument that responds to another criteria, namely that we want better citizens, meaning we want people that have better knowledge about work, the conditions of work, their rights and responsibilities. To do that, you need to think of the financial mechanism to stabilise it so that it does not become a burden for the government. Now it is entirely paid for by the budget. But the example from other countries is that it has mixed funding. It must be sustainable.
