PROVISION OF SKILLS KEY TO ADDRESSING JOBLESSNESS

Experts assert that skilled persons are more likely to deliver good performance in workplaces compared to those who are not.

A skill set is the knowledge, abilities and experience needed to perform a job. These include both hard and soft skills.

Hence, learning a skill helps a person gain new experiences, train the brain to handle a wide range of challenges and keep one’s neural pathway active.

So, as experts suggest, skills can help a person expand their professional competency and allow them to perform their job well. A person can gain and improve skills with education and experience.

Yesterday we carried a story showing that at least 4,000 entrepreneurs in agriculture have received training in basic business skills in the last four years.

These mostly came from the three northern regions of Arusha, Manyara and Kilimanjaro and Zanzibar, courtesy of efforts by Trias East Africa in collaboration with the Tanzania Horticulture Association (Taha).

There is no doubt that now that these entrepreneurs have acquired the requisite skills, their productivity will improve a lot whereby the benefits will spill over in society in a myriad forms, including improved agro-production, more jobs for the youth and sharing of knowledge with others.

As a nation, we definitely need to replicate these efforts in other sectors of the economy so as to improve the general productivity of the labour force.

Offering of skills should go hand in hand with empowering women and youth economically through access to affordable loans to enable them to raise the capital they need to run their businesses.

We are convinced that this is a sure way of ending unemployment and curbing the now ever-expanding youth migration to urban centres to engage in hawking as they try to eke out a living.

Let us ensure that every person acquires the right skills for them to be productive—whether through being employed or self-employed in various sectors of the economy.

HONOUR MAPUTO AGREEMENT

Eighteen years have elapsed since the heads of state and government of African Union member countries endorsed the Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security in July 2003. Although the Declaration required the states to allocate at least ten per cent of their national budgets to agriculture and rural development policy implementation within five years, Tanzania is still far off the mark.

A recent report by the AU-affiliated think-tank Grow Africa states that only 20 out of the 47 member states which in 2017 reported progress in implementing a similar initiative — the 2014 Malabo (Equatorial Guinea) Declaration on Accelerated Agricultural Growth — were on track to attaining the goals by 2025.

Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda were reportedly on track in fulfilling the Malabo commitments. In fact, Rwanda had the highest score (6.1) on Agricultural Transformation in Africa, but Djibouti, Sudan and Tanzania were laggards. It is small wonder therefore that the Eastern and Southern Africa Small-Scale Farmers Forum has been tirelessly campaigning for the East African Community leaders to make mandatory the allocation of at least ten per cent of their national budgets to agriculture.