UNDP approached to set up vocational training centre on modern lines

Islamabad : Carrying forward its efforts to bolster the country’s human resource development, the government has reached out to the United National Development Programme (UNDP) for establishing a state-of-the-art technical and vocational training centre.

According to official sources, Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Overseas Pakistanis Sayed Zulfikar Bukhari during an interaction with the UNDP representatives requested the programme to establish the centre on modern lines.

He urged the UNDP to provide technical and financial assistance in establishing vocational and training institution under its youth programme, adding that the vocational trainings must include Information Technology and computer programming.

Highlighting the ministry’s major initiatives, he informed the representatives that they were equipping its vocational training institutions with modern technologies and digitizing the functioning of its departments to ensure good governance.

Besides, the revival of Overseas Youth Council (OYC) was also in process.

He also expressed the government’s desire to outsource administrative work of OYC to UNDP for making it more effective and transparent institution, adding that it perfectly matched with their youth programme.

Over 1.4 million youth were likely to enter in the country’s labour market annually for the next five years, the UNDP s National Human Development Report (NHDR) revealed, recently.

The report pointed out that the country owns some 64 per cent of population under the age of 30 and underlined the need for evolving a comprehensive strategy to engage them through quality education, skill development and jobs oriented investment.

The NHDR also highlighted that the country also had to create some 1.3 million employment opportunities by 2035 on an average every year, claiming that the number of youth seeking employability was likely to increase from current four million to five million.

Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment Report in its Export of Manpower Analysis Report 2018 showed that the emigration trend in 2018 had declined by 23 per cent as compare to 2017. In 2017, the country sent some 0.49 million manpower abroad while the number drastically went down to 0.38 million in 2018, the report added.

The emigration of Pakistani labour abroad saw its peak in 2015 when the country exported some 0.95 million of its workforce abroad and since then the emigration trend witnessed a sharp decline due to some economic reforms in the middle east which resulted into the return of huge number of manpower back home.

As many as 10.48 million of Pakistani workforce was sent abroad for different job assignments of the international manpower markets during the years of 1971-2018, the data read.