Is rampant unemployment a result of our education system?

Experts in English etymology trace the word ‘education’ back to the ancient Latin terms educare, educere, and educatum, which mean: to bring up, to nurture, to mould, to lead out, to bring forth, to draw out, to drag out, and to nourish. One thing that is common in all these meanings is the principle inherent in education (of any kind), which is to direct, train, and guide.

While our education fulfils its role of training citizens, the impact on a large scale needs to be seriously examined. It is time to have our education programmes drafted and implemented in a way that what is imparted is relevant to the local situations.

For instance, while we have thousands of graduates pouring into the already saturated waiting room of the labour market, we still produce many more in the same professions. Think of the thousands of qualified teachers who are roaming the streets for years without the possibility of getting jobs. Yet, many more young and vibrant citizens are accepted into the same programmes.

In a personal yet well-examined opinion, I would propose that if a certain professional avenue is saturated in whatever ways and for whatever reasons it can no longer employ half a supply of professionals produced in two years, considerations about suspending or modifying that programme must be considered.

Otherwise, it is a self-defeating process that makes our society stuck because we are not channelling the youthful and vibrant energy of our young people in the right ways to fit the professional demands relevant to and urgently needed in our country.

The government needs to utilise to the maximum the expertise of relevant scholars and experts in carrying out open and collaborative multi-sectorial studies of unemployment in our country and how best it can be addressed by looking at the possibilities within the brackets of the future we want to create together as a people of this great nation. Things will get worse.

By way of prioritising, many problems in our country are linked to unemployment. The key problem here is poor career guidance at low levels of education and a lack of assessment of the needs of government services and the possibilities of the private sector in employing people of different expertise.

For example, given the plans of the government to set up projects and accomplish the visions of different terms of leadership, the leaders responsible should be able to prospectively know the number of professionals needed per time as those projects go.

Here the population data and future demographic projections in terms of numbers, linked with the available data of the facilities available and those needed, professionals already available, and standards of averaging service deliverers with the clients, etc., can to a great extent give a more objective and productive sectorial prioritisation.

In addition to that, the government needs to study the local situation and make public, with sufficient details, the sectors that are in dire demand of professionals. This effort should align with the standard of living the government envisions for the people of Tanzania.

Instead of training people for jobs that are not available for them by the time they graduate, we can then, after such important studies, train people to respond to the needs of our country professionally. This will be a big boost to where we are already strong.

In addition, there is a need for progressive, continuous and sustainable career awareness from early years, building our young people to discover and value career opportunities around them. The bias over certain careers needs serious uprooting as well, just the same way with the contemporary politically popularised impractical and inconsiderate myth of “self-employment” by thousands of fresh university graduates themselves.

A more contextualised modality of education tailored for our people will add more value in the long run where we will have our own top professionals in all the key and leading sectors in the country. This will be an assurance of a promising stride towards true and secure economic and socio-political independence.

It is a shame for our country to incur huge costs to pay foreign countries for professionals that our country can easily train by merely patterning its education, not on satisfying years-old curricula but with consideration of relevance to the actual needs today, cognisant of the availability of more enhanced ways of doing things that we have today.

We ought to target ‘playing at home’ in such a way that we have a good structure to make our young people relevant and valuable professionals at home before they are recognised abroad. Young people who graduate from universities should be able to get jobs and should be empowered if they are to employ themselves. A reform of education with proper targets can help solve the riddle of unemployment in our country.

Shimbo Pastory is a Tanzanian advocate for positive social transformation and is a student at the Ateneo de Manila University, Manila, the Philippines. Email: [email protected], website: www.shimbopastory.com.