Paynesville – The Deputy Minister For Operation at the Ministry of Labor, Augustine Williams, said the rocketing rate of unemployed youth remains a national priority of the government.
Serving as keynote speaker at a job fair training workshop organized by the Coca Cola Africa Foundation, Williams said unemployment should be not only an issue for the government but the concern of Liberians as well.
“Government has never been the biggest employer, so it is the private sector who, when given the enabling environment, will attract more jobs, especially the young people into the labor force,” he said.
But government’s responsibility is to create the environment so that private institutions like the concessionaires and other business sectors would have the opportunity to provide jobs for the citizens rate and not only youth.”
He added that the government has instituted measures to address youth employment.
“Youth employment is a global challenge. I don’t want to link it to Liberia alone, but globally there is an improvement now in youth employment.”
“I know there is high unemployment rate of young people, but to generalize it in such that to say everybody is unemployed, we have to put in those indications that specify the kind of unemployment that are within the economy,” he averred.
For his part, the founder and CEO of J-Palm Liberia, an oil palm and kernel processing company in Liberia, Mahmud Johnson, said the training was needy, especially for young people who are seeking job opportunities.
“I think this event is something that is much needed. We have a lot of young people in Liberia who are looking for jobs but don’t really know how to go about getting those jobs. So I think it is a wonderful opportunity to bring employers together with their job seekers and also to educate young people how to present themselves.”
According to Johnson, the high rate of unemployment is due to the lack of job opportunities in the Liberian economy, something he described as poor economy.
“There are several factors that contribute to unemployment in Liberia. One is the fact that the economy as a whole is not creating the kind of jobs to create a paste that will allow the private sectors to observe people that are coming into the labor market,” he said.
We have a lot of people graduating from college every year, but majority of them end up with no job, that is because the economy is not dynamic enough to be able to create jobs.”
Johnson called on attendees of the workshop to use the knowledge acquired to create their business in order to curtail the challenges the economy presents.
“I expect those who attended this training to transform the knowledge they have acquired to able to market themselves to be employer.
Also I will hope that some of them be proud at least to take the challenge to see how they can also start their own businesses to eventually create job for other young people.
This is the only country that we have, it is our own responsibility to do whatever we can to help move our country forward in our own respective paths,” he added.