New work scheme hoped to ease youth unemployment

Transcript

A successful youth-in-work programme in Solomon Islands will be replicated in the rest of Melanesia, if a training programme is successful.

The Pacific Community will this week start training 20 youth from Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu to act as leaders to help unemployed youth in their home countries.

The SPC's Melanesia director, Mia Rimon, says twenty percent of the Pacific's 11 million people are 15 to 24 years old, and approximately half are unemployed.

But she told Jamie Tahana if the leaders are successful, they could help move large numbers into formal employment.

MIA RIMON: Well in the Pacific we have a youth bulge that is much higher than other parts of the world and the problem is that there isn't a lot of formal employment in the Pacific so if you've got a growing population of youth for example in Port Moresby and in Papua New Guinea, looking at 60,000 kids coming out of the school system, either school leavers, or uni, or highschool, and they're looking for jobs and there's just not enough formal employment in our country to absorb those kinds of numbers.

JAMIE TAHANA: So what is this programme you're developing and how does it hope to address that?

MR:There's a programme that was started with the Pacific community with the government of the Solomon Islands called Youth At Work that's been supported by the Australian government. That programme has been a successful model for providing pathways to employment for youth in Solomons and now we've been asked to start this programme across Melanesia because so far in the Solomons we've managed to get 3,500 kids into formal employment and another 500 kids into their own businesses through the young entrepreneurs programme.

JT: How exactly does it do this? What do you do with these youth to get them in this position?

MR: Well what we're doing with this emerging leaders programme, is we're going to train 20 odd kids from five different countries in Melanesia to learn how to do the Youth at Work model and then they can go back to their country and see whether or not it can adapt or which parts of it they'd like to choose. Really the way it works is that we look for kids that really have no  opportunity, kids that have dropped out of school, kids that have very low literacy rates or they're maybe even a uni grad but they've got absolutely no experience and no one will hire them. What we do is we frontload train them on work ethics, on getting a bank account, a mobile phone, a provident fund card, all sorts of things they need in order to go into the workforce. Then we get them a job placement and we give them about 20 weeks with that employer to gain some job experience. At the end of that time they're on their own but they've got a CV that has some good experience, they've got a good letter of recommendation and these kids are very willing.

JT: You're starting off with 20 people out of how ever many thousands are in Melanesia, this is barely a drop in the ocean. To what extend do you hope to expand or create for it to actually create a dent in this number of high unemployment?

MR: Well these kids are not part of the Youth At Work programme, they're the army that we need to start this programme across Melanesia, for example in the Solomons we've got 30 kids that are employed running Youth At Work right now, Those kids are responsible for running through the big numbers that we do. Five hundred kids a year in town and another few hundred in the provinces. So if we're to start this in PNG, and Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji and some of the other high population countries, we need some leaders from those countries that know how to do this, so we're bringing them together and if the Solomons model looks like it'll work, we're hoping that these new young leaders can go back to their countries, we'll try help them raise some resources and we'll start Youth At Work in their countries and then start to put through these big numbers of youth into our programme.