Researchers recommend skill-specific opportunities for youths

By LULU MAGINDE
GIVEN the imbalance of job opportunities to the number of school leavers each year in Papua New Guinea, academics have recommended for the creation of more skill specific related opportunities.
Researchers at the National Research Institute Julian Melpa and Dr Francis Odhuno published a study last month looking at the situation of young people in Port Moresby’s informal Morata settlement and what the government could do to keep them from resorting to crime.
Melpa and Dr Odhuno found that within the group of 35 youths aged 20 to 35 living in Morata, a majority of which were from the Highlands, had migrated to the city for education purposes but were living with relatives or family friends.
The number of those engaged in the informal economy was almost equal to those who were not currently doing anything.
Some of the more re-occurring reasons provided as to why they found it difficult to access the job market was school fee problems, lack of skills, poverty, nepotism and corruption.
The assumption of the authors was that the youths who answered they were unemployed or not doing anything for that matter, were involved in criminal activities such as petty theft, pickpocketing, rape, murder and even grand theft auto.
The researchers recommended that the government could to help reduce the number of youths involved in criminal activities by providing more government funding for youth training, create more jobs, engage youths in community services and introduce a loan scheme for unemployed youths.
“If the government could create a scheme to engage more unemployed youths in community services or provide start-up capital through a loan scheme, similar to the small to medium enterprise idea, then this would definitely help a lot of struggling youths,” she said.
She noted that although there was the National Youth Development Authority and there were programmes offered to get more unemployed young people involved, some of them had not accounted different interests.