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Thu April 26th, 2007
Africa lacks jobs for
young - UN report
Africa's jobless rate is nearly
twice that of the rest of the world despite several years of
rapid economic growth, according to a United Nations report
released on Tuesday.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) said African
economies need to create two million more new jobs every year
for their unemployment rate of 10.3 percent to fall to the
global average of 6.3 percent by 2015, when the United
Nations's Millennium Development Goals on reducing poverty
come due.
Africa's economic output rose 5.4 percent in both 2005 and
2006, and is expected to increase another 5.9 percent this
year, according to International Monetary Fund figures quoted
by the ILO. But employment has lagged, especially among those
under the age of 25 whose jobless rate is 20 percent, the
report found.
"In Africa young people (are)
three times more likely to be unemployed than adults," it
said in the "Decent Work Agenda in Africa" report,
to be discussed at a gathering of political and economic
officials this week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The ILO called the pervasive youth unemployment "an
economic and social waste and a socio-political risk" for
the continent which remains the world's poorest despite its
vast energy, ore and mineral reserves.
The number of people worldwide living on less than $1 (about
R7) a day declined by a quarter between 1981 and 2001, but
nearly doubled to 314 million in sub-Saharan Africa in the
same period, partly as a result of the HIV and Aids epidemic
and a series of floods, droughts and civil wars that have
gripped the region.
Agriculture accounts for two-thirds of total employment in
sub-Saharan Africa, and many farm workers have low and
unstable incomes, the ILO said. The majority of African women
are engaged in rural subsistence work, and nearly 50 million
children aged five to 14 are thought to be active in the
continent's workforce.
The report recommended that African countries seek to foster
more employment-heavy sectors of their economies.
"Little progress has been made in shifting the reliance
of African economic growth away from agriculture and resource
extraction towards manufacturing and other more dynamic and
knowledge-intensive activities in the service sector," it
said.
Kick-starting job creation would require steps to reduce the
time, cost and complexity of registering a businesses and
ensure that property rights and contracts are better-enforced,
according to the report.
Other constraints to African employment growth include
bureaucratic obstacles to international trade, difficulties in
accessing credit, especially for women, and erratic tax
regimes for entrepreneurs, the ILO found.
Africa
needs one million health workers
Sat April 14th, 2007
Africa is in need of about one
million health workers, a World Health Organisation (WHO)
official said in Johannesburg on Thursday.
The deficit worldwide was about four million, said the
executive director of the Global Health Workforce Alliance, Dr
Francis Omaswa.
"Africa is a real catastrophe," he told reporters on
the margins of an African health ministers' conference.
As a result of the shortage and Africa's burden of disease,
average life expectancy in some parts of Africa had dropped to
30, while 60 was the expected maximum.
Global warming was causing malaria
to spread, which added to the pressures created by Aids and
new epidemics like avian flu and severe acute respiratory
syndrome (Sars).
A 2006 WHO report identified 57 countries - 36 of them in
sub-Saharan Africa - which had such critical shortages that
they could not provide basic healthcare.
The alliance, established in May
2006, had as its aim the strengthening of the world's health
workforce and the creation of better working conditions.
Omaswa said after independence of African countries many
training institutions were not upgraded and health was not
made a priority. In addition the economies of the continent
did not perform well and foreign donors imposed policies that
led to a reduction in civil servants.
The former chief executive of the UK's National Health
Service, Sir Nigel Crisp, said people in Africa were dying
largely of preventable diseases.
"If you train medical assistants, they can do 'simpler'
but fantastically important things. A lot of those people you
can train quite quickly."
Dr Lincoln Chen, president of the US-based China Medical
Board, said Africa's health worker shortage was not yet past
its worst point due to the time lag involved in training new
doctors and nurses. "I think that it will get
worse."
Workers themselves were susceptible to diseases like HIV and
Aids and often found themselves playing the role of
"terminal care workers" to those beyond hope, which
had a demoralising effect.
Chen said within Africa, South Africa and Botswana's health
workers were the best paid. While the two countries were also
net importers of staff on the continent, in a global context
they lost workers to the north.
Aid agency Oxfam urged governments and donors to provide more
aid to solve the shortage.
In a report "Paying for People" published on
Thursday, Oxfam estimated that $13,7-billion had to be
invested every year to fund the additional 2.1 million
teachers and 4.2 million health care workers, half of them in
Africa, who were needed to break the cycle of poverty.
"The International Monetary Fund should stop imposing
ceilings on the wage bills for health and education budgets in
developing countries and should leave such decisions to
individual countries which are in a better position to judge
the most appropriate use of their budgets," it wrote in a
statement.
Africa was estimated to have three percent of the world's
health workers but 25 percent of the world's burden of
disease.
'Blacks have no power in
the boardroom'
While blacks were getting into
the boardrooms of South African companies, they had limited
decision-making powers due to their non-executive status,
Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said on Friday.
A total of 405 blacks held 558 of the 3 125 directorship
positions of the companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock
Exchange (JSE).
"However, roughly 83 percent of these are non-executive
positions," she said.
She was speaking at the Economic Empowerment Rating Agency's (Empowerdex)
book launch of "Trailblazers: Recognising South Africa's
Black Pioneers and Prodigies".
By 1997, there were 98 black
directors, and by 2005, there were 307 black directors sitting
on the boards of JSE-listed companies.
Research conducted by Empowerdex late last year revealed that
only 15 listed companies had predominantly black boards, while
166 had at least one black board member. There were 143
companies without a single black board member.
Mlambo-Ngcuka said it was
heartening that five of the top 10 most influential black
executives featured in the book were women.
"This is proof that the emphasis placed on gender
empowerment in new regulations, such as the codes of good
practice, are already taking effect."
She said "Trailblazers" showed that the
"so-called BEE gentlemen", also known as the
"usual suspects" were no longer hogging board
positions.
"While it was not uncommon a few years ago to see a few
BEE kingpins... sitting on nine to 12 boards each, directors
are no longer spreading themselves that thin. Today the 15
most active directors sit on an average of four boards
each."
This was a far cry from the record 29 board positions once
held by Anglo American's Leslie Boyd.
On remuneration, she said black directors were still not being
paid "anything near" what their white counterparts
were receiving.
"The top 10 black directors are paid almost a third of
that paid to the JSE's top 10 directors."
She said the struggle for South Africans was no longer
political, but economic, and its success depended on
transformation.
She quoted from Mamphele Ramphele, who tops the list South
Africa's most influential black executives: "Personal
enrichment should not be confused with black empowerment, one
cannot be fabulously rich on behalf of others".
esinislam.com + Agencies
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