‘Enterprise development will generate more decent jobs’

Enterprise development will create more decent job opportunities and to maximise the changing work environment, the youth must develop themselves with need-based future skills, said experts.

While launching the month-long "Youth Employment Campaign 2021" on the future of work, workplace, workforce, and skills development on Wednesday in Dhaka, they encouraged the young people to be engaged in continuous learning as much as possible to gain appropriate skills.

The campaign is organised by the EMK Center, in partnership with The Business Standard and the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh (Ulab).

The inaugural ceremony started with good wishes and greetings from Mark Burrell, regional public administration specialist of the US Embassy, New Delhi.

"Being able to find opportunities and to take them is the most important task for a person," he commented.

At the programme, Gunjan Bahadur Dallakoti, SME development specialist at the International Labor Organisation (ILO) explained the mandate and projects of ILO in different countries.

Asif Uddin Ahmed, assistant professor at ULAB and acting director at the EMK Center, inaugurated the ceremony by sharing the campaign plan.

The title for the 2021 phase of the campaign is "Unleashing Youth | Education, Employment, and Engagement: Solving the "triple E" challenges for the youth of Bangladesh".

He shared that all the webinars, workshops, and training programmes are clustered around these three broad topics - the future of work, the future of the workplace and the future of the workforce so that specific policy recommendations can be generated for stakeholders to act on.

The event ended with a vote of thanks by Sharier Khan, executive editor at The Business Standard.

Sharier Khan mentioned that discussions addressing the problems which the youth face are crucial for development. He also encouraged stakeholders from all strata of the society to participate in such discussions.

To prepare the youth with futuristic skills and utilise work opportunities, the EMK Center has been arranging its flagship programme "Youth Employment Campaign" since 2020.

This year the virtual campaign is being participated by national and international experts, business leaders, youth activists, academicians, and government representatives.

The main target of the campaign is to find ways to make work better for the youth and to make the youth better at work, by connecting the dots between education, employment, and engagement innovatively.

The ceremony was moderated by Aisha Siddiqua, programme assistant at the EMK Center.