Sindh Youth Policy seeks to empower the youths of the province economically, social, and politically, besides proposing effective institutional mechanism and an elaborate action plan divided into short, mid and long term strategies with targets fixed and input resources identified for the next five years in wake of the key challenges being faced by the youth.
Sindh government has prepared youth copy, a copy of which has been obtained by Business Recorder. The draft policy states that joblessness and underemployment are causing to shrink the economic growth, gearing up physical and psychological insecurities among prospective leaders of the Sindh leading to social instability, personal dissatisfaction, conflict, greater poverty and substance abuse.
One of the key issues faced by youth is economic empowerment. Data reveals that it is deeply linked with the over-all economic and poverty profile and trends of labour force development of the country and is not just youth-specific. However, as a glaring youth-specific trend in Pakistan, the possibility of unemployment rate is much higher for better-educated youth, and the initial earnings of better educated youth are not much different from those of less-educated youth (compared with wages for adults with similar education levels).
The list of economic challenges to youth may include unemployment, underemployment, working long hours under informal, intermittent and insecure work arrangements; working below their potential in low-paid, low-skilled jobs without prospects for career advancement; being trapped in involuntary part-time, temporary, casual or seasonal employment; and frequently working under poor and precarious conditions in the informal economy, the policy document revealed.
According to national statistics, unemployment rate among youth is 2-3 times higher as compared to adults. As many as 51.4 percent youth (15-29 years) is out of the labor force and only 8 percent youth is self-employed which might be indicative of lack of entrepreneurship skills among youth.
"There is also a sheer size of the uneducated youth in Pakistan (32 percent) with no vocational and life skills that end up in elementary occupations or remain either unemployed or inactive. As 9th largest country in the world with respect to size of its labour force, Pakistan faces immense challenges in the employment sector," it added.
In Sindh province, Youth faces high unemployment trends and the number of unemployed people has risen (in 2010-2011) from 0.57 million to 0.70 million. A large number of youth is out of labour force data, with a high degree of gender disparity. Female inactivity in the province was very high (91.5 percent) in 2006-07, the document mentioned.
However, unemployment rate among youth in Sindh (5 percent) is lower as compared to other provinces of Pakistan and it is further lower among the graduates (3.6 percent) of the province. The economic health of youth in the Sindh province is also spatially determined with severe vocational deviations. According to a survey, four types of economic groups exist in the rural areas of Sindh, namely: only-agriculture, agriculture-cum-livestock (mixed), only-livestock and off farm activities (employed/self employed). Of these groups, the rural economy is largely based on mixed agriculture and livestock farming where 60 percent of farmers belong to this group. In Sindh, 32 percent are associated with only-agriculture and the remaining work as labour, it added.
Sindh has lower multi dimensional poverty indices as compared to other provinces but there is a stark difference between urban (13.6) and rural indices (78.21), which shows that rural areas of Sindh are in extreme poverty and facing multiple deprivations. The districts of Tharparkar, Thatta, Badin, Jacobabad, Ghotki, Mirpurkhas, Sanghar and Shikarpur are the most deprived districts of Sindh. The poor have low access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities and have lack of physical infrastructure, agriculture extensions, more shocks to local economies, low paid and seasonal non farm incomes. Rural poverty is found to be strongly correlated with lack of asset in rural areas especially holding of land.
The devastating floods of 2011, had drastic impact on economy of the province, according to World Bank and Asian Development Bank report, 27,000 sq. Km area damaged in Sindh province out of the total 27,370 sq. Km. affecting 1.9 million people across Sindh and Balochistan. In addition, law and order situation in Karachi has very negative impact on socio-economic environment of the province, the document stated.
The Policy would empower youth at all three levels: (i) economic, (ii) social, and (iii) political. By examining the key challenges to youth, it further devises effective institutional mechanism and an elaborate action plan divided into short, mid and long term strategies with targets fixed and input resources identified for the next five years. Additionally, it would serves as a glaring example of multi-sectoral alliance and public - private partnership in the public policy making to respond to and transform the youth bulge into a dividend for Sindh and Pakistan, it mentioned.