ILO and UNICEF join forces to improve vocational training for youth in Lebanon
A joint UNICEF and ILO project works to strengthen technical and vocational training for youth in Lebanon, in line with labour market needs.
The project will conduct labour market assessments on the community and national level, and develop and implement a curriculum of competency-based training programmes that respond to labour market demands.
The project will ultimately benefit low-skilled youths, who form the majority of job seekers in Lebanon.
“This joint initiative is the result of close collaboration between the two sister UN agencies, and a shared desire to give young people access to decent work,” said ILO’s Regional Director for Arab States Ruba Jaradat.
“This partnership will address many of the challenges facing the Lebanese labour market through providing a better understanding of market dynamics, a skilled workforce responding to market needs, and access for youths to informed career guidance and counselling services,” Jaradat continued.
Following the outbreak of conflict in neighbouring Syria in 2011, the influx of refugees increased the number of job seekers in Lebanon’s already beleaguered labour market, doubling the unemployment rate to 20 per cent by 2014.
The country’s labour market is also characterized by inadequate job creation, underemployment (where workers’ skills are underutilized), informality, and skills mismatches (where skills do not meet the needs of the labour market).
“As one of the lead agencies in education and youth, UNICEF is eager to invest its technical and financial resources in this project because it will reform the formal and non-formal technical and vocational education and training sector,” said UNICEF Lebanon Representative Tanya Chapuisat.
“This timely collaborative effort will thus play an important role in increasing the employability of job-seeking youth in Lebanon and ensuring the fair and smooth transition of youth into the labour market,” Chapuisat added.
The project, titled “Towards improved formal and non-formal technical and vocational education and training in Lebanon,” was launched in January of this year. It had previously received US$ 0.5 million in funding from UNICEF. The agency increased its funding by $US 2 million to ensure the project’s sustainability until mid-2019, and its ability to achieve planned results in coordination with government institutions, the private sector and NGOs.
The Unicef/ILO partnership complements similar work the ILO has recently launched in the TVET field in Lebanon, through two other parallel projects. The first is funded by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and works with the Ministry of Agriculture to improve access to employment opportunities and livelihoods in rural areas through upgrading the agricultural technical education system. The second, funded by the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, works to improve the technical capacity of vocational trainers to provide market-oriented training.
For media inquiries, please contact:
ILO: Salwa Kanaana, Regional Communications Officer, kanaana@ilo.org, +961 71 505958UNICEF: Amira Alameddine, Communications Officer, aalameddine@unicef.org, +961 (0)3 922 332