Education reform aims to address joblessness

The World Bank and the Albanian government are working on a new strategy to reform the education system to better respond to labor market needs.
TIRANA, Sept 18. – A top World Bank representative raised major concerns this week over the quality of the education system in Albania and its effects on massive unemployment, particularly among young people and women.
The World Bank’s regional director, Ellen Goldstein, said at a high-level conference that reforming its education system is the largest challenge Albania faces in improving job prospects for the young people, which face a record unemployment.
The World Bank and the Albanian government have decided to work together on a new strategy to reform the education system to better serve the needs of the labor market, Prime Minister Edi Rama said at the conference.
The World Bank has supported the Albanian education system for two decades, mainly with investments, but its representatives said this week that Albania still lags behind the region and must work harder to meet European standards.
Goldstein further offered a statistic that indicated massive workforce under-utilization in Albania.
“About 40 percent of the working age population is neither working nor looking for work, and are passive in this regard,” she said at the conference. “These figures are higher for youths, women and the poor.”
Goldstein added Albania needs a fundamental education reform to help increase employment by adapting to market needs.
Albania is facing difficult challenges of the labor market, and should boost competitiveness, World Bank experts said. For example, employment of women in Albania is extremely low, only 30 percent, data shows.
Prime Minister Rama described the situation as grave, adding a radical reform at all levels of education was needed.
He said there had been a fundamental lack of educational standards, so the government is working with the European Union and the World Bank to increase funding for education and take on the reform as a major challenge.
The government believes that vocational education will reduce unemployment, because young people will not follow general studies but take on a marketable skills at an early age. To that end, it is hoping to open more trade schools, following the example of Germany and Austria, which have successful education systems and low unemployment rates.
The latest efforts come as data earlier this month showed youth unemployment climbed to a historic high of 33.5 percent in the second quarter of 2014, meaning one out of three people aged between 15 to 29 find themselves jobless, according to a labour force survey published by the country’s state statistical institute, INSTAT.
The unemployment rate for this category has increased by around 10 percent in the past couple of years rising from 23.6 percent in the first quarter of 2012 to 30.2 percent in early 2014 and 33.5 percent in the second quarter of 2014. Youth aged 15 to 29 years old who said they were students or attending training accounted for 62.7 percent of young men and women economically not active.
With Albania’s average population age at 31, one of the youngest in Europe along with Kosovo, youth unemployment has become a top concern although most young men and women nowadays manage to get a university degree, unveiling the inefficiency of the education system but also crisis impacts as the private sector has almost frozen new hiring. Around 12.6 percent of youth aged between 15 to 29 are classified as discouraged workers.