Mitigating educated youth unemployment in Bangladesh

Ever-increasing unemployment or underemployment of educated youth is taking its toll on Bangladesh as it is giving birth to new social unrest in the country. While its national average unemployment rate is 4.2 per cent, the rate is 2.7 per cent among those who have studied up to primary level and 11.2 per cent among those who have graduated from the universities. If such a trend continues, over the next ten years, the working-age population structure in Bangladesh would grow more than two million annually. Since the rate of job creation is lagging far behind, excessive unemployment may not only increase the rate of crime and social maladies but also cause social unrest. The recent student protest movement against the existing quota/reservation policy in public service recruitment is indicative of this alarming trend. Drawing on the publicly available data and information, this conceptual paper makes the case that youth unemployment and underemployment in Bangladesh is the result of underdeveloped skills that is due to the lack of proper and purposeful education and human resource development policy. Under the current system, technical education remains below par and the few technical education institutions that the country has are not producing enough and relevant skilled workers. It is unfortunate that there is existing and growing demand for skilled human resources for various sectors of the economy, while, despite explosive growth in tertiary education at universities, the pool of educated unemployed is also growing. Due to the scarcity of qualified manpower, Bangladeshi companies often hire better skilled people from abroad by incurring higher costs and keeping a portion of Bangladeshi citizens out of job. Bangladesh therefore needs to address its skills mismatch phenomenon first. More specifically, the country must equip its youth with right set of skills, which would make them employable in the fast-changing job market both inside and outside the country. To make it happen, the country needs a policy shift on an urgent basis, which would include but not limit to interfacing its formal education with technical training, technical training with labour market entry, and labour market entry to the workplace.