As more than 90 developing economies are dependent on commodity exports, building the skills needed to add value to raw materials and provide decent work are two of the key objectives to be discussed next week at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (Unctad’s) eighth Global Commodities Forum, taking place at the Palais des Nations, in Geneva, from April 23 to 24.
The Global Commodities Forum provides a “high-level, neutral multistakeholder and free” platform to discuss issues related to the production and trade of commodities.
In a statement released last week, Unctad noted that moving up the value chain would help commodity-dependent developing countries achieve their Sustainable Development Goals, in particular Goal 4, pertaining to professional education, Goal 8, providing decent work, and Goal 9, which prioritises industrial development.
“Lack of skilled workers [discourages] investment in value-added activities, which, in turn, limits incentives for young adults to acquire more skills,” Unctad commodity implementation and outreach chief Yanchun Zhang said.
“Those workers seeking careers in skilled fields often choose to pursue education and jobs abroad, fuelling a brain drain from developing countries, and further [discouraging] investments in industrial development. It’s a vicious circle.”
Unctad commented that calibrating skill- building programmes to the needs of employers can be tricky. The organisation cited the Republic of Congo’s partnership with petroleum company Total to establish master’s programmes in engineering and geology. Unctad noted that, while the partnership had produced a steady flow of graduates, Congolese employment in the oil sector still did not meet expectations and “employers continue to complain of a shortage of skilled workers, as well as a mismatch between their needs and the training graduates receive”.
In light of the difficulty in establishing effective training programmes, Unctad’s plenary themes to be considered through panel discussions and open debates during the two-day event will include skills for trade and economic diversification, sustainable job creation in extractive industries, multiskill training in agricultural value addition, energy transition, natural gas and the skills gap, as well as changing skills requirements in the mining sector.