ADB approves $300-million loan to help prepare graduates for workplace

THE Asian Development Bank (ADB) will lend the Philippines $300 million to finance programs by the national and local governments to better prepare graduates for work.

The ADB Board of Directors approved the loan yesterday, as part of the Facilitating Youth School-to-Work Transition Program implemented by the Labor department as well as other government agencies and local government units in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.

“The Philippines has a young population with an average age of 25 years. Therefore, creating wage jobs for youth is vital to reducing poverty and income inequality,” said Kelly Bird, Director for Public Management, Financial Sector, and Trade Division of ADB’s Southeast Asia Department.

According to the development lender, only one out of five high school graduates in Metro Manila and Cebu City found employment within a year of leaving school.

In 2013, one in four young persons was not in employment, education, or training — a rate second only to Indonesia in Southeast Asia.

ADB cited that inadequate and underfunded government employment services as well as weak post-high school training as constraints in the youth’s schoolto-employment transition.

Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III said earlier that the country is at what he ASIAN Development Bank in Manila descr ibed a “demographic sweet spot,” where the younger generation start to enter the work force. He said that the country must invest in them and create jobs, to be globally competitive.

The government enacted a law in 2015 mandating the institutionalization of public employment services off ices (PESOs) in local governments and secured funding for them.

The government also passed amendments to the Special Program for the Employment of Students Act that provides paid internships to poor students to keep them in college.

It also enacted a law institutionalizing and funding the nationwide roll-out of the JobStart Philippines Program that provides skills training and internships to out- of- school youth to raise their chances of productive employment.

The program will include a series of government policy actions to raise the youth employment rate. It will support the government’s efforts to restructure its PESO and labor market activation programs and roll out new services to assist youth and strengthen training and apprenticeship programs.

Published early last month, The Asian Development Outlook 2017: Transcending the MiddleIncome Challenge had 6.4% economic growth outlook for the Philippines this year, which is lower than the actual 6.9% recorded in 2016.

The government expects the gross domestic product to grow 6.5-7.5% this year, then 7-8% subsequently until 2022. —