REGIONAL APPROACH CAN DELIVER BIG BENEFITS

A new ETF project is looking at how to develop regional qualifications for the building and tourism trades in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia.

A builder from Cairo is hoping to find a better job by moving to Amman in Jordan. A Tunisian hotel receptionist is aiming to find work in a five-star hotel in Marrakesh in Morocco. Just imagine how much easier things could be for these individuals and for their future employers if they could only take their qualifications with them.

The need for regional qualifications – something which could act as a kind of professional passport for people across four countries of the Mediterranean – is the driving force behind a new ETF project which began with a launch event in Tunis in December 2009.

The six-year initiative will facilitate the development of internationally-recognised qualifications in sectors which are seen as priorities for the region, starting with the sectors of tourism and construction. “We are trying to benchmark qualifications, see if they are comparable and see if we can move towards a common understanding of what a regional qualification could look like,” said Eva Jimeno Sicilia, the ETF’s Deputy Head of Operations for ENP South.

Tourism industry

Employers as well as politicians see the need for this kind of initiative and hope it could upgrade workers’ skills and help them develop new ones. “Tourism is a very labour intensive industry and the tastes of tourists are changing – we now need to talk about new technology, health and eco-tourism for instance – so the need for competences is both varied and urgent,” said Loïc Gogue, representative of the Moroccan National Tourism Federation.

The Arab Contractors Group works in 23 countries as well as its native Egypt. “When we work abroad we use local workers for less important jobs, but we tend to send the management team from Egypt,” said Anis Zakhary, Advisor to the Chairman, “but it is hard to find these very qualified people.” He believes the barriers to workers becoming more internationally mobile are often cultural – such as being unable to speak the language – rather than the lack of technical skills.

The two days in Tunis launched the debate on how to proceed. Whether to create new qualifications for the two sectors or concentrate on benchmarking existing ones was a big issue. People also discussed whether the pilot should target traditional jobs or some of the newly emerging ones. What became clear was that employers’ federations in countries such as Egypt and Morocco have already done a lot of work on occupational standards and this can provide useful building blocks for the new initiative.

Mutual trust

What was also clear was that participants could see significant gains in adopting a regional approach. It could facilitate mutual learning and build mutual trust between industry and education stakeholders and between countries they concluded. “It could allow us to become a kind of observatory on the region,” said Fatma Bennour of the Federation of Tunisian Hotels, “we can build a common framework and then allow individual countries to fill in the rest according to their specifities.” It could also facilitate the mobility of workers thereby satisfying the needs of labour markets and relieving demographic pressures. “If we work together, it will be easier to exploit the relative strengths of different countries and we will be able to achieve more with less,” said Filippo del Ninno of the ETF.