Tajikistan looks for moves on migrants

Many of them are from Tajikistan.

Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and nearly 15 years after the end of the bitter ethnic and tribal civil war that tore Tajikistan apart, endemic poverty and an economy that struggles to find jobs for half its workforce means migrant labour is critical. Fifty percent of Tajikistan’s annual gross domestic product, around US$1.7 billion, is sent home each year from the estimated one million, mostly male, migrant workers.

The vast majority of those men work in Russia where wages are seven times higher than at home.

The sheer size of this migrant workforce – representing more than one-tenth of the entire Tajikistan population of 7.6 million – makes it a key factor which shapes current employment and training policies.

The sheer size of this migrant workforce – representing more than one-tenth of the entire Tajikistan population of 7.6 million – makes it a key factor which shapes current employment and training policies.

Migration is seen as both a positive factor, as a source of economic and political stability, as the absent migrant workers can reduce social tensions at home by creating job opportunities for those left behind.

It is also negative because of its adverse impact on families left behind and because few skills picked up abroad, apart from building and construction qualifications, are relevant to the Tajikistan economy.

Now the Tajikistan government, with the help of the European Training Foundation, the World Bank and other donor agencies, has begun to formulate

long-term strategic policies to reform the internal labour market to ensure Tajikistan is less reliant upon exporting migrant labour.

Jamshed Kuddusov, director of Dushanbe’s Socservice Information and Research Centre, which works with the ETF in implementing labour market, policy and vocational education research, observes that, the “problem of outflow of labour migrants will not be solved within the next ten years.”

The author of a major ETF report, Labour market review – Tajikistan, published last year, he notes that only through the implementation of a new national strategy on labour market development through 2020, approved by the Tajikistan government in June this year, “can we stabilise the quantity of labour migrants.”

With a rapidly growing population – the

working age population increased by 41% between 1998 and 2007 at a time when the labour market expanded just

just 19% and a vocational education and training system that until 2005 was chronically underfunded and even now struggles to offer places to just 45% of school leavers, Tajikistan is facing major structural challenges to reforming its labour market.

The rapid rise in young working age people – half of them women – “requires intensive growth in the number of workplaces,” says Kuddusov.

“We need to develop business in the country; to really improve the business environment, industry, the power sector, tourism, services and farming, particularly the processing of agricultural products,” he adds.

None of this can be achieved without an improvement in professional training and vocational education, although sounding a note of caution that will surprise no one familiar with the education sector in Central Asia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, Kuddusov adds: “The main deterrent [to such developments] is universal corruption.”

culture of paying bribes to pass exams. Students also often drop out of VET after choosing inappropriate courses or applying simply to avoid serving in the army.

With corruption or without it, the high level of labour force growth, widespread unemployment – officially (and understated) 7% – and an increasing tendency to people taking second jobs to supplement low wages in their main place of work, means there is a need to create 150,000 new jobs every year. Employment would need to grow at 7% annually, although current figures show it is increasing at eight times lower than that rate at just 0.9%.

The need for vocational training and specific programmes to help the school-to-work transition remains a pressing one in a country with an annual per capita income of just US$ 2,000.

Next year the ETF plans to launch a project that involves a survey on school-to-work transition to provide an evidence base for better policies to address this key area.

Building on the most recent work in this field, a study by the Centre for Strategic Studies attached to the Executive Office of the President of Tajikistan that surveyed more than 4,000 school leavers in 28 urban areas and districts, the ETF will undertake a more detailed investigation.

Kuddusov observes: “It is necessary to develop professional training and to determine who to train and in which fields,” he says.

Key objectives should include training for entrepreneurship and developing an efficient system for helping young people “choose a trade properly” through the creation of a “national system of vocational counselling of youth and career formation, and for adults to facilitate lifelong learning and trade transition.”

Without efforts to change the structure of Tajikistan’s labour and training market, the country is likely to remain locked into a system of a diaspora labour force for many years to come.

One reason for the poor level of skilled technicians in Tajikistan is the endemic