Government is being faulted for showing lack of political will to invest in the Ministry of Labour (MoL) enough resources to stimulate employment creation as evidenced by the funds it has channeled to the ministry in the 2016\/2017 national budget.<\/p>\n
But government has justified the allocation saying it is relevant considering the pressure it has to implement the budget in the absence of significant external support.<\/p>\n
Government has allocated K9.7 billion to the Ministry of Labour in the 2015\/2016 national budget, a large chunk of which is money from Malawi\u2019s development partners including the European Union which will support the technical and vocational training programme.<\/p>\n
Further, the sum of K1.6 billion has been allocated to projects under the community colleges programme, in addition to an amount of about K650 million for programme operations.<\/p>\n
But the Communication Workers Unions (Cowuma) has faulted government for focusing much of its attention on community colleges while neglecting to fund the core functions under the mandate of the Ministry of Labour.<\/p>\n
Cowuma General Secretary, Hamilton Deleza, said it is unfortunate that despite the Ministry of labour being key in stimulating employment growth in the country, it continues to lack adequate resources needed to effectively carry out its duties.<\/p>\n
Deleza said the Ministry of Labour has a mandate to support workers, employers and other stakeholders but that funding challenges makes it even impossible for the ministry officials to carry out workplace inspections, thereby compromising working standards in the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you visit labour offices, you will find that they are either understaffed or do not have enough equipment to work with and that there are no adequate resources to finance their daily operations,\u201d he said<\/p>\n
While commending government for allocating K1.6 billion to projects under the community colleges Programme, Deleza said government needs to strike a balance between resources channeled to the skills development programme and core operations of the ministry to ensure that Malawi meets its agenda of decent work creation for all.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile we encourage government to give its support to the technical colleges\u2019 agenda, we also would want government to increase its support towards the operational requirements of the ministry,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
But government has since justified the amount of money channeled to the Ministry of Labour saying the allocation is relevant considering the pressure to implement the budget in the absence of significant external support.<\/p>\n
Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Labour, Patrick Kabambe, is optimistic that MoL will be able to deliver on some of the key priority areas under its mandate. He said the ministry will use the available resources to focus on its key functions and ensure that those functions are performed well.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are living in an environment where the needs are so many and you would always want to ask for more money but we are quite comfortable with the allocation we have received because given the circumstances that the country is in, we think what we got was good enough,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Kabambe also justified the additional K1.6 billion allocated to the community colleges programme in addition to an amount of about K650 million for programme operations, saying the skills development programme will help in employment creation, especially for the country\u2019s youth.<\/p>\n
We are always in touch with industry and we believe that we are responding to the needs of industry through the skills that we are offering students at the community colleges,\u201d<\/p>\n
When he came into office, President Peter Mutharika elevated the Ministry of Labour to become one of the priority ministries with a mandate to oversee employment creation through impartation of vocational skills.<\/p>\n
But economic commentators continue to lament the insufficient funds channeled to the ministry arguing that its lack of financial capacity defeats the government\u2019s ambitious plan to position it as a vehicle to spur job creation and create an enabling environment for decent working conditions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Government is being faulted for showing lack of political will to invest in the Ministry of Labour (MoL) enough resources to stimulate employment creation as evidenced by the funds it has channeled to the ministry in the 2016\/2017 national budget. But government has justified the allocation saying it is relevant considering the pressure it has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":26233,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26231"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26252,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26231\/revisions\/26252"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}