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Rabat – A recent UNICEF report said that three in four young people worldwide lack skills needed for employment, and the Moroccan youth is no exception.
Published on June 13 by the UNICEF Education Commission, the report titled, “Recovering learning” highlighted the gap in knowledge and skills among youth aged 15 to 24 in low-income countries compared to their peers in developed countries.
The report added that in at least one in three low-income countries, more than 85% of young people are “off-track” in secondary-level reading and math skills as well as digital and job-specific skills attainment.
Moroccan youth have notably held medium to low levels of mastering the secondary-level, digital, job-specific, and entrepreneurial skills, UNICEF noted. The trend extends to transferable skills, including life and socio-emotional capabilities.
Morocco performed similarly to its neighboring countries, Algeria and Tunisia. Tunisian and Algerian youth, however, mastered more advanced entrepreneurial skills than their Moroccan peers.
On the global scale, only two-fifths of youth worldwide are on track to attain secondary-level reading and math, transferable, and digital skills. Meanwhile, roughly a quarter of young people possess job-specific skills, whereas one-third of the youth is on track to attain entrepreneurial skills.
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Commenting on the findings, UNICEF Director of Education Robert Jenkins said that “the majority of children and young people across the world have been failed by their education systems, leaving them uneducated, uninspired, and unskilled — the perfect storm for unproductivity.”
This calls for “investment in cost-effective, proven solutions to fast-track learning and skills development for today’s generation and future generations is urgently needed to address this crisis,” Jenkins argued.
In response to the rising urgency of the issue, UNICEF launched the World Skills Clock, which aims to track the progress of global youth skills attainment “to prepare this generation to thrive in the future,” said Executive Director of UNICEF Education Commission, Liesbet Steer.
The UN agency further urged countries to provide quality education to address literacy and numeracy issues, stressing that the majority of 10-year-old children in low- and middle-income countries are unable to read and understand a simple text.
As knowledge retention is an accumulative process, access to quality education from a young age in all countries is key to creating innovative future generations, UNICEF argued.
“These foundational skills are the building blocks for further learning and skills development,” the report concluded.
