PRIME Minister Kassim Majaliwa has directed regional authorities, municipal and district councils to allocate areas for public empowerment activities.
The Premier issued the directive during the Second National Economic Empowerment Forum jointly organised by the National Economic Empowerment Council (NEEC) and Tanzania Standard (Newspapers) Limited (TSN), in Dodoma, yesterday.
The PM said that areas allocated for empowerment projects or activities must be surveyed before being offered to individuals.
In his speech read by the Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office, Policy, Parliament, Labour, Employment, Youth and Disabled Jenista Mhagama, the Premier said basic infrastructure that support investment must also be availed to the earmarked areas.
“This order was first issued on November 20, last year and once again we are giving it.
I’ve been ordered to inform you that it does not paint a good picture if we find Mr Majaliwa that the areas earmarked for setting up investment under economic empowerment initiative are friendly to the public,” she insisted.
Ms Mhagama implored regional, district and ministerial leaders to be creative enough in designing programmes to empower youth economically, including of “The law is neither Quran nor Bible.
What is required is information. We need to share information so that we find answers in case we face challenges in our efforts to empower our people economically,” she insisted.
Ms Mhagama said the plan was to have a basic product in each district to facilitate investment.
According to Ms Mhagama, local researchers in the country were capa-ble of conducting researches to establish products suitable for each district.
“We are going to implement a mega project at Mkulazi in Morogoro Region by construct-ing a sugar plant.
This plant will be the first of its kind in East and Central Africa,” she said.
NEEC Executive Secretary Beng Issa said the forum aimed to, among other things; give stakeholders a platform to share views that would empower peo-ple economically.
She said that in 2004, the government conducted research on the state of manpower skills after which it was noted that employers were complaining on grounds of poor skills on the side of manpower.
She said the research revealed that only 3.6 per cent of Tanzanians possessed the requisite skills while 16.6 per cent of the citizens had moder-ate skills.
The remaining 70.6 per cent of Tanzania had low level of the required skills.“We want to reduce this huge percentage of low skilled people from 70.6 to 54 per cent. We must teach our people skills.
In this sense, we have to increase the percentage of moderate skilled people from 16.6 per cent to 43 per cent and high skilled people from 3.6 to 12 per cent,” she insisted.
The target must be attained within the period of five years.Ms Beng said Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology (DIT)’s Mwanza branch has introduced a special training to 1,000 youth on how to add value to hides for shoe manufacturing.
The representative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Amon Manyama urged the govern-ment to have policies and strat-egies that will create environ-ment for building capacity for the public, especially on entre-preneurship.
©Daily News
