Dr Satish Chand
The Pacific Islands may be short of many things but not workers, and young workers in particular. Coincidentally, this is exactly what neighbouring industrialised nations of Australia, New Zealand, and Japan need. Both brains and biceps are already in short supply in Australia.

The Federal Government announced in its last budget an increase in intake of permanent migrants for 2008-09 of 190,300; and, an additional 100,000 skilled workers are to be allowed in on temporary (457) work visas.
Pacific islands are unlikely to win a significant share of these places, but they have a scheme of their own in the pipeline to allow in unskilled workers on a temporary basis.

Population growth rates are likely to remain high within the Islands for the foreseeable future. Even if birth rates fall, more people will be entering child-bearing age for the next few decades as these people have already been born.

Solomon Islands, as an example, has some 42 percent of its population that is less than 15 years of age. It will be another 20 years at least before these individuals move out of their reproductive phase. Population growth rates in the more populous states of Papua New Guinea (at 2.5 percent), Solomon Islands (2.8 percent), Vanuatu (2.7 percent), and Timor-Leste (3.2 percent) are high and likely to remain so for a while.

The issue at hand for the islands is how best to position their people for a global labour market which is likely to require young and productive workers with the rewards for their effort likely to be the largest for their brains, not their biceps.

While it is true that Pacific Islanders as a whole are blessed with beautiful physique, including their intellect, it is a matter of choice as to which of the two—the biceps or the brain—gets utilised most to maximise future earnings. If it were the brain, then we should be investing in facilities that provide the best training for our youth. It is this issue that I want to take up here.

Need to improve access to educational facilities

On training facilities, we need to look at the entire value chain in so far as education for our youth is concerned. Let us start from primary education. Some 95 percent of children of school age in Fiji, Samoa and Tonga reach grade 5 after entering school; the corresponding figures for PNG is 58 percent and for Nauru a meagre 25 percent.

These figures do not tell much about the proportion of children of school age as a whole that acquire literacy and numeracy skills—thus, little is known of the quality of education imparted.

More worrying is the fact that enrolment rates for primary school age children may be considerably lower. I am reliably informed that less than half of primary school age children in PNG ever get to school. Many of our primary school teachers remain untrained; better than no teachers at all, but not by a big margin.

Good primary education is necessary as the foundations on which a strong secondary and tertiary education can be built upon.

Numbers are rubbery, but some crude estimates show that only one in 10 students who get into Grade 1 end up in secondary school in Solomon Islands.

Add the many that never make it to school from the rest of the Pacific and this then makes a sure recipe for providing hordes of unskilled workers in search of menial jobs for the next several decades.

It also short changes these poorly trained individuals from using their latent intellect to do better—both for themselves and for their communities. Assuming that workers will continue to have access to jobs abroad, it is time to invest in up-skilling our youth.

Raising the quantity and quality of the trained

How can access to schooling be improved, you may ask? Difficult for many given their precarious fiscal position; PNG possibly the exception. Expanding supply quickly may be beyond the fiscal capacities of many Pacific governments, but this is where donors such as Australia and New Zealand can help. Donors are contributing, but more could be done.

Some joint and concerted effort to scaling up resources for primary and secondary education with a view to raising educational outcomes is long overdue. Demand for schoolling also needs to be scaled up. No point in having lots of unfilled seats in schools. Ready access to jobs for the skilled will provide the incentives while short-term seasonal work abroad for the unskilled the liquidity for such investments.

Let me now turn to our tertiary training facilities. Their role is critical for the preparation of our workers for the skilled end of the international labour market. This is where pay is high and benefits likely to be even higher. But these jobs are competitive and require top rate training. Mediocrity on this front is simple madness.

The lack of adequate training locks people out of high paying jobs that in turn acts as a disincentive for skill-upgrading in the first place. We may already be in such a trap. You may argue that these same deficiencies apply to our elite athletes—true, but a handful break out—true again, but I am talking about the masses and not the gifted few.

How can we simultaneously improve the quantity of children receiving education and the quality of the throughput? There are no magic solutions here. We need to begin by recognising that many of our schools are simply not up to scratch. Reasons for this deficiency have to be worked out, but such an exercise is likely to take forever. There is a shorter way out of this conundrum, however. I have argued for direct cash subsidies to schools for progress in terms of completions and competencies attained in literacy and numeracy skills. This would definitely help.

This now leads me to our tertiary education. The Universities of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) and the South Pacific (USP) have played significant roles in training our professionals.

USP and UPNG sit at the apex of the training and education pyramid for the Pacific region as a whole. These institutions need to live up to their expectations. As premier tertiary institutions, they have an obligation to the people of the Pacific to set standards and provide quality training at an internationally competitive price.

On quality-training, much remains to be desired. On prices, all of the local tertiary institutions have done well. I can, for example, vouch for the fact that tuition costs at USP and UPNG are a fraction of what is charged for similar (paper) qualifications in Australia.

USP and UPNG have indeed a responsibility in bringing their other sister institutions under an umbrella such that standards are harmonised both across institutions and maintained at internationally competitive levels.

A similar argument can be made for technical and vocational education. Tertiary technical institutions such as the University of Technology, Lae and the Fiji Institute of Technology (FIT) have an equal challenge to UPNG and USP. Considerable improvements in throughput and quality of their training have to be made if their graduates are to be competitive in a global labour market. This can be done as demonstrated by the experience of the Indian Institutes of Technologies (IITs).

Train or else...

People are our premier resource: so we claim! We need to up-skill them for an expanding global labour market. Otherwise, we will continue to be the saucepan of unskilled workers for fruit-picking jobs and the like for generations to come.

Australia is rumoured to be getting ready to announce a pilot ‘seasonal worker programme’ at the forthcoming Pacific Islands Leaders’ Forum in Niue. Even if it’s a pilot project, this is to be welcomed. Disturbingly, however, Fiji is to be excluded from this scheme due to Australia’s objections to the military government there. Many in Fiji have lost jobs due to the downturn in the economy brought about by the coup of December 2006. What the Fijian unemployed least need now is Australia (and New Zealand) joining forces with their leaders at home in robbing them of the opportunity to earn income elsewhere.

I may be counting my chickens before they have been hatched, but Pacific governments must invest in preparing their youth to earn skilled jobs in the global marketplace. If true to the rhetoric, then we as a community need to be investing in brains and not just biceps. Otherwise, much like our primary commodities, Pacific Islands workers will be exported cheap and unprocessed.