East Asia & Pacific on the Rise (World Bank)

Answers to your questions on jobs and skills

 Earlier this week I asked you to send us your questions about the link between jobs and skills --which should I acquire to make it in the current job environment? Thanks for all the replies --there were so many and so interesting that Lars Sondergaard, our expert, will address in a separate blog post next week the ones that couldn't make it into the video interview. Stay tuned!

Categories: Blogs

Wanted: Jobs –and your questions about how to find them

Lars Sondergaard will answer 5 of your questions in a video

Use social media to ask the World Bank about the type of skills and education that are needed in today’s global economy.

The global economic recession has made the search for a good, stable job even more significant.  In Asia, where I’m from, jobs have always been foremost in young people’s minds because of the harsh conditions brought about by social and economic inequality or, if you’re not from a developing country, the previous generations’ memory of it. We don’t have an equivalent to a “gap year” to take time out between the life stages of high school and university to travel.

What can make a person more employable? Policymakers say that having the right skills and good education largely have something to do with that. It’s not just about being able to go to school. In Thailand and some other countries, schools are linking with companies so that students can enhance the skills their future employers needs. A World Bank report, Putting Higher Education to Work: Skills and Research for Growth, also recommends investing more in research and scholarships, prioritizing underfunded but important subjects like engineering and sciences, and improving the management of public universities.

Have your say

Do you have a question about the effect of the recession on joblessness in your region? Or the type of skills most needed by the market?

We’re asking an expert on education, Lars Sondergaard, to take questions in a video interview that we’ll post at the end of this week. 

Here’s how to get involved:

Send your question using the comment function below to ask our expert. You can do it right now. You can also join the conversation on Twitter (send your questions to @worldbankasia) or on Facebook.

So what are you waiting for? Ask now and share with your friends!

Categories: Blogs

Four years on: What China got right when rebuilding after the Sichuan earthquake

Paul Procee The devastation from the Sichuan earthquake was immense; the recovery, impressive.

Four years ago on May 12, 2008, the world was stunned by the news of an 8-magnitude massive earthquake that struck Wenchuan of Sichuan Province and affected, in total, ten provinces in Southwestern China.  

Official estimates put the number of affected people at 46.25 million, with some 69,227 deceased, 17,923 missing and 15 million displaced from their homes.

During our visits to those areas back then, we witnessed how water, electricity and gas systems were largely paralyzed and telecommunications and transportation severely disrupted.  General infrastructure was also overwhelmingly damaged, with approximately 7,444 schools and 11,028 medical institutions and 34,125 kilometers of highways devastated, in a region that was already among the poorest and most vulnerable in China.

The overall direct economic loss was estimated to be RMB 845 billion (US$ 130 billion).

In face of these severe human, material, economic and environmental damages, the Chinese government immediately set in motion a comprehensive relief and reconstruction program.

Our team worked on the World Bank-financed Wenchuan Earthquake Recovery Project. We recently concluded a review of China’s national master plan for rehabilitation and reconstruction of the earthquake and six sector-specific recovery plans. This includes lessons learnt from the Chinese and international experiences in earthquake reconstruction and policy recommendations to further improve reconstruction efforts. 

Having witnessed the immensity of the tasks accomplished, we’d like to share some of our key findings:

One of the most astonishing aspects is the speed and efficiency with which the Chinese government was able to mobilize government agencies, the private sector and the population at large. 

Soon after the disaster, the planning process for recovery and reconstruction efforts took off, including the optimization of the urban layout during reconstruction, the restoration and reconstruction of rural production and living facilities, the provision of health services; the creation of cultural, sporting and other public service facilities; the strengthening of disaster prevention and relief systems; the restoration of the ecological landscape; and the provision of psychological support of the affected population.

Most importantly, the government was able to capitalize on the opportunities presented by this disaster to plan the reconstruction in a way that allowed the affected provinces to move forward.

Another interesting part of the reconstruction was the way other provincial governments and the population at large got involved.

Overall, about 41,130 projects for reconstruction and rehabilitation were undertaken, 99% of which were completed within a two year period. This was largely made possible thanks to the innovative measures such as a partnership scheme set up among provinces – basically, the Central Government paired up each affected county with an unaffected province, which then worked to provide financial and technical assistance for reconstruction and restoration.

These provinces in turn worked to raise awareness among their population and industrial sectors of the needs of the affected provinces they were assisting.  In this way, civil society was also massively mobilized. In total, over RMB 949 billion (US$ 146 billion) were invested for reconstruction.

Furthermore, the earthquake provided an opportunity to reconstruct all public-service facilities in the affected areas with high seismic standards and modern equipment. Some RMB108 billion (US$ 16.6 billion) were spent in these facilities, including investments in medical and sanitation facilities and social management. Schools and hospitals are now fully restored and reconstructed, in addition to social welfare houses, elderly homes, community service centers, village activity centers, etc.

We are continuing to strengthen our partnership with the Chinese government on disaster and risk mitigation and management, by disseminating China’s great experience and expertise in disaster preparedness and relief to other countries in the region and worldwide.

This Monday (May 14), the China Emergency Relief Training Center (CERT) in Beijing, with support from GFDRR, through the World Bank, is offering the one-week Emergency Response and Relief Training to selected rescue teams from Indonesia, a country that has also been hit hard by natural disasters. This training is designed to prepare medical and rescue teams to respond to emergencies more effectively in future.

We hope that this will be the first of a series of such trainings through which China can share some of the know-how it has acquired from previous disasters such as the 08 earthquake.

Here, watch a video that records a training program on disaster preparedness for primary and second school teachers from the Sichuan earthquake-struck areas:

The details are also available in this story. And here are some previous blog posts about this earthquake.

Categories: Blogs

Can you hear me now? Yes - Mobile phones in the Mongolian countryside

Photo courtesy of Steve Burt through a Creative Commons license

A few years ago, I spent a few days in a ger (yurt) in what seemed like the end of the world—Baruunburen district in Mongolia’s Selenge province. It took more than seven hours to get there from Ulaanbaatar, via Erdenet, Mongolia’s third-largest city. The paved roads gave way to dirt ones, but even these faded away until they were nothing more than tire marks in the grass. We took the final leg of the journey on horseback through a small, rain-gorged river, and finally arrived at a ger, a white speck in a huge, green valley surrounded by hills that went on forever.

A little later, I checked my phone to see if there was a signal. There wasn’t. Then my host pointed to a nearby hilltop and explained that I could catch a signal from there, so off I went. It took about 20 minutes of vigorous climbing to get the top, but it was worth it. The view was spectacular, and sure enough, I caught a stray signal. I pinched off a few text messages to my wife, a continent away in Ukraine.

It may seem inconvenient to climb a hill to use your phone, but think—ten years ago, even this would have been impossible. In a country where three million people are spread over 1.5 million square kilometers (Mongolia is the least densely populated country in the world), communicating without mobile phones can be difficult and expensive. Just think how hard it would be to get a message to a herder somewhere in the hills, or to someone in a ger in the next valley. It’s easy to see that mobile technology is more than a convenience in rural Mongolia.

The Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid (GPOBA), a partnership of donors and international organizations, had a lot to do with developing rural communications in Mongolia’s countryside. With World Bank support, it piloted an approach to bring voice and broadband Internet services to the countryside in partnership with private service operators. This led to a highly successful rollout on a much bigger scale.  In an article in Handshake, a journal on public-private partnerships, GPOBA reports that today all 335 districts in Mongolia have mobile phone services, broadband Internet services are now available in 34 district centers, and the distance herders have to travel to make a call has fallen by more than half.

But that’s not all—mobile banking is taking off in Mongolia. Several of its top banks, including Khan Bank and XacBank, have been expanding their mobile banking services to the countryside. This means herders won’t always have to travel to conduct financial transactions, which will make their lives a lot easier. And I’ll be able to pay a few bills the next time I want to send a text to my wife.

There are probably other ways that mobile phone technology is changing life in the Mongolian countryside, ones that city dwellers like me can't imagine. If you have any good stories, please share them in the comments section below.

Categories: Blogs