Low qualifications and poor employment skills

The first barriers for young people in rural areas are scant qualifications and poor employment skills. Dr. Nguyen Thi Thu Hoai from the Institute for Social Development Studies said that according to recent surveys on employment and labour, trained workers in rural areas account for just 2.7 percent while technical staff working in offices only make up 1 percent. The rate of non-agricultural workers in rural areas is around 27 percent while the rate of agricultural workers is 32 percent and the unemployment rate for people aged between 15 and 29 in rural areas amounts to 77 percent. In fact, almost all the rural youth are employed with low incomes. Some of them develop a household economy on a small scale and do not apply science and technology in agricultural production, leading to low gains in productivity.

In addition, some young people begin their career by doing traditional handicrafts such as woodwork, lacquering, and pottery. However, traditional handicrafts have only been developed on a small scale as young people in rural areas are not able to develop them in a professional way.

To cope with such difficulties, many young people move to the big cities to find jobs. However, due to their low qualifications and skills, they can only find unstable jobs or work in industrial parks with low incomes. In fact, generating jobs for young people has become an urgent problem.

Thirsty for loans

At the moment, the number of young people who are able to access loans for business or for career building purposes is selected and negligible. A youth official said his locality’s fund has only enough for 15 young people to borrow VND7 million each. However, there are a great many of young people who want to borrow loans for business purposes, not to mention the hundreds of young people who are not members of the youth union.

Nguyen Van Thieng, deputy secretary of the Dong Anh district Youth Union, Hanoi, said that providing loans for young people has not met the demands. The small amount of money and short-term loans are not enough and not effective.

Dr. Tran Hoang Phuong said that young people need more advice in how to use loans effectively or otherwise it becomes a burden. It is a fact that some credit projects and programmes have not yet paid off because young people have used the loans for personal items rather than for production purposes.

Breakthrough solutions

Providing a secondary education for all young people in the country side is considered a solution and an urgent need to help them access better conditions to set up their businesses in the context of a highly-demanding intellectual working environment.

More importantly, the State should continue its reforms in the field of education with a focus on training in technology, high-tech and on-demand training.

It is necessary to build training models suitable for each locality, which helps save time and money for the rural youth. In addition, building supportive policies for young people, creating favourable conditions for them to get involved further in rural economic development and providing loans are considered important solutions to help young people in the process of setting up their own businesses.