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East Asia & Pacific is facing some great development challenges today: urbanization, protection of the environment, the need to find renewable energy sources and many others. This site wants to create a conversation around those important issues. More »

Education

Answers to your questions on jobs and skills

Submitted by Anne Elicaño on Thu, 2012-05-17 12:22

 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!

 

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

Submitted by Anne Elicaño on Mon, 2012-05-14 17:24
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!

Saya mau anak saya belajar di sekolah seperti ini

Submitted by Nugroho Nurdikiawan Sunjoyo on Fri, 2011-11-04 12:12
Orangtua dan masyarakat akan semakin mendukung sekolah kalau memiliki informasi mengenai sumberdaya sekolah.

Juga tersedia di English

Bertahun-tahun yang lalu, saat saya masih di bangku sekolah, interaksi antara orangtua saya dengan sekolah terbatas hanya saat pembagian raport, juga beberapa kali saat saya sedang bermasalah. Itu saja. Meski anak saya baru berumur satu setengah tahun, saya sudah mulai mencari-cari sekolah yang cocok dan kalau bisa saya tidak mau ia belajar di sekolah seperti saya dulu.

Children enjoy learning, bringing better education in Timor-Leste

Submitted by Laura Keenan on Tue, 2011-10-18 11:56
With new learning materials, children are more interested to come to school as learning becomes more enjoyable.

I’ve always been passionate about the need to focus on education in order to achieve lasting development and this is especially true in Timor-Leste, a country with one of the youngest and fastest growing populations in the world. I visited a number of schools around the country to see the benefits of two of the World Bank’s projects in the education sector: the Fast Track Initiative Bridging Project 2009 and the Education Sector Support Project, co-funded by AusAID.

I want my children to go to this kind of school

Submitted by Nugroho Nurdikiawan Sunjoyo on Tue, 2011-09-13 17:49
Parents and community members are more willing to support a school from having full knowledge about the school's resources.

Available in Bahasa

Years and years ago, when I was still in school, the interaction my parents had with the school was only during report card day, and perhaps the odd times I got into trouble. That was it. Although my son is only a year and a half old, I’ve been on the lookout for a school and I would rather not have him study at the type of school I went to.

Travelling great distances to improve lives of rural Solomon Islands communities

Submitted by Alison Ofotalau on Mon, 2011-06-20 12:47
Map courtesy of Wikipedia through a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Taking development to the outlying provinces of Solomon Islands is not an easy ride. I found this out when going on a site visit to the Rural Development Program (RDP) at the country’s far western province of Choiseul.

At the Northwest region of Choiseul province where the island faces open waters that span to the Micronesian archipelago of the Pacific lies a village called Polo. The Polo community has a primary school that was established in 1957 when Solomon Islands was still a British Protectorate, prior to independence in 1978. Since its inception, the Polo school never had a permanent classroom building until two years ago when through the RDP participatory process, the community identified the school as their main need.

Higher education graduates in East Asia: Too few? Too many?

Submitted by Emmanuel Jimenez on Tue, 2010-05-18 18:26
East Asia and Pacific countries have more university graduates than ever, yet employers say they don't find the skills to match their needs.

The number of people with higher education credentials has never been higher in East Asia and the Pacific (EAP), according to a new World Bank website on higher education.   Over the past two decades, the number of university graduates in the region has increased significantly.  In countries like Thailand, Indonesia, and China, the percent of tertiary level graduates in the workforce is now about 20%, double from what it was 15 to 20 years ago. 

At the same time, employers fret that they are not getting the skilled workers they need to compete in a global economy.  Investment climate assessments  report that 20% of employers feel that skills availabilities are a major impediment to business, as much as, if not more than, meeting onerous regulations.

"What were you thinking?" — Helping adolescents recover from poor decisions

Submitted by Emmanuel Jimenez on Wed, 2010-03-10 13:17
Photo courtesy of drivefaraway under a Creative Commns license.

Parents all over are hard-pressed to respond to a teen or young adult who has made a poor choice. Why drop out of school when the returns are so high? Why smoke when the future health risks are well known?  Why have unprotected sex when the risks of contracting HIV/AIDs or some other STD are so high and one is not psychologically or economically ready to start a family? Why not wear a helmet when traffic accidents are the highest leading cause of death in many Asian countries? These seem such rational choices. It’s not rocket science. Or is it?

Empowering adolescent girls in East Asia and the Pacific to protect, build human capital

Submitted by Emmanuel Jimenez on Thu, 2009-12-10 15:30
Some recipients of a scholarship given to young girls in Cambodia at the end of primary school. The program has had a significant effect on girls’ secondary enrollment. (photo by Deon Filmer)

Those of us who have had the pleasure of raising an adolescent girl – and survived the experience – might blanch at the thought of a program to stimulate education that gave her, rather than the doting parent, a grant equivalent to 3% of the family’s average per capita monthly consumption. And yet, that’s exactly what a policy experiment, conducted by my friend Berk Ozler and other researchers, did in Malawi. What’s more, they found that raising these girl-targeted cash transfers increased school attendance much more than raising those given to parents.

Empowering women with resources has long been recognized as a powerful weapon to safeguard investments in human capital. Research has shown that transfers to women have a more powerful effect than to men in raising school attendance and ensuring that kids are immunized. But more recent research, like Berk et al.’s, is showing that policies aimed directly at adolescent girls and young women may have an even greater effect, not only in encouraging schooling but in ensuring reproductive health. Pascaline Dupas’ policy experiment in Kenya showed that simply giving young women information showing that older men were more likely to be HIV-positive led them to eschew partnering with ‘sugar daddies’.

Supporting education in remote areas of Western Sichuan, China

Submitted by Emmanuel Jimenez on Tue, 2009-10-20 17:17
There were perhaps too many children to a class, but these were clearly participatory.

It’s usually pretty hard for a World Bank sector director to make a spontaneous site visit.  But this one was fortuitous.  The informal school visit was hastily arranged when I realized my vacation tour would run through remote townships where World Bank projects have been supporting government in improving education through the Basic Education in Western Areas Project (BEWAP)…townships that had not, to my knowledge, been visited by previous missions.  I wasn’t sure exactly when I would arrive at each town on this trip so the visits could not be pre-arranged in advance.  Luckily, the whole province is almost totally ‘wired,’ so, the day before, I was able to call our Beijing office, which made arrangements for the Ministry of Education to contact the headmaster of the Tagong Township School with no difficulty.  In fact, the quality of the telecom coverage was better than that in many parts of Washington DC – like my office where my cell phone often doesn’t work unless the weather is clear and I press my face up against the window.