Baghdad, Iraq – The International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Ministry of Youth and Sports (MOYS) in Iraq have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to strengthen their cooperation in advancing financial education among youth in Iraq.
The new partnership focuses on training a pool of national trainers from the Ministry in various governorates on ILO’s Global Financial Education Programme, designed to teach financial knowledge and management skills to vulnerable groups, particularly young women and men.
The trainers will in return train around 1,000 young women and men on the tool, with a focus on those who are looking to start or improve their businesses in various sectors. The selected youth will include forcibly displaced persons, returnees and host community members, with a focus on Ninewa.
The initiative is being carried out by the ILO under the PROSPECTS partnership which is supported by the Government of the Netherlands.
“The Ministry has undertaken an important approach related to raising financial awareness and education, which emphasises the need for young people wishing to engage in the labour market to become well- informed of the main principles governing financial management through planning for personal budgets or business budgets and ways to deal with their finances…The most recent of which is the agreement with the International Labour Organization to set up a financial education programme in which a group of youth from ten governorates are trained with the aim that they launch their own training initiatives targeting around one thousand young people,” said Minister of Youth and Sports of Iraq, H.E. Adnan Dirjal.
The ILO Global Programme on Financial Education is a comprehensive programme that addresses limited levels of financial literacy around the world, through national policy dialogue and capacity building at all levels and has been implemented for more than ten years in multiple countries.
The ILO has adapted the programme to address the needs of the Iraqi context and has begun to roll out the programme at the national level.
“The Labour Force Survey of Iraq shows that more than one-third of the youth population in Iraq was not in education, nor in employment or training. In addition, the youth unemployment rate was more than three times that of the adult unemployment rate. These figures highlight the urgent need to attract more youth towards the private sector and entrepreneurship,” said Maha Kattaa, ILO Country Coordinator in Iraq. “Our collaboration with the Ministry of Youth and Sports is a step in the right direction as it will enhance the capacities of young people in managing their finances, while supporting them to build sound relationships with financial institutions, which will help their businesses to grow.” PROSPECTS is a strategic four-year global partnership, that supports host communities and displaced populations in eight countries across East and North Africa and the Arab States and which also includes UNICEF, UNHCR, IFC, and the World Bank.
Source: International Labour Organization
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