policy makers, business leaders, financial institutions, academia, training providers, and citizens. These networks enable all stakeholders to work together to cater to aspects such as: reskilling and continuous skilling, aligning the skill sets of the labour force to the needs of the industry, providing unemployed youth the support needed to find suitable apprenticeships and jobs, and providing small and medium enterprises with access to credit which will allow them to scale up their business and create more opportunities.
In the long-term, in addition to all these efforts at the global and national levels, there is a strong need to promote the culture of entrepreneurship. Creating entrepreneurs allows job seekers to become job creators. Entrepreneurs also can leverage emerging trends to create business value and in the process, create more jobs. Governments, businesses, financial institutions and academia need to work together to provide the conducive eco-system that promotes entrepreneurship. In emerging economies like India such interventions will play a crucial role in leveraging their demographic dividend, which would otherwise become a potential demographic burden.
The early signs are extremely positive. In India for instance, in several states, universities have been actively promoting the entrepreneurship culture amongst its students. Also many other programmes are carried out by various departments like identification of potential entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship training programmes for youth, coaching programmes through senior managers and entrepreneurs, training linked to government schemes, business activities, vocational training centres and universities, start-up funding programmes and micro-finance schemes, awards for youth entrepreneurs etc.
These early signs are very encouraging and are a step in the right direction. We certainly have a long way to go in our pursuit of addressing the challenge of structural global unemployment