Azerbaijan, WB eye employment support project

By Azernews

By Ayya Lmahamad

Azerbaijan’s Labour and Social Security Ministry and the World Bank have discussed the jointly implemented “employment support project”.

Labour and Social Security Minister Sahil Babayev emphasized the importance of the new cooperation project, noting the successful cooperation with the World Bank in the social sphere.

The minister stated that active employment programs are expanding year after year in line with President Ilham Aliyev's instructions.

In this context, the self-employment program covered 16,232 people last year. This is 13.8 times more than the program that was launched in 2017. In addition, the number of program activities has grown to 44.

The employment support project, according to Babayev, is critical for expanding the self-employment program and improving the effectiveness of the implementation mechanism.

He said that as part of this project, 22,000 unemployed people from vulnerable groups will start small businesses in the manufacturing and service sectors.

The minister also stated that over 6,000 unemployed people have already participated in business trainings as part of the project, with 1,033 of them being members of martyrs' families and war veterans. Simultaneously, 1,771 of those taking part in business training as part of the project are women, while 1,806 are young people.

During the meeting, Babayev emphasized that 6,000 more people will be involved in the project this year, and small businesses will be established.

The project will strengthen employment services and programs, develop and update special training modules, improve human resource capacity to assess labor market needs, develop statistical profiling tools and skills assessment tests for job seekers, and so on.

It should be noted that Azerbaijan became a member of the World Bank in 1992. Since then, the bank has financed over 50 projects totaling $4.4 billion in commitments. It began economic cooperation in Azerbaijan to help build institutional capacity and efficient management of oil reserves. The World Bank has always supported Azerbaijan's large-scale reforms.