Guatemalan private sector plans creation of 1.2 million jobs

Guatemala’s soaring unemployment has inspired its private sector’s economic development think tank to bond with major business to plan a job-creation strategy.

The Association of Guatemalan Chambers (CACIF) and the Guatemalan Development Foundation, (FUNDESA) have together launched their ‘Guatemalans – let’s improve Guatemala’ project. The initiative is a large-scale thought and action generator aimed at encouraging a more productive country and includes technical and practical proposals.

Full details of the project were announced at the ninth annual ENADE National Business Forum, at which it was explained that proposals from different business sectors will lay down a road-map to build a more caring, safer and more prosperous country via an unprecedented job creation and poverty eradication scheme.

Guatemala suffers from both a high level of unemployment and also from underemployment, exacerbating a rise in poverty affecting families and young people alike. Per year, around 20,000 jobs are being created, but 140,000 young people enter the jobs market annually, without a hope of supporting themselves unless they emigrate, become illegal street vendors or turn to crime.

Overall, 53 per cent of the population lives in poverty, with a growth rate of 6.34 per cent necessary to reduce the figure to 31.4 per cent. According to FUNDESA’s vice president, Salvador Paiz, a driving force behind the project, cooperation between the business, government and private sectors is the key to success.

He explained the project was a holistic, technically sound proposal to create over a million jobs, thus reducing poverty by 50 per cent by the year 2022. Key private sector personalities, the President of Guatemala and the Supreme Court's President are all backing the plan, together with leaders of the country’s labour organisations, with ithe initiators looking for a national buy-in with all participants working together to provide stability and success based on employment.