The World Bank has recently published The skills road: skills for employability in Tajikistan (full citation at the end of this post). The report argues that

Generating more productive employment is arguably the most critical challenge [for the government, against a backdrop of relative political and economic stability].

This finding comes from an extensive household survey undertaken in Tajikistan that focussed on skills, the first of its kind. There are some interesting sections in the report explaining why this skills approach was taken and just how you go about measuring and comparing cognitive skills such as working memory and graph comprehension.

The strong conclusion of the report is that there are serious skills gaps in Tajikistan. Both the causes and the impact of these gaps are multifarious. As an example, the authors identify points throughout the life course where opportunities to enhance skills are currently being missed. During the early years of life, access to pre-school or equivalent early years education is not available to enough children. Once people have left education (and women are leaving education significantly earlier than their male counterparts), difficulties in finding work and a paucity of work-based training are contributing to a growing mis-match between the skills employers are increasingly demanding and the experiences that employees are able or willing to offer.

Given that the causes and outcomes are so extensive, the authors make a series of recommendations – they call this a ‘skills map’ to boost employability and productivity in Tajikistan:

(From page 51 of the report)

This is a richly detailed report that makes use of some very valuable new primary data, and is well worth reading. This brief summary should hopefully whet your appetite!

Source

Ajwad, Mohamed Ihsan , Hut, Stefan, Abdulloev, Ilhom, Audy, Robin, de Laat, Joost, Kataoka,
Sachiko, Larrison, Jennica, Nikoloski, Zlatko and Torracchi, Federico (2014) The skills road: skills
for employability in Tajikistan. World Bank, Washington, USA. Available at http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60024/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRARY_Secondary_libfile_shared_repository_Content_Nikoloski%2C%20Z_Nikoloski_Skills_Road_Tajikistan_Nikoloski_Skills_%20Road_Tajikistan_2014.pdf.