‘Promote project’ girl internees discuss govt jobs

KABUL (Pajhwok):  Hundreds of female internees with USAID‘promote program’ held a gathering also participated by government officials in Kabul on Monday to identify and assess job opportunities for themselves.

Some 500 internee and trainee girls and women on the project joined government officials and representatives from 26 ministries and a number of independent departments’ officials at the gathering.

Spogmai Wardak, deputy minister for planning and policy at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MoWA), told Pajhwok Afghan News that the gathering discussed job opportunities for the internees of the project at non-military government organizations.

She said the five-year Promote Project was launched two years back to train more than 7,000 women and girls in relevant fields.

Wardak said MoWA had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with USAID as a donor of the project two months ago. Based on the MoU, MoWA was responsible to cooperate and facilitate implementation of the project and supervise it.

According to her, about 1,000 posts lied vacant at government organizations currently and the girls and women of the project could apply for any post of their choice.

The USAID launched the Promote Project in partnership with the Government of Afghanistan to preserve the gains made by Afghan women in the past decade besides providing a new generation of Afghan women with leadership skills to make vital contributions to Afghanistan’s development in governance, civil society, and economy.

The program has been designed to target and train educated women, 12th graders and bachelor’s degree holders aged 18–30 who have interest to work at government institutions.

Herbie Smith, USAID director in Afghanistan, said: “This is an essential step for women to identify job opportunities in government offices and know how they can enter a field of work.”

According to him, about 1,700 girls and women, graduated from 12th or university, had participated in the training programs in Kabul, Herat, Balkh, Kandahar, and Nangarhar provinces and 118 of them, after undergoing a one year training, had achieved permanent jobs at government organizations.

Sharifa Mosavi, one of the apprentices in Kabul, said: “We learned subjects which weren’t taught at universities.”

She asked the government to take serious the phenomenon of youth joblessness and create work opportunities for educated and specially trained individuals.

sns/ma