Jakarta (ANTARA) - Manpower Minister Ida Fauziyah spotlighted Indonesia's success in suppressing its open unemployment rate, from 5.45 percent in 2023 to 4.82 percent in 2024, during a G20 meeting in Brazil.
"We will continue to aim for an even lower rate by employing a wide range of measurable and on-point measures," she remarked at the meeting in Fortaleza, Brazil, on Friday (July 26), based on her office's statement cited here on Saturday.
Fauziyah explained that the measures include enhancing the quality of educational and training activities, boosting investments by easing permit-obtaining processes, supporting those in the informal sector of the economy to ascend to the formal sector, and developing a national job market information system.
"We will also continue to boost our agricultural productivity. It is important to modernize the agriculture sector by adopting sophisticated technologies that can shoot up productivity and positively affect the tourism and creative economy sectors," she stated.
The minister, however, acknowledged that despite seeing improvements, Indonesia's current open unemployment rate is still relatively higher than that of other member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
She attributed the trend to the fact that Indonesia is the most populous country in the region, producing about three million new workers every year.
She also pointed to the gap between the workforce's skills and the job market's needs, which had been keeping the Indonesian workforce's productivity stuck below the ASEAN's average.
The minister further remarked that the Indonesian government is currently exerting all-out efforts to create quality job opportunities in a bid to help laborers get proper jobs.
Fauziyah underlined that quality jobs are crucial for Indonesia to fully recover from the far-reaching detrimental impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the national economy.
