One econ­o­mist is urg­ing gov­ern­ment to look at ways to cre­ate more jobs for those who have re­lied on make work pro­grammes.

Dr In­dera Sage­wan says while there may have been a need to weed out cor­rup­tion in the Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief Pro­gramme (URP), there is al­so a need to cre­ate sus­tain­able em­ploy­ment for un­skilled work­ers.

She was a guest on to­day’s edi­tion of CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew show.

Last Week, 400 URP work­ers were sent home, months af­ter job cuts at CEPEP and the Re­for­esta­tion Pro­gramme.

Dr Sage­wan warns that job cre­ation is nec­es­sary to sup­port the coun­try’s so­cial and eco­nom­ic sta­bil­i­ty.

This econ­o­my ab­solute­ly needs gov­ern­ment in­ter­ven­tion in terms of the gen­er­at­ing of jobs for a par­tic­u­lar cadre of the pop­u­la­tion—par­tic­u­lar­ly the un­skilled,” she ex­plained. “The so­cial im­pli­ca­tions are quite dire.”

Ac­cord­ing to Dr Sage­wan, many of these so­cial pro­grammes have been utilised be­yond their orig­i­nal in­ten­tion.

She says there is a greater need for skills de­vel­op­ment.

“CEPEP, for ex­am­ple, was nev­er in­tend­ed to be a job that some­one en­tered in­to for life,” the econ­o­mist points out. “It was al­ways in­tend­ed to be a very short-term em­ploy­ment that some­body would en­joy while si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly be­ing trained to be able to en­ter the nor­mal [work] mar­ket or the pro­duc­tive sec­tors.”

“Un­for­tu­nate­ly, the last gov­ern­ment did very lit­tle to cre­ate sus­tain­able em­ploy­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties at this lev­el that per­sons could be ab­sorbed in­to,” she ob­served.

Last month, Guardian Me­dia re­vealed that $5.6 bil­lion was spent on URP be­tween 2010 and 2024.