Shoura members seek restructuring of HRDF

Some Shoura Council members are demanding an overhaul of the Human Resources Development Fund (HRDF) to cope with the increasing demands of the job market.
Members made the demand while discussing a report of the council’s Human Resources and Administration Committee during a sitting in Riyadh on Sunday.
The council also described the annual report of the HRDF for the year 2009 as vague.
“HRDF has not dealt with the issue of distributing training and employment opportunities in all provinces alike as it focused only on some particular provinces,” the report of the council’s committee that studied the HRDF report said.
The committee also observed that women got only an insignificant share of the opportunities for training and employment offered by the HRDF even though the rate of unemployment among women is high.
The committee stressed the need to pay more attention to small and medium enterprises (SME) because of their potential to solve the unemployment issue in the country.
The council also made a majority decision that the Ministry of Social Affairs should prepare a bill to regulate the business activities of productive families. The bill should enable the productive families to generate more job opportunities besides helping them market their products without hurdles. It asked the Social Affairs ministry to open special schools for mentally disabled in coordination with the Ministry of Education.
The council asked the Saudi Monetary Agency to instruct Saudi banks to arrange special teller machines for disabled people to draw their pensions and other grants distributed by the General Organization for Social Insurance.
Meanwhile, Director General of HRDF Ibrahim Al-Muaeqel said a new women’s employment program in collaboration with private companies would be launched shortly.
The program aims at finding employment at home for female graduates of universities and technical institutes. Women can stay home and their work will be sent to them online.
“The program will be experimentally implemented in a few cities at first and extended to other places after rectifying any flaws,” Al-Muaeqel said.
Under the project, the HRDF will support training programs for women graduates and subsidize their monthly salaries when they get jobs. The jobs that are found suitable for women to work without going to office include translation, web designing, customer service and e-marketing.
Private companies are likely to be attracted to this kind of work arrangement as they need not create any special women-only sections for such workers.
The program will also be helpful to people with special needs.