Jobs outstrip supply of skilled workers

Chinese companies in Kenya say they want to hire more locals, but jobs go begging as workforce training remains inadequate

Chinese companies in Kenya are facing challenges in hiring local employees because of the lack of skilled labor and culture differences, according to a recent report.

While Chinese companies in Kenya on average hire 90 percent of their employees locally, they also show a strong willingness to replace their Chinese employees with local workers, according to Business Perception Index Kenya-2014, published by Sino-Africa Center of Excellence Foundation in Kenya.

The report says 63 percent of the 75 companies surveyed said they have an active policy to eventually replace Chinese workers with locals.

The private companies are more willing to do that than the state-owned Chinese companies. While 66 percent of private companies answered affirmatively, only 56 percent of state-owned companies did so. Also, the willingness to replace Chinese employees with locals is stronger in manufacturing and construction than in the service sector, the report says.

But the lack of skilled labor in Kenya has hindered Chinese companies' plans to hire locals, company officials say. Among the 10 obstacles the officials listed in order of importance, an inadequately skilled workforce was perceived to be the seventh-biggest obstacle.

Many Chinese companies in labor-intensive businesses, which are major contributors to local employment, complained that it has been hard for them to find qualified and trustworthy Kenyan workers, says the report.

It says 60 percent of the companies surveyed indicated that they had formal training programs.

To address the problem, the report suggests creation of a talent pool of skilled local workers for Chinese construction companies to consider for employment.

Language barriers and differences in working cultures also trouble the workforce localization process, the report says.

Many Chinese employees don't speak English and thus many of them stick to their own group and don't engage with the local community.

"Chinese companies usually don't have enough interaction with the local communities, media and governments," says Liu Naiya, an Africa analyst at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

While many workers don't speak English and this hinders interaction, company executives should shoulder the responsibility to do that, he adds.

At least one other factor limits engagement with the local community even more: crime, including theft, disorderliness and personal safety issues, which comes in second to corruption among the 10 most difficult obstacles for Chinese companies.

Sixty percent of Chinese companies surveyed experienced losses as a result of crime in the 2013 budget year, compared with 29 percent of Kenyan companies, according to the World Bank Enterprise Survey 2013 in Kenya.

"In order to reduce those incidences, some companies closely monitor the daily lives of their Chinese employees, and they are strictly prohibited from getting around if a trip is not organized by the company," says the report.

Liu Qinghai, an Africa analyst at the Institute of African Studies at Zhejiang Normal University, says many Chinese companies have been encouraged to help improve technical and vocational education and training in Africa, aside from the efforts of the Chinese government.

She says Huawei, a prominent Chinese information and communications technology company, has built up their own training institutes in Africa.

Liu says, however, that it will take time to solve the shortage of skilled labor in the continent. "While more and more NGOs and foundations from Western countries are taking part in improving the situation in Africa as well, it would be better if China and other countries and those NGOs could cooperate with each other in their efforts," she says.

(China Daily Africa Weekly 01/23/2015 page21)