The changing international, sub regional and national economic contexts duly have an influence on the implementation of the National Growth and Employment Paper.

Acceleration of growth, reduction of underemployment and slicing down extreme poverty are among the main goals of the Growth and Employment Strategy Paper established in 2010 and engraved in the 2035 vision of attaining the status of an emerging country. Five years since the ambitious programme was put on the rails, the question on many minds is how far has the country gone in its implementation.

The Head of State in his end of year address to the nation revisited the programme underscoring the importance it has to play in the country’s development trail. According to the latest report of the Technical Follow-up Committee for Economic Programmes, the implementation has been going on within the realms of changing international, sub regional and national contexts.

Acceleration of Growth

Economic growth has evolved steadily from 3.3 per cent in 2010 to almost six per cent in 2015. Internal demand remains the driving force induced by the execution of major infrastructure projects and government support to the private sector through sector by sector programmes such as agropole, land development loans, law on investment and improving company performance. Even though the growth rate has moved some steps ahead, it remains short of target, hence the need to double effort in the years ahead in order to attain the projected rate of 10.2 per cent by 2020.

Employment

Government, it should be recalled, wants to reduce the level of unemployment from 75.8 per cent in 2005 to less than 50 per cent in 2020. In order to achieve this, it has been focusing on improving decent jobs, improving the quality of job seekers in order to render them adequate enough for supply and improve on the regulation of the job market. As at 2014, the quality of employment remained preoccupying. According to the report of the ECAM-4, the rate of underemployment Climbed from 71.1 per cent in 2007 to 79 per cent.

Poverty Reduction

The results of the ECAM-4 indicate a drop of 2.4 points in poverty down to 37.5 per cent compared to 39.9 in 2007. This is the result of the contribution of the real average annual economic growth of 4.7 per cent from 2010 to 2014. This remains short of the GESP projections.

Investment

The Public Investment Budget continues to have relative precedence over current budget.  It jumped from 24.5 per cent in 2010 to 30.7 per cent in 2015. This in effect, ties with the first consideration of GESP, which has among its considerations the need to reinforce the financing of major projects with the use of internal resources. The major change here which falls within the framework of the implementation of the GESP has to do with the introduction of the special budgetary conference on major projects in the budget preparation process between 2010 and 2015.

In all, the Technical Follow-up Committee for Economic Programmes, according to its Permanent Secretary, Gregoire Mebada Mebada, all that is being done is to ensure that what is achieved come 2035 goes even beyond some set goals notably as concerns growth rate.