81271719-Empowerment of the Nursing Sector's Labour Market Governance in Jordan

Jordan's unemployment rate has increased significantly in recent years, and young people are particularly affected. More than a third of the country's youth are without work, and young women have by far the lowest economic participation in the region. While Jordanian companies lack qualified skilled workers, the vocational and higher education institutions often focus rather on theory than practice. Most students and parents reject technical vocational education and training (TVET) as viable employment paths, preferring academic educations leading to university degrees. In line with Jordan's HRD Strategy, GIZ on behalf of The German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) has launched the flagship project ‘Labour Market Oriented Vocational Education, Higher Education and Training — MOVE-HET’ in 2017. The MOVE-HET Project has an overarching goal of aligning TVET and Higher Education programs with labour market needs to improve employability. BMZ's mandate includes supporting the Jordanian Ministry. The MOVE-HET project supports and encourages the involvement of the private sector in TVET and Higher Education and supports the improvement of interactions and stakeholders on the political level (ministries and centralised institutions) as well as on the level of institutions. The project also addresses the tension between labour demand and labour supply through the matching of demand and supply by collecting and evaluating labour market data. This also supports the quantitative control of the option for Jordanian nurses to enter the German labour market. At the same time, MOVE-HET will support the compatibility of the education of Jordanian nurses with requirements of the respective German labour market. With the addition of the healthcare sector to the MOVE-HET project, i the improvement of the data basis for the sector will be tackled. The objective is to serve the need for a better forecast of workforce, in the domestic labour market as well as internationally. It is to be considered that the Jordanian labour market can currently not absorb the nurses that are being qualified through university education, due to a lack of financial resources of the sector. Nevertheless, the lack of skilled workers currently prevents the achievement of SDG 3.8 (Universal Health Coverage): Only 2.3 doctors and 2.8 registered nurses per 1,000 inhabitants in Jordan (UHC target: 4.5). The infant mortality rate is 16.2 per 1 000 live births (in Germany it is 3.72 per 1 000 live births). Working conditions are difficult due to a high workload, and there is increasing evidence of overwork among nursing staff. Lack of employment prospects in the local health care system and difficult working conditions have led to a high emigration of Jordanian health care workers abroad. That being said, there is a major lack of statistical data regarding the nursing labour market. With multiple governing bodies, councils and entities involved in shaping the nursing labour market, a clear data source highlighting the numbers of registered nurses in Jordan (both employed and unemployed) as well as figures of Jordanian nurses working abroad, and a geographic distribution of these assignments is heavily lacking. Thus, the MOVE-HET project will focus on two key areas of activity in the field of nursing: — support the development of a Labour Market Information System (Platform) for the nursing sector with relevant partners; — capacity development to employees of the relevant governing bodies. These interventions will help empower the Jordanian counterparts to make informed decisions about the nursing labour market, thus guide student enrolment in nursing programs, adapt nursing programs, understand employment prospects in the labour market and inhibitors to that, and finally, regulate nursing emigration and make informed decisions on the migration of Jordanian nurses. The latter is a window the Jordanian government is very keen on exploring.