 Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us. My name is Andy McAfee. I'm a scientist at MIT, and I am the moderator for this session on a deeply important topic, which is how are we going to accelerate this process of closing the skills gap that we see over and over again around the world? And our colleagues at the World Economic Forum have set up an interesting accelerator model in 23 countries around the world to do exactly that, to accelerate the process of giving people the right skills, the right training, and closing the skills gap. We have five panelists with us today who are in the middle of that transition, in the middle of that process, and we want to hear from all of them. They are Ms. Maria Jose Aboud, who is the vice minister of women and gender equality in Chile. Mr. Giyos Uden Khan, who is the president and chief executive officer of Angro Corporation in Pakistan. Ms. Zainab Bodor Okay, who is the chief executive officer of Kail Holdings, and the co-chair of the Turkey, closing the skills gap accelerator. Mr. Peter Hummelgard, who is the minister for employment in Denmark, and Dr. Hangchuan Naran, who is the minister of education, youth, and sports in Cambodia. Ms. Aboud, could we start with you? The accelerator in Chile has been up for a while. Can you tell us what steps and priorities are being set to ensure the continued success and the sustainability of this program? And I'm sorry, I think you're on mute still. I'm there. OK, so thank you, Andrew. Good morning and good evening to all the panelists. It's a pleasure to be here with you and to share the experience of this accelerator in Chile. Let me first quickly explain what does this accelerator do. It's called the Gender Parity Initiative, which is a community of organizations committed to reduce the gender gap in the labor market based on innovative public-private innovation. To be part of this community, we ask companies to go through a self-assessment to identify their biggest gender gaps. They measure the percentage of women in high management position, gender weight gap, protocols to address gender-based violence between other indicators. Then based on this self-assessment, we help them to develop an action plan tailored to their needs. These action plans include goals to reduce the gender gap in, for example, recruitment process, promotion of women in leadership positions, and how to life-work balance and share responsibilities between men and women. In the last five years, with the support of the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Economic Forum, this accelerator has become a powerful network of 109 member companies, which make it the largest gender parity initiative in the region and one of the largest in the world. Despite the challenge of the pandemic, we have continued growing. 25 new companies joined this initiative last year, and 16 have been recently certified with the highest standard of gender quality in the workplace. But going to your question, what has made this initiative so successful? First, we have ensured to speak the language of the private sector, outlining the right incentives. Join to this accelerator is not about justice or ethics, but have to be and have to be understood like a smart business move that benefits the company in the long run. And it goes beyond corporate social responsibility as the studies and the academic studies have shown that gender equality benefits productivity and innovation of companies. Also very important, this model is built on international best practices. And we create existing networks that bring concrete benefit to companies. They become part of a community where they have the opportunity to exchange information and work with relevant industry actors. In addition, being part of this accelerator is highly regarded by the community that increasingly demands our society a strong commitment towards gender equity. Just to show some concrete benefits, when we look to the indicators of companies that are part of this accelerator, we see that they are above the natural average in terms of some gender quality indicators. For example, companies of this accelerator have a higher proportion of women in leadership position. They have an average approximately 26% of female representation on boards. Meanwhile, our national average is around 10%. In the same sense, when we look to the gender weight gap, the average of these companies is 7%. Meanwhile, the national average is 27%. And just quickly, I would like to go through some lessons that can be very useful for other accelerators in terms of ensuring sustainable and continuous progress. First, we think it is very necessary to get the right incentives across. We believe that sustainable success lies in making sure that the accelerator model moves and goes beyond political will and becoming must do for companies. Not because they need to take the gender box, but because they see the benefit that brings the organizational, culture, employees' performance onto their bottom lines. This initiative cannot be part of a human resources strategy. It needs to be part of their business strategy model. And also, for the model to be sustainable, it needs to gain full organizational ownership from high executives. This is why we have been focused in the last time, last month on promoting territorial engagement and meetings with industry representatives and business associations from around the country because we need to engage the high executive in this accelerator. Also, we need to generate trust in our initiative. Many times, companies are afraid to look at themselves to do this self-assessment because they are scared of the gaps that they may find and also the use of the data. So we ensure confidentiality and the right use of the information. This data is only used to create their tailored action plan and to generate aggregate indicators never to show that at the company level. And lastly, we need to be creative to create a strategic partnership with key actors to increase the impact of this accelerator model. International collaboration is very crucial to make sure to have an active and dynamic cooperation with organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Economic Forum, of course, but also with organizations as UN Women, with foreign timbers of commerce, and especially with other gender parity initiatives in the region in Latin America to share best practices and also to promote collaborative growth. So that is a very resume of what is our accelerator. Thank you very much for the organizer, for this event, for this invitation, and we look forward to promote this initiative and to exchange ideas with the international community. Thank you. Fascinating. Thank you very much. Mr. Khan, could we go to you? In Pakistan, your accelerator has identified more than 100 roles that need reskilling, upskilling, and new skilling. And I understand that you've created dedicated skills programs to help accomplish that task. Can you tell us a bit about that, what's been achieved so far and what you've learned? Yeah, greetings to everyone from Anglo and Pakistan, and thank you for giving me this opportunity. So the area that I'm gonna focus on in terms of the skills development program that we have undertaken as agriculture, and that is because of an importance that it holds not only for the region, but also for Pakistan. So even if you look at the South Asian region, the 23% of the world's population lives in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. 17% of the GDP of these countries is contributed through agriculture. It employs about 39% of the population. But more importantly, more than 15% of the people living in these countries are undernourished. And there are essentially three reasons, three areas where investments are necessary, whether it's increase in farming practices, whether it is to efforts to improve agricultural yields, and at the same time to train the people so they're ready for skills that will be required for tomorrow. In Pakistan, the story is very, very similar to the region. We've got about 40% of our people who are involved in the agriculture sector. Unfortunately, in Pakistan, more than 20% of the people living here are undernourished. The number is even worse when it comes to children who've got stunted growth over 45%. And if we look at the overall productivity in the agriculture sector, our crop yields are roughly 25 to 60% worse off than some of the other developed countries. And essentially, there've been three problems that we've been able to identify. Number one is obviously sub-optimal resource utilization. That's mainly because of poor skill sets and absence of farm mechanization and very slow adoption to modern technologies. We are, unfortunately, our R&D spend is extremely low. It's only 0.24% of GDP. And there is tremendous lack of financial inclusion when it comes to access to credit to particularly our smaller farmers. And hence, what we've been able to identify, the three solutions that we've been able to identify are number one, using innovative farming techniques, higher level of mechanization and farm operations and use of modern technology. And clearly, what it requires us to do is to massively upskill, re-skill and introduce new skills to the entire labor force which is involved with the agriculture sector. And I must thank World Economic Forum over here because through the partnership with Punjab Skills Development Fund, Punjab being our largest province population wide, we've been able to set up the Skills Accelerator Program. It comprises of business leaders from different sectors, a company like Engro. We are focused mostly towards agriculture. We have been able to identify 24 roles which are now going to focus on skills which will be required for the future. Essentially, it is important not just from the perspective of future-proofing our workforce, but also keeping into perspective the requirements in terms of managing our food security. So thank you to the World Economic Forum. It has been a very positive start and we hope that it's gonna answer, it's gonna help us address some of the key problems that we are facing right now. Thank you. Fantastic, thank you so much. And I particularly wanna thank both of our opening speakers for keeping their remarks both fascinating and on time. As I say, we have a packed agenda and we really appreciate everybody helping us out to finish and accomplish all of our goals on time. Ms. Okiye, let me turn to you. You're working closely with both public and private partners in Turkey to close the skill gap. What have you learned? How has the Accelerator helped so far and what are your targets? What would you like to see accomplished in the next chunk of time? Thank you, Dr. Makafir. I would like to start by thanking the other panelists for the insights, first of all. Let me begin by answering the second part of the question first. What is the target of the Accelerator initiative? Our target is clear, create systems and structures that can sustain themselves, supported by public-private cooperation, whose main goals are identifying the needs, processes and solutions on re-skilling and upskilling in order to better equip the workforce for the future of the economy and the world. So these mechanisms must employ policies and practices that are built on the following three pillars, SDGs, digitalization and innovation. The Accelerator initiative kicked off in Turkey as of this year. So it is fair to say that we are at the beginning, just of a multi-year journey. Our goal is very challenging and not easy to achieve and I believe that the only way we can succeed is with a multi-stakeholder approach, as you mentioned, and a strong public-private cooperation. We are working diligently in the first phase where we are conducting a system analysis to identify the current shortcomings, barriers and gaps in both the public policies, institutions and mechanisms, as well as those the private sector employees independently. In the months ahead, upon the completion of this analysis with our partners, we are going to discuss the path forward to bring forth a comprehensive agenda and expand our community by contacting other stakeholders to take part in the initiative under specific agenda items. Later, we will create a working group to focus on separate these specific agenda items. Upon the completion of the working groups, we will ask our partners and others to commit to actions that working group have suggested. So lastly, we will track these commitments and continue to monitor how these commitments have emulated the status quo. I also would like to share a few facts with you that might help explain the potential of the accelerated initiative in Turkey. So a study conducted last year revealed that 7.6 million jobs will be lost until 2030 in Turkey. But in return, there will be the 8.9 million new jobs created in the same period in similar fields. Moreover, the study further highlights that an additional 1.8 million jobs and in professions that do not exist currently will also be created. This puts out the net increase potential of 3.1 million jobs, most which will definitely require different set of skills than what the workforce in Turkey mainly possesses today. So digital literacy will be a key variable in this regard as the skills needed for these new professions will mostly include tech abilities. The role of entrepreneurship is also very critical, I believe, as a portion of the potential is likely to be employed by new companies operating in these yet to be seen spaces. This very significant potential coupled with Turkey's young population dictates that opportunity should not and cannot go uncaptured with the accelerated success. We can work to help realize these numbers and perhaps even more. As a private business owner, I'd like to underline that public policies on employment and the workforce must utilize AI and other digital tools, not just for increasing productivity in the workplace, must also for supporting social cohesion and social needs. Private sector must also support public policies with matching policies and actions of its own. And also a challenge, I also challenge my own colleagues toward this goal. Public policies must be built so that they can utilize real-time data to adapt to sudden changes and shocks to the workforce and the economy as we experience. The challenges and inequalities in access to education must be identified and resolved. This is crucial for closing the skills gap. We have to provide equal opportunity to every member of the society using new technologies, changes in curriculum and providing the needs needed infrastructure. Inclusions of women, particularly young women in the re-and upskilling processes will also be crucial element of addressing systemic change. Turkey has had experiences in the recent past with the initiatives to empower women in STEM and these efforts must strengthen, of obvious, the exponentially moving forward. So these are my thoughts and thank you for this invitation and listening. Thank you very much. Mr. Hummelgard, you're our representative from an educational ministry. Tell us what you have learned about the, what's what we need for a successful, a fruitful collaboration between the public and the private sector around this broad issue of re-skilling and training for the jobs of tomorrow. Well, thank you so much and also a very big thanks not only to the World Economic Forum but also to the other panelists for insightful remarks. First of all, just to add that I'm the minister of employment and not from an educational ministry. However, we do work a lot with the upskilling and re-skilling of especially not only employed but also unemployed people. And I think basically there's an old Chinese proverb that says that if you're planning for a year, so rise. If you're planning for a decade, plant trees. And if you're planning for a lifetime, educate people. So in other words, education and upskilling requires long-term commitment and also substantial funding. All to that, ensuring that our workers have the right skills is to me one of the most important tasks for politicians all around the world at this moment. And we really think from a Danish perspective that we have a unique opportunity, absolutely pandemic to invest in re-skilling. In Denmark, we have invested more than 260 million Euro since 2020 through a number of initiatives. And just to mention a few, we have invested in up to two years of vocational training on higher unemployment benefits. So that unskilled unemployed persons will get 110% in unemployment benefits if they commit themselves to a longer term educational program in one of the areas where we also have lack of employment at the moment. And we have seen a rise in vocational training after the possibility to receive higher benefits was introduced. Second of all, we have made massive investments in short vocational training through regional programs with the job focus. And during the pandemic, the Danish government has concluded 17 tripartite agreements with the social partners. And that is also an answer to your direct question because that is a direct partnership with both the employer side and the worker side in actually making investments in short vocational training and also making sure that we can assist businesses and workers through the crisis. And one of the important tripartite agreements concerns students and apprentices working at companies in a difficult situation. That aim is to give them essential education and training as the demand was low during the pandemic. We've also invested further in local public coordinators bringing together local job centers, education centers, social partners and local businesses in order to identify the needs in the work market. And the aim is to make it easier for companies to get qualified employees and make it easier for the job centers to get unemployed persons reskilled. And this is an excellent example of public private partnerships. And my experience is that we need to collaborate with the employers as well as the workers. So just let me conclude by saying that Denmark has a proud tradition for reskilling. And this has only been possible due to the committed engagement from the social partners and the state in a tripartite collaboration. And such partnerships are the necessary key, we believe to ensure that we provide workers with the needed skills and that we can actually at least try and plan for a lifetime. So thank you. Thank you. And I would like to remind all of our participants today and everybody who's listening that they have the opportunity to ask questions of our panelists via Slido. I think we're all familiar with how to do that. So please feel free, post your questions, please keep them short and please keep them relevant to the content of this session. But we would love to hear what's on your mind. Dr. Narona, if we could close out with you. I think our timing is excellent because I understand that Cambodia is launching its accelerator with the forum today. Could you talk a bit about what your goals for it are and what you think will be critical for its success in the future? Thank you. Greetings from Cambodia. I wish to thank all the panelists for the insights. And I think that for the successful initiative, I think we need to have an ecosystem of schools, universities, policies, private sector working together and also how to make education responsive to the, and training to the needs of the private sector. I would like to share some of the thoughts that what we are trying to do and how we can use that model together with the WAF initiative to make it works. I think firstly, government policy and school reform are necessary to develop soft skills needed by the private sector. So, sometimes it's very difficult to plan for skill development, but at least we have to build strong foundation of the skill, foundation skill for the young people and especially the soft skill. So, we embark on education reform by piloting the new children's schools, creating school environment for STEM education, use of new teaching methods such as collaborative learning, critical thinking to promote the meta cognitive skills and self-regulated capabilities using active learning students and approach. And especially for the student to become a lifelong learner and committed to relearn the skill. And I think it works and now we are gradually investing in order to roll it out. Secondly, I think we must have a flexible curriculum to link to career path which is the student, you know, provide opportunity to participate in study clubs and also to have extra curricular activities such as robotics, computer coding, creative writing so that they can develop specific skill which they have special purpose for. And secondary education must be linked to high education. The student should have opportunity to listen to expert, have access to career counseling so that they can make orientation toward the job market. Thirdly, school and universities as a hub within the entrepreneurial ecosystem, a platform for competition to link education to the real world. I think competition is crucial to develop grids and also the ability to compete in the real world. It also promotes inquiry, problem solving skill. Student learn by observing orders, build self-confidence and self-efficacy if they can do it. I also can do it. Fourthly, business model accelerator competition with the participation of the private sector is useful for students to learn how to solve the challenges facing Cambodia. This should include training session on leadership, key concept or entrepreneurship to young people with drive and determination to turn their innovative idea into viable business model and then the winning team can use funds to grow their ideas toward incubation which is to train students to create their own job. They don't need for other people to create their job but also to think how to solve problems facing society and especially to use digital technology. I think the young people, they are smart on that. So what they need is an ecosystem, also a platform. Fifthly, a university business sector linkages to promote joint projects and research. So we have that initiative too. I think it's a very well, it's a win-win and long-term collaboration for all in the present. And I think the private sector, they can contract our university and we invest in those that work well so that the university work help private sector because mostly our SME to solve their technology problem. And the private sector and university also benefit for using that fund to grow, to train people and to grow their research and also their capacity. And I believe that the national level partnership that we are trying to promote now because we just have joined it. I think number one is to establish public private data sharing initiative, to share data, to talk and find it out and how school and university address those skills that the private sector need sharing. I think the demand and supply side, they're not trying to balance that. Number two is to the capacity to respond, to develop upskilling policy to respond to the need. Thirdly, I think that continue to update the curriculum to address the changing nature of the workforce and also the evolving needs of the economy which need more and different skills of the STEM and other skills. We must also explore the private sector punish it to develop models of upskilling that works. Have to look at what works and try to invest more on what works and promote lifelong learning. And I think that it is important that the students themselves are committed but also supported by not just policy but also incentive. So incentive provided to the business, incentive provided to the workers to make a need. And more importantly, I think that do we need long degree, sometimes students spend a lot of time studying, but we have to maybe look at innovative flexible micro-condential model. So you don't need big degree but you need small part and like a credit base. So I think that training and focus on including online, micro low cost but knowledge intensive credential model that respond better to the changing needs of the economy. Basically, and I think that online would be great. Now we online can have a lot of access and also good for the young people but the problem also for the rural area that they don't have access to the internet and also technology. Basically, I think those are what we have tried to respond, I think it's not easy. It's not easy to respond to the needs of big friends because the economy changing fast and the question lag behind. So how to make that? And I think that the student themselves must be smart. Train them to be smart and then so that they can also help to address that problem. So thank you. And I believe that with sharing this idea we can learn a lot from all of you. Thank you. Thank you very much. We have a question that's come in for Mr. Khan. The question is how important is the role of the private sector in tackling challenges that are traditionally associated with government and what initiatives are you seeing in Pakistan that are working here? So the role of the private sector is extremely important because at the end of the day, so even if you look at the accelerator program that we currently working in six different sectors whether it's financial services, information and communication technology, manufacturing, hospitality and retail services, textile, agriculture. What you see over here is that it's the private sector which will be the biggest beneficiary or will have the biggest loss if they don't invest in upskilling people at the right time. So for example, for us because we are focusing on agriculture, we've picked up about 24 roles and out of that we are doing pilots on about three of them. Let me share an example with you of a crop advisor who's a skilled professional who provides customized solutions, technical advisory and related marketing services to farmers who can and help them improve their yields. And this service is targeted to be provided to all small farmers which are about 90% of the total farmer population in Pakistan. So to expect government to do this work alone, it's A, I don't think it would be possible. I think the biggest beneficiaries off-skill development apart from the country itself is the private sector and hence a very, very active role is required from all of us. So yeah, that one is pretty clear. Fantastic, thank you. Vice-minister Aboud, a question for you. Were there any policy changes that the government did in Chile to accompany the efforts of the private sector in closing the economic gender gap? Well, thank you, Andrew. Well, we always say that as a minister of women and gender equality, we need to work with the private sector. The closing the gender gaps, it's so important that if we don't have the commitment of the private sector, we cannot achieve the goals that we really need to achieve and in this pandemic, we have seen that there have been of course a negative impact on employment on women and men, but we have seen that the impact have been bigger on employment of women. So what we have been doing is a series of different policies to recover the loss of employment and here the accelerator model have a crucial role because we need that commitment of companies. Now our society demands for companies to be involved in gender issues and to have different results, we need different ways to do things on organizations. So what we have been doing is working on different plans, especially to increase the participation rate of employment of women in sectors that they traditionally haven't been and they are crucial in this reactivation state of economy like electricity, steams areas that until we have a low rate participation as in all the region of Latin America and the Caribbean. So we have been doing like special plans for sectors that are important for the recovery that we have a low participation of women and that we need to have women in that places. And for that is very important accelerator because what we do is to work with action plans, specifics for each organization of how they looking at their gender gaps can have realistic plans of how they can increase women participation and also to improve the opportunities and the environment in the organization that helps women to be part of the workforce. And that includes of course to have more flexibility and to be able to have some tools that are important to women to come to the workplace like a tiger and that is what we have been working with their private sector. Thank you very much. Vice Minister Aboud, you brought up the pandemic and that leads to a question that's been on my mind. We are all acutely aware that for the past year and a half we have been dealing with a devastating global pandemic that has shifted and changed the skill base probably a great deal in all of your countries. So let me ask an open question and I'd love a volunteer for this one. What have the main insights been from this really challenging period that we've been living through and how has the pandemic changed your view of what we need to do, the skills that are necessary and how we're going to close that skills gap? How are we thinking about that differently than we were a year and a half ago? And I'd love to hear from any of our panelists. Please don't be shy. May I? You may please. Yes, I think that the pandemic forced us to learn new technology, such as digital technology. Our teacher, they were hard to embrace that change. And I think that digital skill is more important now. And I think that if business after COVID, it will take a longer time. It would mean that reduce traveling, but more technology-based businesses will be promoted. And I think that it will change the way we are doing things before and after. It means that it will focus on maybe more distant exchange, but we're safe. It's more efficient, like we don't have to travel. So it will impact travel industry. It will impact the tourist industry. But you will see that businesses with digital technology, with online technology, will prosper. And it will change the way a business model operating in all over the world. And I think that we have to prepare for that change. Thank you. Very good. Thank you for that. Any of our other panelists on this topic? Yeah, just a few remarks. Please. That's okay. Yeah. Well, just two points. I would say in Denmark for many years, also after the financial crisis, we have had very high employment rates also among many of our unskilled workers. And we've been trying for several years to see how can we make sure that they have the skills that are needed in the labor market within the next five, 10, and maybe even 20 years. And we've had a lot of problems actually, you know, making it attractive to people who are in employment, have their paychecks and they have their mortgages to pay and their children to feed to actually go back on the school bench. So what we tried to do during the pandemic was to combine two problems at the same time. We saw that a lot of especially unskilled workers lost their jobs during the pandemic. And so we made this scheme, which I talked about before, the 110% unemployment benefits for actually taking on a longer vocational training program in some of the key areas where we know we lack trained people at the moment. And that being industrial technicians, that being plumbers, electricians, and you name it. So we made a short list of I think around 40 to 50 types of educations where we said that if you start this education now, you will receive 110% unemployment benefit for taking on that education and during the education. So that has made some progress. And then I would say the second thing that we have learned during the pandemic is that it has accelerated our need for educated and trained people. We can see now when we look at how the structures in labor market are placing itself after the pandemic, that the need for skilled people are now even stronger than it was two or three years ago. And it will increasingly become stronger, especially among the vocational trained workers, because in Denmark we have set a very high target of limiting our green grass emissions. And until 2030 where we're gonna limit our emissions by 70%. So we really have a hard drive on for the green transition and to make the green transition work, you need electricians, you need plumbers, you need industrial technicians and so forth. So we are really trying to accelerate the demands in our labor market, which we knew we had, but we just ever more evident after the pandemic that we have. Fantastic, thank you. I think we have time to hear from one more of our panelists on this question. If anybody has a final contribution, they would like to know. I would like to comment if it's possible. Please. The most important aspect that the pandemic showed was the fact that much more can be achieved to work from a distance also within the education. This is valid. But as I mentioned before, challenges and inequalities in access to education must be identified and resolved. The ones who were prepared, they did quite well in Turkey. The ones had the problem infrastructure problem, especially had difficult time to adapt. But overall, in education, in mega cities, in big cities, both in business and schools, we were quite adaptive and everything was working well and it was effective. Another problem is manufacturing. I'm working in the manufacturing industry and manufacturing was also highly impacted during the crisis. We had to find innovative ways to keep the factories open. We had supply chain problems during COVID and we had other issues. And we were trained to work in a certain manner, lean operations, et cetera. So everything has to change. So either through arranging worker schedules or automating processes was a difficult process for all industries and especially manufacturing. This led to a need increase in the number of skilled workers but also in some cases an increase in number of workers overall. Because some workers who were in quarantine couldn't work, for example. So it was very difficult. So to be adaptive was the key issue. And that at the beginning was very difficult but on the course of the pandemic, everybody learned how to react and when to react. So it is a process but it wasn't really easy for companies who are really doing big scale productions, et cetera. So that was a big challenge. Fantastic. Thank you so much. And I would like to thank all of our panelists for being so clear and so informative and for helping us stay on time with this session. I think this might be a record for a World Economic Forum session that we're actually going to end exactly on time. I'm grateful to all of our panelists for that and for the insights they shared with us. I would like to remind all of our panelists and all of our audience members here today that they should feel free to share their insights and their learnings from this session and from all the other ones this week on social channels on top link. And please keep in mind that we have a fantastic array of programming ahead thanks to our colleagues at the forum for the coming week. So please carve out some time, feel free, drop in, participate in these sessions, ask questions. The world that we are creating is changing very quickly and we need to stay on top of it. And I can't think of an area that's more important than making sure that our people have the skills that they need to be successful and to create thriving economies in this world that we're all building so quickly. So again, thank you to our panelists. Thank you to our hosts. And I would like to draw this session to a close. Thanks for being part of this.