National Intelligence for Skills, Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship (NISE)

In Bangladesh, mismatch between the demand and supply sides is considered to be the key reason behind unemployment and inefficiencies of the labour market. National Intelligence for Skills, Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship (NISE), a one-stop data driven matchmaking platform, bridges the gap between demand and supply sides and thus benefits all relevant stakeholders. This unique platform caters for the needs of youth, policymakers, skills service providers and industry by enabling real-time data driven decision making.

Innovation Summary

Innovation Overview

Around the globe there are 621 million young people aged 15-24 years old who are not in education, employment or training and 75 million young people are trained but have no job. This crisis is also predominant in Bangladesh. The country has a total of 82 million people in the labour force, with 2 million youth joining the force every year. Youth unemployment rate is as high as 10.6% and the share of unemployed youth in total unemployment is 79.6%. Much of the workforce, especially young people, face difficulties in finding employment as they lack information on necessary skill sets for the jobs. With the changes in the workplace and skills set demand, there is an increasing imbalance between the supply of labour and demand for skills.

The country’s current practice of supply driven trainings has led to a supply-demand mismatch as youths are unable to learn the right skills for jobs while the employers and industries are unable to find suitable human resources that they require. As a solution to this problem, a2i- Aspire to Innovate Programme, developed a one-stop data driven matchmaking platform: National Intelligence for Skills, Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship (NISE). The objectives of NISE are as follows:

Matchmake Youth, Skills Providers and Industries
Contribute to achieving SDG 4 (4.3, 4.4) & SDG 8 (8.5, 8.6)
Facilitate real-time data driven decision making and policy formulation
Create a central database for youth
Provide Career Counselling and Guidance
Reduce time-cost-visit (TCV) for receiving skills
Forecast future occupations
Track employment records
Track initiatives on 4IR

On the supply side, youth benefit from getting automatically registered to a central youth-database, and they can avail special features like counselling and guidance, job forecast, apprenticeship opportunities, business and migration suggestions, and entrepreneurship guiding pathways. Policy Makers benefit from using real time data of the platform’s Dynamic Dashboard, 4IR and SDG Dashboards to generate user behaviour analysis reports and analyse labour market condition to make informed data-driven policy decisions. And skills service providers benefit from the innovation in the following ways:

Can shift to demand driven skills development model
Avail services like course redesign, course enrolment, online payment, enrolment management, training centre management, etc.
Use platform’s real time data to forecast future trend in jobs and analyse job market
Maintain industrial linkage
Make data-driven planning

On the demand side, Industry/ Industry Associations/ Industry Skills Council benefit from it as they can:

Publish job vacancy posts to targeted youth, easily sort candidates based on requirements by automatic filtering, assess candidates using features like pre-interview assessment, exam management, etc.
Track apprenticeship activities through apprenticeship management.
Place demands to the skills service providers for skilled youth
Use Dynamic Dashboard for data-driven decisions
Track 4IR activities across sectors from 4IR Dashboard

Currently NISE is used by 6 Government departments under 4 Ministries and by the end of 2023, 32 government departments under 23 ministries will be onboarded in NISE. The supreme ministry which is a cabinet division is coordinating the whole process. To ensure the job demand availability we are not only onboarding the industries but also integrating with the existing job portals. Moreover, NISE has been replicated in Jordan and Somalia in collaboration with relevant Government and other counterparts.

Innovation Description

What Makes Your Project Innovative?

NISE aims to minimize youth unemployment crisis through the following innovations:

Making real-time data available for the policy makers and decision makers to make evidence-based informed decisions regarding youth skills and employment
Bringing together 32 Govt. Departments relevant to skills development under 23 Ministries into one platform so that they can use the platform’s future job forecasting feature to ensure market driven skills development
Connecting 42 industry associations into a single platform to make sure the HR demands from their member industries can be visualized in real time
Integrating with all existing job portals
Providing career guidance, suggestions on business and entrepreneurship, apprenticeship opportunities, and migration opportunities for the youth
Securing meaningful decent employment
The platform offers specialized services for people with disabilities - i.e., voice command, reading guide, font customization, cursor customization

What is the current status of your innovation?

NISE has 0.4 M registered unemployed youth. 80 Skills Service Providers (SSPs) under the Department of Social Service, 27 SSPs under the Department of Youth Development, 6 SSPs under the Bangladesh Industrial Technical Assistance Centre and 20 private SSPs are supporting real time data driven decision making. Piloting started by SME Foundation to reach 7.8 M Cottage, Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (CMSMEs) in Bangladesh to ensure access to skills. By the end of 2023, 32 Govt departments under 23 ministries will be onboarded in NISE. The supreme ministry's cabinet division is coordinating the whole process. To ensure the job demand availability NISE is not only onboarding the industries but also integrating with the existing job portals. Moreover, to solve similar challenges NISE has been replicated in Jordan & Somalia.

Innovation Development

Collaborations & Partnerships

32 Govt. departments under 23 Ministries supply skills
ICT Division and the Cabinet Division act as the host Ministries of the innovation
National Skill Development Authority, Prime Minister’s Office acts as the national coordination agency
UNDP provides global reach for the innovation
ILO and UNICED provides technical support
Bdjobs provides information about the labour demand from the industries
Somalia's Ministry of Communication & Technology and UNDP Somalia are replicating the innovation in Somalia
Jordan's Ministry of Digital Economy & Entrepreneurship and UNDP Jordan are replicating in Jordan

Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

On the supply side, 7K SSPs under 32 Govt departments under 23 ministries and 6K private SSPs get the opportunity of providing demand driven skills as they get the forecast of skills demand. Bangladesh's labour force is 82 M and its annual growth rate is 2.2 M, out of them 1.7M get skills from those SSPs. On the demand side industries benefit from obtaining skilled human resources. Policy makers are positively affected as they can make informed data driven policy decisions based on labour market situation.

Innovation Reflections

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

These results have been measured through the real-time data available in the platform:

0.4 M unemployed youth registered in NISE
80 skills service providers under the Department of Social Service supporting real time data driven decision making
27 skills service providers under the Department of Youth Development supporting real time data driven decision making
6 Skills Development Centres under the Bangladesh Industrial Technical Assistance Centre supporting real time data driven decision making
Piloting started by SME Foundation to reach 7.8 M CMSMEs in Bangladesh to ensure Access to Skills

Challenges and Failures

Challenges:

Frequent change in leadership at Govt Ministries/ Departments and industry associations obstructed the flow of execution
Meeting customized requirements, and streamlining them under the platform framework required multiple revisions of the process
Digitalizing previously stored manual data of the stakeholders in huge quantities was a tardy process

In order to mitigate these challenges:

Organizations have assigned multiple focal points for the innovation's execution
All the organizations are onboarded using a common framework
Organizations are taking the lead of their respective data digitalization

Conditions for Success

For an innovation like NISE to be successful, the following conditions played a vital role:

Relevant ministries/departments allocated proper resources and infrastructure services for the development of this innovative platform
The top-down approach of the government through strong leadership of Cabinet Division and ownership of relevant ministries and divisions contributed to the achievement of NISE. Relevant government policies such as the National Youth Policy 2017 mandates the development of such platform where youth will be guided regarding skills requirement and employment opportunities
The election manifesto of the government also emphasized a singular platform with youth database
A dedicated team with a deep understanding of the labour market, industry skills requirement, frontier technology, and start-up ecosystem of the country have been engaged with the innovation since inception

Replication

Considering the significance and distinctive nature of this platform, NISE has been replicated in other countries. Realizing the significance of skills development and decent employment opportunities of 2.8 million youths in Jordan, the country's Ministry of Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship (MODEE) has replicated it under the name of “Digi Maharat” with support from UNDP Jordan and UNDP Crisis Bureau Office, New York. Another global replication of NISE is in Somalia where Ministry of Communication and Technology with the support of UNDP Somalia and UNDP Chief Digital Office in New York has already launched NISE platform under the name of “Shaqo-Abbur” to ensure skills development and job opportunity to nearly 5.32 million youths in Somalia.

Lessons Learned

Using ICT in combating the challenges of skills development and employment generation can add a new dimension in preparing a country to prosper in the future and NISE can be an effective tool to make that happen. To spread the benefits of using NISE to all, such an innovation needs to incorporate all the access points available to ensure access to last mile youth. The smart notification system via email and SMS can be incorporated into the system so that arrival of new courses or jobs can be noticed immediately and youths can be updated all the time. It is expected that the NISE platform will keep up the flow of successes by learning from the challenges along the way and become more resilient in fulfilling its aim to close the gap between the supply and demand sides of skills, education, employment and entrepreneurship and thereby can contribute to effective implementation of Bangladesh Vision 2041.

Anything Else?

NISE has been awarded at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Champion 2020 in the e-Employment category by International Telecommunication Union, Switzerland
UNDP Chief Digital Office has declared NISE as a Global Best Practice in 2021
United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation (UNOSSC) has declared NISE as a Good Practice in 2022 https://www.unsouthsouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/SSTC-Good-Practices-in-LDCs-EN.pdf (Page no:128)
NISE has been declared the winner of the “Bangladesh Innovation Award 2022” in “innovation in public service delivery”
NISE has been nominated to be a “Digital Public Good (DPG)” so that other countries with similar problems can easily use the platform in their contexts
NISE has been featured in Digital X Solution Catalogue of UNDP's Chief Digital Office (https://digitalx.undp.org/nise_1.html)