UK Parliament / Open data

Job Creation: Developing Countries

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and it has been a great privilege and pleasure to share that work with her over the past few years. I reiterate that I believe such work to be essential for the UK as well. It is not simply a matter for developing countries. As I have said, we must learn from some of the work going on elsewhere in the world, and I believe we must integrate that sort of business education into our schools. We are not talking about sophisticated business education; we are talking about basic skills that are relevant to the self-employed or those in the informal sector. Many of our young people who are at school will end up being self-employed or working in the informal sector; that is true more than ever in the modern economy. We need to give them those skills, not just through excellent programmes such as Young Enterprise—I am proud to support that programme in my constituency, and I have no doubt that several colleagues do likewise—but as a core part of our curriculum.

One might argue that such training has little relevance to someone involved in small-scale agriculture, but I absolutely disagree. I have seen many examples of how farmers who have just a small amount of land can, using business acumen, create vibrant businesses that are based on agriculture, but go beyond it into activities such as food processing, retail and feed manufacture.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
583 c37WH 
Session
2014-15
Chamber / Committee
Westminster Hall
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