As part of the Saudi government's efforts to create more spaces for women in the labor market, an initiative was recently announced to qualify 60 Saudi girls to work in selling and marketing fish products, marking the first time that women work in this profession.
This step aims to create new jobs and encourage initiatives aimed at qualifying girls to work in jobs in which they are not accustomed, and to enter into broader fields of the prevailing stereotype about women's jobs that restrict them to specific professions, such as education and medicine.
Create new job opportunities
The Executive Vice President of the Saudi National Program for the Development of Fisheries, Musa Al-Kinani, said that the number of Saudi women who were accepted in the project will be trained in the "solution" track, which specializes in sales and marketing of fish products, at the hands of experts and specialists in this field.
Al-Kinani points out that "the initiative aims to train and qualify Saudi youth for the fishing profession, and that the ministry has many strategic plans that contribute to creating job opportunities for young men and women in a number of technical and craft sectors."
Empowering women is one of the basic pillars to protect them from violence #Protection #Saudi #Jeddah pic.twitter.com/WFhrNjNdEx
— Civil Family Protection Association (@Himayahorgsa) August 9, 2022
Saudi Women Empowerment Initiatives
The initiatives to empower Saudi women did not stop at qualifying them to learn new professions, but the Federation of Saudi Chambers announced that it was “in the process of studying the mechanism of empowering women to take leadership positions in private sector establishments, identifying challenges, and providing the best solutions and proposals to address challenges, in cooperation with the Coordinating Council for Women’s Work.” .
The study included the challenges facing human resources departments in employing women in leadership positions, and the proposed solutions to support the employment of women in them. All chambers of commerce were notified of this, to circulate to their employees and disclose the challenges.
In turn, the Saudi Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development has begun implementing several initiatives aimed at empowering women in the labor market, including the leadership training and guidance initiative, which aims to raise the percentage of women in middle and senior leadership positions, in order to achieve the goals of increasing women's participation in the labor market through training Female cadres in various sectors, whether in the public or private sectors, to provide an ideal environment that enables them to obtain information that will enrich leadership skills.
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— Wusool Worker Transport Support Program (@Wusool_SA) August 16, 2022
Initiatives to facilitate the work of Saudi women
Among the Ministry's initiatives: the program to support working women's transport "Wusul", which aims to help the female employee overcome transportation difficulties to and from the workplace, and support her job stability.
The Saudi Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development also launched an initiative to work remotely, with the aim of reaching the human energies of job seekers who are self-employed (independents) to owners of establishments in various regions of the Kingdom, in line with the policies of labor market development in opening work fields for citizens in business Convenient, stable and productive.
The program to support children’s hospitality service for working women “Qura” is also one of the important programs, as it provides services to parents looking for centers to register their children, in addition to supporting the empowerment of working women by joining and continuing in the labor market.
In addition to this is the Parallel Training Initiative of the "National Transformation Program", whose objectives include "raising the level of job performance of female graduates and ensuring their success in the labor market."