Some Lessons from Botswana's Experience with Manpower Planning

Manpower planning as a guide to educational expansion in developing countries has had a mixed reputation over the last decade. The debate in the academic literature has tended to focus upon the techniques for projecting future levels of demand for skilled manpower used by typical planning models1. Criticisms have rightly emphasised the large margin of error which is likely to be associated with long-term occupational demand projections. They have pointed out that the models used usually take no account of market indicators particularly wages and costs as a guide to decision-making.The fact that the approach tends to ignore possibilities of substitution between different occupational structures with regard to output, and different skill structures with regard to occupations has also been identified as an over-simplification and as a potential source of significant errors in attempting to anticipate future demand. In spite of these criticisms, more than 40 manpower plans were completed for more than 20 developing countries in Africa over the decade ending in 1970. Judging from the position in central and southern Africa, where the five English-speaking independent countries have each commissioned one manpower survey since 1970, the trend is not yet beginning to disappear. In many ways this is not surprising. In most African countries at Independence, one of the most obvious and pressing groups of problems facing the new administrations was that of extreme shortages of skilled and educated local workers, high levels of vacancies in skilled jobs and acute dependence upon non-citizen personnel to fill often the most high-level and influential positions in both Government and the private sector. The need for major increases in educational provision appeared obvious on these grounds alone, and implicitly or explicitly, some form of manpower forecasting had to be used in order to decide what proportion of Governments' scarce financial and human resources should be devoted to educational expansion. The labour markets of many countries are still characterised by structural imbalance, and these circumstances explain why manpower forecasting methods however imperfect these may be still retain an important place in the planning process. Nevertheless, the problems connected with projecting the long-term demand for skilled and educated workers have typically been only a small part of the work of manpower planners. The emphasis that has been given in the literature to projection methodology, though this is important, has tended to divert attention from a wider range of benefits of manpower planning, broadly defined, for policy in education and in other sectors.