KOTA KINABALU: Sabah Economic Development and Investment Authority (SEDIA) chief executive Datuk Dr Mohd Yaakub Johari yesterday disclosed that Sabah had passed the development stage where the state attracted investments due to the availability of cheap labour.
“We need to recognize that our ability to transform into a high income economy will depend on our ability to generate adequate human capital and an adaptable labour force with higher skills, talent, expertise and knowledge.
“Sabah indeed can no longer be a haven for cheap labour,” he said at the SDC Innovation Public Forum jointly organised by the Institute for Development Studies Sabah (IDS) and SEDIA.
Mohd Yaakub in his speech also said that according to the Department of Statistics, unemployment in Sabah was relatively low at about 5.4 per cent in 2012.
“There were only about 85,300 unemployed citizens in Sabah in 2012. This is indeed a small figure in comparison to the number of foreign labour in Sabah, especially those in the plantation and construction sectors.
“What is very much needed now is to locate where these unemployed citizens are and ascertain their qualifications as well as skills level to enable them to be trained so that they could provide a pool of human capital geared to drive the economic transformation program,” he pointed out.
According to him, to meet the human capital requirement of Sabah, SEDIA has been undertaking a concerted effort to visit and discuss with higher learning institutions locally as well as overseas on academic and research and development collaborations as well as enticing these higher learning institutions to consider setting up campuses in Sabah in particular to meet investor requirements in SDC projects in line with the Key Focus areas.
This initiative will be further intensified as SEDIA embarks on the third and final phase of SDC with emphasis on accelerating sustainable growth through the provision of adaptable human capital and dedicated infrastructure, he stressed.
Mohd Yaakub said that the key focus areas during the second phase of SDC following the alignment with the National Key Economic Areas (NKEAs) under the ETP are tourism, palm oil, agriculture, oil and gas, education and manufacturing/logistics.
In addition, he disclosed five focus areas have been identified to turn greater Kota Kinabalu into a strong, vibrant and liveable city.
These include the development and modernization of Kota Kinabalu into a lifestyle hub with more tourism attractions, improvement in mobility and travel, boosting the public and private healthcare which will help stimulate health tourism and improvement of early childcare education, he said.