Jakarta. Jakarta governor hopeful Pramono Anung has proposed job fairs as one of his key strategies to bring down unemployment rate as the ex-cabinet secretary confronted his election rivals in their first head-to-head debate on Sunday evening.

Pramono is facing Former West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil and independent candidate Dharma Pongrekun. In a debate that zeroed in on human capital development, Pramono revealed that 354,496 Jakartans are unemployed. Data showed that at least 53,000 people across Indonesia had faced layoffs so far this year. In response -- Pramono who has partnered with actor-turned-politician Rano Karno as his ticket mate -- is planning to hold trimonthly job fairs.

“About 354,000 people in Jakarta are unemployed, and 53,000 people [in Indonesia] have been laid off from their jobs so far in 2024,” Pramono said at the debate aired live by national television.

“This calls for serious government intervention. We should host job fairs once every three months in the sub-districts,” Pramono said. 

The career expo will take place at the sub-district government offices. The Pramono-Rano pair also plans on having these offices to include job training centers.

Pramono has also made the career fairs as his silver bullet for other problems happening in Jakarta.

He proposed job fairs when responding to Ridwan Kamil’s argument on improving Jakarta’s low female labor participation while promising to make the proposed training centers to be inclusive to women. 

Pramono wants to relax the requirements for Jakarta’s "orange troops", the nickname for the people hired to collect trash and keep the metropolis clean. According to Pramono, these orange troop worker vacancies are currently only open to high school graduates. Pramono intends to allow anyone who has pursued elementary education to be an Orange Trooper should he win the election.

“What’s most important is that these [orange troop workers] can read and write,” Pramono said, pointing out that many women are without high school diplomas.

Pramono also brought up the job fairs when the panelists asked him what he would do to transform Jakarta into a “global city” from a human capital perspective, especially his plans to involve Jakarta’s 267 wards.

For reference, an Indonesian ward is a smaller government unit compared to a subdistrict and is equivalent to a village. As a case in point, the Jagakarsa subdistrict in South Jakarta has 6 smaller wards/villages.

As Jakarta is about to lose its national capital status, the government wants to maintain the metropolis as a major economic center in the country. This includes making Jakarta what they call a “global city”.

Jakarta, however, is still lagging in the 2023 Global City Index. Jakarta only ranked 74th out of 156 countries in an index that factored in human capital, among other things, in the calculations. Pramono admitted that Jakarta was still struggling in the human capital area. 

“That is why the government must hold these job fairs once every three months in every sub-district office …  and also in every ward-level government office if necessary,” Pramono said. 

Over 8 million Jakartans are set to cast their votes to pick their next governor on Nov. 27.