By A.D McKenzie
Paris - As Brazil looks ahead to hosting the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, the country is struggling to line up the technical workers necessary for these projects, officials say.
"We need to triple the number of engineers in the next few years," says Maria Helena Guimarães de Castro, former state secretary of education of São Paolo.
Speaking at a conference here, Guimarães said Brazil needed around 360,000 engineers and technical workers for the global sporting events as well as for oil and gas exploration. The country has a severe shortage of such workers.
Brazil is not alone in this situation. Shortage of engineers in both developed and developing countries is a growing concern as it threatens national progress, says a report published by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Agency.
"Developing countries are the most affected," says Tony Marjoram, editor of the report and senior programme specialist in UNESCO’s Division of Basic and Engineering Sciences.
"Wealthy countries can hire engineers on the international market, but this leads to brain drain in the poorer countries as many of their engineers go abroad to work," he told IPS. "That’s if they’re still producing engineers in the first place."
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