By Donald Olama.
Y oung people are a wealth of human resource required for socio-economic development on the continent. If there is one area that requires urgent intervention today in Africa, it is the need to address youth unemployment plaguing the continent. The future of Africa is gloomy and unpredictable as long as able bodied men and women, a lot of them university and college graduates, are not able to get employment or job opportunities to empower themselves and their families.
The magnitude of unemployment remains a serious policy challenge in many Sub-Saharan African countries, including Uganda. Uganda’s national unemployment rate is 9 percent and the share of unemployed youth (18-30 years old) among the total unemployed persons in the country is 13 percent.
In reality, Ugandans, and especially young Ugandans, are highly likely to be underemployed, in precarious and non-rewarding work, or in jobs that cannot offer decent incomes. 84% of the Ugandan population aged between 15-29 work in informal jobs.
Although informality doesn’t necessarily imply poor job quality, in Uganda, there is a strong correlation between the two. 41% of the total working-age population is engaged in subsistence farming, which means that a substantial proportion of the workforce neither generates an income, nor engages with markets. Overall, the high prevalence of informality skews the unemployment rate, resulting in an inaccurate reflection of the realities of the Ugandan labour market.
Development practitioners have questioned not only the quality of the education acquired graduated African youth but also the absorptive capacity of Africa’s labour markets. Together with labour market rigidities and labour mobility barriers, skill and educational mismatches represent one of the most important costly factor for the labour markets whereby graduate youth’s skills do not correspond to the available jobs requirements.
Many young people have little or no skills and are therefore largely excluded from productive economic and social life. One reason for low productivity in Africa is poor work ethics and service delivery.
Those with some education often exhibit skills irrelevant to current labour market demands, in a situation where educational and skills requirements are increasing, resulting in millions of unemployed and underemployed. High skills mismatches at the individual level are likely to affect wage salaries, reduce job satisfaction and increase the likelihood of frequent job changes or redundancies. Periods of unemployment through lack of experience erodes the little skills over a long period of redundancy-making the unemployed slide into the poverty trap.
The magnitude of unemployment rate is very high in urban areas because of better chances of job availability .
