AFRICA UNEMPLOYED AFTER 2020 -

DRASTIC   REPORT  !!!! 

 Where would we in Africa end up while all our  natural resources are being swindled by the W E S T ?

 

 SOURCE:  MBENDI NEWSLETTER,  30/1/2015.

THE WORLD AFTER 2020 - AFRICA UNEMPLOYED

Last week the ILO published its latest report World Employment and Social Outlook – Trends 2015. Here is a summary of the key findings with particular emphasis on Africa.

 

The global employment outlook will deteriorate in the coming five years. Over 201 million were unemployed in 2014 around the world, over 31 million more than before the start of the global crisis. Global unemployment is expected to increase by 3 million in 2015 and by a further 8 million in the following four years. The global employment gap, which measures the number of jobs lost since the start of the crisis, currently stands at 61 million.

 

 If new labour market entrants over the next five years are taken into account, an additional 280 million jobs need to be created by 2019 to close the global employment gap caused by the crisis. Youth, especially young women, continue to be disproportionately affected by unemployment. The youth unemployment rate is practically three times higher than is the case for their adult counterparts. The heightened youth unemployment situation is common to all regions and is occurring despite the trend improvement in educational attainment, thereby fuel ling social discontent.

 

Underpinning some of these developments is the decline in medium-skilled routine jobs in recent years. This has occurred in parallel with rising demand for jobs at both the lower and upper ends of the skills ladder. As a result, relatively educated workers that used to undertake these medium- skilled jobs are now increasingly forced to compete for lower-skilled occupations. These occupational changes have shaped employment patterns and have also contributed to the widening of income inequality recorded over the past two decades.

Unfortunately the report lumps together North Africa and the Middle East making it difficult to extract numbers and trends for North Africa alone. Countries in North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East continue to suffer from high unemployment rates, in some cases up to 30% of the labour force. 

 

The unemployment rate in North Africa is expected to remain around 12.5% and in sub-Saharan Africa around 7.7%. The big exception is South Africa where the unemployment rate is forecast to stay above 25%. Sub- Saharan Africa and South Asia account for more than half of the world’s vulnerable employment, with three out of four workers in these regions in vulnerable employment. Likewise, progress in reducing working poverty has slowed.

 

Sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to have had the highest share of the population aged 10–24 of all regions, at approximately 32%, compared with 27% in Latin America and the Caribbean and 25% in Asia and the Pacific. With declining fertility rates, this means that Sub-Saharan Africa is in the early stages of a demographic transition. Such a transition could prompt a “demographic dividend”, as the productive capacity of the working-age population surges with the additional labour supply. To reach this dividend, however, further investment in human capital and infrastructure, improvements in governance and better social protection systems, in particular providing adequate health care is required to ensure sufficient productive opportunities are available for those entering the labour market.

 

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest labour force participation rate of all regions, estimated at 70.9% compared with a global average of 63.5%. The youth unemployment rate is comparatively low in relation to the adult rate, with a youth-to-adult ratio of 1.9 – the lowest of all regions worldwide. The youth unemployment rate was 11.8% in 2014 – only East Asia and South Asia had lower rates. The the female unemployment rate, at 8.7%, is only marginally higher than the rate for men of 6.9%. However, the quality of jobs is of considerable concern, with working poverty and vulnerable employment the highest across all regions. The vulnerable employment rate – the share of own account workers and unpaid family workers in total employment – was estimated at 76.6% in 2014, significantly higher than the global average of 45.3%. Female vulnerable employment (typically unpaid family work) was considerably higher than the rate for males, at 84.3% compared with 70.1% for males in 2014.