The International Labour Organisation (ILO) and its social partners have offered an insight into how African countries can reduce rising unemployment rate especially among the youth population.
This comes as Nigeria’s minister of labour and employment, Chris Ngige warned that Africa could be sitting on a time bomb unless drastic measures were taken to address increased youth unemployment on the continent. Ngige said it was for this reason that the Federal Government introduced in the N-Power scheme to train and create job opportunities for young Nigerians in various sectors of the economy.
According to the Blueprint for Jobs in Africa which was adopted by the social partners in December 2015 in Casablanca, 63 percent of the African population is less than 25 years old. The Blueprint further showed that every month, at least one million young people on the continent enter the job market. And out of about 73 million jobs created on the continent in the past few years, only about 16 million jobs were grabbed by youth population of Africa which is put at over 200 million people.
At the sixth Africa Social Partners summit hosted by the Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association (NECA), in Lagos on Tuesday, the ILO submitted that the number of productive jobs on the continent would have to increase by over 300 million or some 26 million per year, more than doubling the number of existing productive jobs to reach 579 million by 2030.
According to Cynthia Samuel-Olonjuwon, ILO assistant director-general and regional director for Africa, around half of the 26 million jobs (13 million) required per year in Africa, would need to be in form of new jobs to provide productive employment for the large number of net entrants into the labour market each year.
Even with the attainment of the above estimates, according to Samuel-Olonjuwon, an additional 2.2 million new productive jobs would need to be created annually to eliminate unemployment while approximately 10.6 million productive jobs annually would be needed to eliminate working poverty.
This, she explained, would be either by increasing the productivity and incomes of the working poor in their current jobs or by enabling them to move to more productive jobs.
“This would mean, in practice, almost trebling the current annual growth of productive jobs of 9.5 million per year (between 2010and 2017) to over 26 million per year until 2030,” said Samuel-Olonjuwon.
Ayuba Wabba, president of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), also speaking at the summit, called on African governments to build and expand infrastructure, create the enabling environment that would attract ‘responsible’ investors while also investing in education, healthcare to enhance citizens’ development.
JOSHUA BASSEY
