10m Ugandans will be hunting for jobs by 2020
Young men nap the afternoon away at the Railway grounds in Kampala. Many people who have no jobs tend to idle their time away. Photo by Abubaker Lubowa
What you need to know:
A World Bank report says out of the nearly 400,000 graduates produced by institutions annually, less than 100,000 are able to find jobs.
KAMPALA- The number of Ugandans in search for jobs could shoot up to 10 million by 2020, piling more pressure on job creation and attempts at achieving economic equality, according to a World Bank report.
The report titled Jobs: Key to Prosperity published last year made a grim assessment of Uganda’s strides in creating jobs for a major segment of an educated, young and urban population.
“Uganda is facing an increasing challenge to productively employ its fast growing and mainly young, literate and increasingly urban population,” it noted.
The World Bank report is corroborated by a 2013 study by the Labour and Education ministries that discovered that out of the nearly 400,000 graduates produced by training institutions annually, less than 100,000 are able to find jobs.
The country’s population currently estimated to be 34 million will have grown to about 42 million by 2020.
Mr Paul Lukema, a research analyst with the Economic Policy Research Centre, says the short term solution in plugging the job deficit lies in promoting agriculture but with the government looking forward to embracing industrialisation in the long run.
“Uganda should create at least 400,000 jobs annually which is 2 million jobs every five years. Though agriculture employs more than 65 per cent of our population, there has been a trend where youth shift from rural areas to urban areas which is a shift from agriculture to [the] service [sector],” Mr Lukema argues.
He adds: “The solution would be industrialisation because it adds value to agriculture and produces formal, high-wage jobs.”
However, all is not gloom and doom for Uganda as the World Bank report further projected that ongoing reforms to Uganda’s education sector will mean that by 2020, about 50 per cent of Uganda’s total labour force will have attained at least a minimum of primary education.
The Daily Monitor beginning today will run a series tracing Uganda’s unemployment woes, what can be done to plug the job deficit and the effects of joblessness on our society.
