How Uganda’s unemployment crisis started

Cutting a forlorn, disconsolate figure, Gilbert Natwijuka, 28, rummages through a file of documents held firmly in a dusty brown envelope, a feature synonymous with job-seekers, at the Internal Affairs Ministry headquarters in Kampala.

I want to start a conversation with him but cannot muster the courage to bother an already irritated looking soul. That is until he seeks some sort of guidance from me, whereupon I attempt to find out his worries. He pours out his heart to me.

Keen to land a dream job and live a moderate life, far from the hard childhood he had endured, Natwijuka set out on a journey he thought would lead him that way. He tells me he completed a Bachelor’s degree in Economics in 1998 from Makerere University, sure a transcript would earn him a ticket to prosperity.

Armed with his transcript, he set out on a job-searching spree.
“I thought I would instantly get a job, build a house, develop my professional career and live a life better than scratching for a meal as I did during my childhood.

“Back then, I thought that the only stepping stone one needed was a transcript,” Natwijuka reminisces. But he was mistaken.

As the graduation euphoria gradually fizzled out, Natwijuka, armed with his transcript, confidently hit the streets and filed several applications at different government and private agencies. He would wait for days without making any headway.

He repeated that cycle over and over. When I bumped into him, he had given up and was now trying to get travel documents to try his luck overseas.

Natwijuka’s plight is shared by many of his generation. They start school with big dreams, complete university with a degree and then pour onto the streets to pursue a job, which hunt often turns into a wild goose chase.

How it all started
But how did we as a country get to this? After all, there was a time when employment agencies scrambled to ink contracts with graduates-elect even before graduation day.

Patrick Okello, the Assistant Commissioner, labour productivity at the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development traces Uganda’s unemployment problem to the 1990s as the country emerged from years of political instability.

The semblance of order was followed by the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank on developing countries in the 1990s. Under the SAPs, governments were compelled to reform their civil service which translated into retrenchment and downsizing, leaving previously employed civil servants jobless, Okello says.

“People had to be offloaded and that aggregated the unemployment problem,” he says.
Under the SAPs, there was also privatisation which meant corporations previously owned by the government were sold to private entities that downsized and laid off some staff, leading to a surge in unemployment.

And with a return of normalcy in the urban centres, come an increase in rural-urban migration, putting pressure on the towns.

This also triggered unemployment problems in the country. With the economy opened up in the 1990s under liberalisation, Okello says, there was a proliferation of training institutions that have eternally churned out graduates with little employment opportunities on offer.

A 2013 study by the Labour and Education ministries revealed that out of the nearly 400,000 graduates that are churned out by the different training Institutions annually, less than 100,000 are able to find jobs.

“The inability to secure jobs has made such people to fizzle their way into low calibre jobs and also engage in habits such as gambling. Because the youth lack adequate skills and experience, most youth when employed, find themselves in low paying temporary jobs with no job security at all,” Mr Okello says.

Uganda’s labour force is now about 14 million and is growing at five per cent higher than the national population growth rate of 3.2 per cent per year, triggering an inevitable pressure on the number of jobs available, according to the Labour ministry.

Last year, a World Bank report titled “Jobs-Key to Prosperity”, painted a grimmer picture, predicting that more job seekers will be created in the future.

“With Uganda’s labour force growing above four per cent per annum, Uganda can add 10 million potential workers into the labour market by 2020, adding to the challenge of creating goods jobs and achieving equitable growth,” the report noted.

One of the solutions to the problem, the report notes, is that the country’s policy makers will have to manage a transition from a predominant involvement in low productivity subsistence agriculture, to increased involvement in higher productivity manufacturing and services sector.

HOW UGANDA COMPARES TO THE REGION
Kenya: Kenya’s unemployment rate has been at 40 per cent over the last five years.
Rwanda: Rwanda’s Ministry of Labour estimates that about 13 per cent of the population in Kigali and eight per cent in other urban areas are unemployed.

In 2011, two thirds of the population in Rwanda was under-employed on time-related basis, according to Francois Ngoboka, the director of labour research and employment promotion at the Ministry of Labour and Public Service.

Tanzania: Tanzania’s unemployment rate stands at 10.70 per cent in 2011 from 11.70 per cent in 2007.

Burundi: The country’s unemployment rate stands at 14 per cent as of 2011.

814,000; the number of persons aged 14 and above classified as unemployed.

14%: The percentage age of the highest unemployment rates, in central and east central West-Nile has the least at least three per cent.

Shs110,000: The median monthly income of Persons in paid employment

Source: The 2013 National Household Survey

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