Rédaction Africa Links 24 with ANGONOTÍCIAS
Published on 2024-03-03 08:52:05
In a year where the number of unemployed increased by 543,851 to 5,465,291, the Angolan economy generated only 1,454 formal jobs, according to calculations by Expansão based on the report from the Employment Survey in Angola (IEA) by the National Institute of Statistics (INE), for the fourth quarter of 2023, which states that the unemployment rate rose to 31.9%.
The unemployment rate now reported by INE places Angola in the third position among countries with the highest unemployment rate, according to data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), out of a total of 115 nations, behind only Sudan and South Africa.
However, for 2023, the IMF did not account for countries such as Venezuela, Syria, Nigeria, or DR Congo. Thus, after a year without publishing data on employment, INE released the IEA report last week, in a scenario that is not encouraging.
In a year where 554,179 more people entered the working age, 98% of these people went directly into unemployment, increasing the number of unemployed Angolans to 5,465,291. And if 98% went directly into unemployment, it means that the remaining 2% managed to find a means of subsistence. However, out of these 10,329 people who reported having found work, only 1,154 managed to enter the formal sector, while the remaining 8,835 found informal work or odd jobs as a way to survive.
One of the causes of this scenario is the fact that the national economy continues to grow well below the population growth rate, which means that the economy is not generating the necessary jobs to accommodate the people who enter the working age year after year. At a time when the national accounts are still not finalized, and therefore there are no official data on the evolution of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2023, public data on economic growth are included in the Budgetary Justification Report of the State General Budget (OGE) for 2024, in which the Government points to a growth of 0.4% last year. This compared to the annual growth rate, according to the National Development Plan (NDP) 2023-2027, which has been 3.1% per year, as the country’s fertility rate has been 5.4 children per woman. Thus, when the economy does not generate enough jobs for the population, it means that the country is creating more and more poor people and inequality. Currently, out of every 10 Angolans of working age, aged 15 or older, six are in the informal sector, three are unemployed, and one has formal employment.
The economy continues to have a limited capacity to generate jobs when the country has enormous potential. Unemployment needs to be seen, by the government, as a public enemy, alongside corruption, flattery, and nepotism. After all, considering that the Angolan population is mainly young, this increases social tensions, such as crime and widespread lack of security, which are already being felt in Angola. And not only in the cities,” admits economic researcher Fernandes Wanda to Expansão, coordinator of the Social and Economic Research Center at Agostinho Neto University. And the unemployment numbers are especially harsh for the younger population, as at the end of 2023, out of the 5,924,182 people of working age aged between 15 and 24 years, only 2,473,215 were working, equivalent to 42%, while 3,450,967 were unemployed.
Just to give an idea of the impact of unemployment on the youth, note that in 2023 the overall unemployed population increased by 543,851 people. Of these, 453,729 were young people aged between 15 and 24 years, equivalent to 83% of the number of people who became unemployed in the last quarter of 2023.
As for the relationship between informal and formal work in this population group, INE stopped providing data on this relationship, but if the rule of 80% informality relative to the entire employed population is applied, this means that less than 200,000 young people had formal employment at the end of last year. The rest survive on odd jobs or informal work that does not guarantee them any legal security, a salary, or paid vacations, for example. Thus, a young person aged between 15 and 24 years, female, and residing in Luanda, is the profile of the majority of the unemployed in the country at the end of the fourth quarter of 2023, according to the Employment and Unemployment Survey by INE.
The continued high unemployment in the country has coexisted with cycles of high inflation, which result mainly from the devaluation of the national currency and weak domestic production of consumer goods. Therefore, it has been impossible to break the poverty cycles of the population, especially because salaries have not been updated according to inflation, so year after year, the purchasing power is continuously decreasing.
Read the original article (Portuguese) on Angonoticias
