The government’s safety nets provide support to less than 1% of young people without jobs, according to a recent Jobberman Nigeria survey.
The research claims that although social safety nets have significantly improved the fight against poverty and socioeconomic vulnerabilities on a worldwide scale, their effects in Nigeria are uneven because of their narrow scope and poor targeting.
To address the challenges of unemployment in the nation, the Federal government of Nigeria has established various social intervention programs.
A few of these initiatives are N-Power, the Government Economic Empowerment Program, the Conditional Cash Transfer, Graduate Internship Scheme and Training Program, Youth Enterprise with Innovation in Nigeria, SURE-P Technical Vocational Education, and Youth Employment in Agriculture Program.
Jobberman claims that there is a significant brain drain from the nation, known as “Japa,” and that terminations of contractual employment and layoffs are frequent in various economic sectors.
According to the career promotion platform in the research, over the last five years, Nigeria’s young unemployment rate has increased by an average of 6% annually.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics’ most recent data, the unemployment rate in the first quarter of 2023 was 4.1%.
According to the agency, 33% of people were unemployed in Q4 2020.
In order to calculate the nation’s unemployment rate for the first quarter of this year, the NBS modified its approach.
Dr. Yemi Kale, the former Chief Executive Officer of the National Bureau of Statistics and Statistician-General of the Federation, had criticized the most recent unemployment rate.
While serving as the head of the statistics organization, he asserted that he resisted the impulse to further alter the nation’s technique for collecting unemployment data.
According to Kale, one hour of labor in the US would earn the same amount of money as twenty hours of labor in Nigeria.
“That’s why I opposed (modifying the unemployment-gathering methodology) for ten years because it didn’t make sense in terms of giving our policymakers the data they need,” he stated. The committee that was established, which included the ILO, presented its findings and determined that one hour did not make sense because the average salary one would receive from an hour’s work would not be profitable. For this reason, the 20 hours were set.
Every geopolitical zone in the nation has a certain percentage of unemployed people, according to the Jobberman research, which suggests that young people in the North East and North West are more likely to experience prolonged periods of unemployment than persons in other parts of the nation.
