According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), the number of unemployed Kenyans increased to more than 2.97 million in the quarter ending December.
This indicates a 2.94% increase from 2.89 million in September, implying that the economy lost over 80,000 jobs in the three months after the August 9 General Elections. Youth unemployment is at an all-time high, with over half of those without jobs being aged between 20 and 29 years.
This underscores the growing crisis of youth unemployment. The hardest hit are secondary school and college graduates who are struggling to find work due to the reduced hiring on the back of sluggish corporate earnings.
The economic activity in Kenya is estimated to have decelerated further in the fourth quarter after the administration dropped consumption subsidies, which curbed inflation.
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The sky-high inflation has reduced the shopping basket of households, and many are being forced to cut non-essential expenditures amid negative growth in real wages. The worst drought in decades has reduced activities in Kenya’s agricultural sector, which is the biggest employer and accounts for the largest share of the country’s GDP.
The Kenyan economy grew by an estimated 5.6% in 2022 compared to 7.5% a year earlier. However, the Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya, Patrick Njoroge, recently trimmed the forecast for the country’s economy to grow by 5.8% in 2023, down from an earlier figure of 6.1% due to a downward revision of the prospects for the agricultural sector.
Like other countries in the region, Kenya is emerging from a drought, the worst in four decades, that hit agriculture hard.
The unemployed consist of those who were actively looking for jobs and those who had despaired and quit searching for work.
The KNBS reports that the combined rate of unemployment and potential labour force (LU3) measured as either unavailable jobseekers or available potential jobseekers for the fourth quarter of 2022 was 13.9% compared to 13.3% recorded in the same quarter of 2021.
Years of strong economic growth have created jobs in Kenya, but they are mostly low-paying, informal and coming at a rate that economists say is too low to absorb the rapidly growing youth population.
The job market in Kenya is dire, and it is a major blow to jobseekers, especially the more than one million young people who graduate from colleges and secondary schools in search of low-cadre positions like clerks.