Youth unemployment rate worsens: Survey

Dar es Salaam. By almost any measure, job prospects for young people in Tanzania should be plenty.

Tanzania ranks among the world’s 30 fastest growing economies and spends a higher percentage of its GDP on education than all, but 26 others. In theory, this should correspond to the rapid creation of new jobs and an abundance of well-educated young people to fill them.

But the country is facing a youth unemployment crisis rivalled by few other nations in the world. Last year, Tanzania was home to more unemployed 15 to 24 year-olds per capita than 109 other countries. In a survey by a non-governmental organisation, Restless Development, out of over 1,000 young people across Tanzania, only 14 per cent reported working in a formal, wage-earning job.

“Most of the youth we’re meeting … want to be employed in Dar es Salaam, but the problem is that they don’t have qualifications,” said Nicas Nigumba of Restless Development, which works to help young people find better job opportunities. He said many young women were kept out of school and in the home by tradition, despite their longing for an education and a formal job.

“Often they cannot discuss these things with their parents so they are coming to us,” he explained. The problem is in the numbers: An astonishing 45 per cent of Tanzania’s population is under 15, largely the result of high fertility rates and a decrease in child mortality, according to an April report by the World Bank.

Each year, 900,000 young Tanzanians enter the job market that is generating only 50,000 to 60,000 new jobs. Researchers say the problem originates in the country’s lack of quality education. Last year, 65 per cent of students failed their national examinations required to pass secondary school. What’s more, youth advocates say schools fail to teach requisite skills and intellectual prowess employers are looking for.

“The system of education in Tanzania—teaches people general things, not skills they need for employment,” said Ally Mawanja, the programme coordinator for Restless Development. “We just give them a degree, but it’s hard to use that degree.”

The result is that better-educated young men and women who migrate here from Kenya or other neighbouring countries are filling these skilled jobs.

“There are Kenyans coming to Tanzania and they’re getting jobs that Tanzanians should be getting,” said Nigumba.

Women in Tanzania face a host of additional challenges to finding a job, the foremost of which is their severe under-education in comparison with men. Indeed, Tanzania was placed second to worst out of 68 countries in the 2013 Global Gender Gap Report due to a dramatic discrepancy between boys and girls in educational attainment, among other factors.

The percentage of girls, who attend secondary school is decreasing, down to 45 per cent in 2009 from 48 per cent four years earlier, according to Tanzania’s education ministry.

That the country’s gender divide is as abysmal as its youth unemployment rate is no coincidence: It is largely the result of societal practices that limit girls’ education. Chief among them is the long-standing practice of mandatory pregnancy testing in schools.