An entertaining interview with artist Tewodros Fikadu. Maki Show with actor Tewodros Fikadu. There is much debate regarding the impact of the young population, particularly on the provision of jobs and opportunities. I was browsing the Ethiopian Job Creation Commission website and was very excited to know some of Ethiopia’s unemployment data points, according to them more than 53% of our population is part of the active workforce. 40% of employees are self-employed.
This is a great indicator there is a lot of entrepreneurship in this country. I was surprised to read that Ethiopia has a national unemployment rate of 4.5%. It certainly feels high. But not all employees are in the jobs they learn, with 40% underemployed, according to the Jobs Creation Commission. The official definition of underemployment is “the employee is employed in less than full-time or regular employment, or in employment that is inappropriate about his or her educational or economic needs”. This is a very serious problem.
I constantly see people with degrees and certifications in a particular field working in overqualified and underpaid positions. This is a serious source of frustration. Another key data point we found on the Job Creation Commission website is that 25% of young people aged 15-29 are unemployed. I think that’s a pretty conservative number because the youth unemployment rate is supposedly pretty high. This suspicion is backed up by another data point showing that two million people enter the labor market each year. I don’t have data on how many jobs are created each year, but I doubt this number is anywhere near 2 million.
