In a new report titled Future of work (PDF), Passion Incubator, an Abuja-based technology accelerator, came to the same severe trajectory as the one I had reported few days ago from Bloomberg and National Bureau of Statistics: in Nigeria, “only 25% of the workforce is engaged in paid employment”. The Bloomberg/NBS focused only on youth – this one focuses on all segments of the workforce.
(Read with low voice – if you do not have post-secondary education in Nigeria, you may not make the unemployment database even though you have no job. Yes, people do not really see a guy with only primary school education but without a job as being unemployed. He has not done enough to qualify for job.)
Simply, if Nigeria does not deal with our unemployment paralysis, we may not even have a nation to talk of future work!
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With a workforce of 85 million, Nigeria is home to an enormous labour market. However, this resource is characterized by low levels of skill and educational attainment – just 15% of the labour force has a postsecondary education.
About 11.1 million out of the unemployed 20.9 million are involved in one form of work or the other with most of them involved in small and medium scale enterprises in the agriculture and small scale retail businesses. Overall, only 25% of the workforce is engaged in paid employment while half of the workforce has either just primary education or no formal education.
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