Top achievers everywhere, but where are the jobs?

Since he was a child, Mr James Munyoki, 33, has had a passion for flying.

The Mang'u High School alumnus graduated as an Aerospace engineer from China’s Nanjing University in 2012 and returned home.

He did not wait for a job to come by, but instead chose to start building drones for commercial use.

He was, however, shocked when he recently took out an advert seeking trainee engineers and interns to come and join him at his company in Upper Hill, Nairobi.

“I received at least 200 applications from engineers here in Kenya who just wanted to work for free. I only had an opening for five and most did not understand how I could reject them given that they would essentially be working as volunteers,” Mr Munyoki said in a recent interview with the Nation during which he painted a sad picture of jobless engineers in Kenya.

 His story is not unique. Today doctors, pilots, engineers and other professionals who took prestigious courses at university are jobless.

Kenya continues to churn out academic stars faster than the economy can absorb them, in what portends a bleak future for some of the current giants who will join a saturated job market.

 Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of top achievers grew by 42 per cent to 893 as more candidates who sat for the 2020 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exams got the coveted straight A, compared to 627 in 2019.

In total, 143,140 made the cut for university admission by scoring C+ (plus) and above.

 But unless the country steps up the rate of job creation, a good number of these youths will graduate from campus four years from now to find millions of their predecessors queuing for non-existent jobs.

 Worse still, even the informal jobs that were being created by the economy before the Covid-19 were not enough to absorb the graduates coming out of the various training institutions.

 On average, Kenya has been creating about 850,000 informal jobs annually in the past five years. But this is still less than the more than 900,000 youths who join the job market annually.

 Also, fewer formal jobs are being created than the number of students who graduate from public and private universities.

 For instance, in 2019, the economy generated just 67,800 modern jobs against more than 100,000 graduates who leave universities every year. By the end of 2019, there were 509,473 students in campuses and the annual enrolment grew from 68,550 in 2018 to 89,488 in 2019. While the 2021 Economic Survey data is yet to be published, data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) shows that in 2019, total employment excluding those engaged in small-scale farming and pastoralist activities increased from 17.3 million in 2018 to 18.1 million in 2019.

 The total new jobs generated in the economy were 846,300 in 2019. The informal sector was estimated to have created 767,900 new jobs in 2019, compared to 744,100 new jobs created in 2018.

 A recent survey by the same agency shows that by December 2020, 17.6 million Kenyans in the productive age of 15-64 were employed. This means more than 9.4 million Kenyans in the working age group were unemployed.

 In its quarterly survey, KNBS put the unemployment rate at 7.2 per cent using the strict definition of unemployment. But this number grows to double digits if all factors are considered.

 “The unemployment rate, measured based on the strict definition of seeking work in the last four weeks, was 7.2 per cent in the third quarter of 2020, compared to 5.3 per cent in the same quarter of 2019 and 10.4 per cent recorded in the second quarter of 2020,” the KNBS report notes.

 The highest proportion of the unemployed was reported in the age groups 20-24 and 25-29 at 17.6 per cent and 10.7 per cent, respectively.

 “The survey revealed that the overall employment to population ratio in the country, for the working age population, was 63.9 per cent in the third quarter of 2020, compared to 66.1 per cent recorded in the same quarter of 2019, and 57.7 per cent recorded in the second quarter of 2020,” KNBS said in the report.

 Though the numbers capture the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on jobs, it will take a long time for industries, companies and key sectors such as tourism and the hospitality industry to fully recover and go back to job creation.

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