How Addis City Administration shows the way
The Addis Ababa City Administration recently announced its plan to provide jobs for 5,000 college graduates in the city, an unprecedented move to alleviate the problem of youth unemployment as one of the acutest social problems that is facing the authorities. Addis Ababa is a fast growing, vibrant and a pace-setter in modernization and urban renewal. It is a kind of melting pot where people from various places are coming in search of opportunities and livelihoods. This is sometimes putting pressure on the resources and the economic capacity of the Ethiopian capital where urban growth does not automatically lead to job creation for tens of thousands of job seekers.
In an essay entitled The Cause of Educated Youth Unemployment and its Socioeconomic Effect in Addis Ababa, Gebretsadik Daniel writes that, “Nowadays, the growth of educated youth unemployment is one of the critical problems facing Ethiopia. Most young people in Ethiopia are attaining their formal education with the hope of leading a better life and improving their livelihood. Even though, young people’s and their families expectations and hopes placed on education that is associated with upward social mobility and improvement of livelihoods, in reality, most youth in their post schooling life have to face unemployment challenges and remain jobless for an extended period of time. The intensity of the problem is high in Addis Ababa, the prime city of the country.”
There is in fact a contradictory trend whereby job creation does not keep pace with the number of temporary and permanent job seekers. Add to this the general mismatch between population growth in urban centers that is recently estimated to be in the environs of 5.2% per annum and the tens of thousands of youngsters leaving college every year as a factors further complicating the job market and the economic situation in general. According to recent information, “Unemployment Rate in Ethiopia increased to 19.10 percent in 2018 from 16.90 percent in 2016. Unemployment Rate in Ethiopia averaged 19.54 percent from 1999 until 2018, reaching an all time high of 26.40 percent in 1999 and a record low of 16.80 percent in 2015.” The rate of unemployment rate in Addis Ababa is believed to be in the environs of 17% or higher.
Unemployment among the educated youths is something the capital city has been dealing with in recent years as the new graduates add up to the increasing numbers of job seekers and the backlog in youth unemployment might sometimes prove alarming by any comparison. Addis Ababa is home to an estimated 3-5 million people mostly young as the national average tells us. Some 70 percent of the population falls in the youth category. Addis Ababa is also a melting pot of cultures, traditions, dreams and disillusionments as well as hopes and successes. Another factor that has further compounded the problem is the uncontrolled growth in the number of institutions of higher education and student enrolment there.
This has impacted not only the quality of education but also led to a deadlock. New jobless youngsters enter the market every year in addition to the backlog that is created in the previous years. This process has now reached the level of an explosive social crisis as youngsters get increasingly frustrated and hopeless. The frustrations sometimes translate into bouts of violence. The cumulative effect of all this is that job creation which was confined largely to the public sector is now overflowing the bounds and involving private actors to come up with urgent and feasible solutions. Traditionally, the state played the role of educator and employer. This was the ‘original sin’ of the public education system in Ethiopia which was primarily and mainly designed to create able civil servants for the nascent modern bureaucracy early in the 20th century. This in time proved untenable and has led to the present dead end in youth education and employment. As the private sector has always been marginalized in these endeavors, it could hardly become a stakeholder in education and as well as job creation.
However, every dark cloud has a silver lining as they say. Youth unemployment is both an opportunity and a challenge. It is an opportunity because Addis Ababa has a large number of young, vigorous creative and energetic young people with the potential to bring about changes in all walks of life. Addis epitomizes the hope of success that is harbored by its young residents. Addis is also a city of educated youngsters, a technology savvy generation that is the vanguard of innovation and hard work is slowly emerging. The contrast is amazing. In Addis you can see tens of thousands of youngsters in downtowns and posh parts of the city, glued the screens of their cell phones and looking from the latest social media buzz about politics to job openings and sports and entertainment news. The situation is somewhat different in less flashy neighborhoods or in the slum areas where employment is very low and the informal sector dominate the marginal economy and young people do all kind of odd jobs to meet the daily demands of life until better days come.
There, you can find young graduates who are working as day laborers, waiters and waitresses, hawkers, and shop attendants, to name but some of the available occupations. In more serious cases, you may find a college graduate in civil engineering working as a shoe shine in the less privileged parts of the capital. This is of course the dilemma of a city that is trying to accommodate its younger residents who are bold enough to break taboos and are ready to pick up any job that comes their way. In the old days a college graduate working as a shoe shine might have been considered a lunatic. The times have indeed changed and so have attitudes.
The notion that work makes a man is still popular in those areas where Biblical passages like “though shall live by the sweat of your brows” mix with old Marxist invectives of the Derg era that relates the human condition to labor. With the exception of the privileged few who have relatives in the Diaspora who send them money so that they can live in relative prosperity and financial security, the majority of youngsters are fighting to make ends meet in these hard times. The young street boys and girls who are staying outside come rain or shine and even raise families by doing all kind of odd jobs ranging from garbage collection to car washing and street vending with the hope that one day things might improve, are the heroes and heroines of an optimistic city. The city administration is trying to provide these youngsters with permanent shelters and provide them with any kind of jobs.
Addis is of course a capital awash with young jobs seekers who roam the streets with documents in hand with the hope that they may find some opening to which they may apply somewhere and somehow. These are often clean and well-dressed young boys and girls who live with their parents and daily struggle to achieve self-support in a society where traditional values of family support and solidarity are being eroded as the demands of life become increasingly hard to meet. Some of the youths may suffer the pangs of conscience because of their dependence on the meager incomes of their parents. These youngsters are also real heroes and heroines for the endurance and optimism they continue to keep alive every day they leave their abodes in search of work that may not come easily.
In the middle of the struggle for jobs, public and private companies are also advertising job openings on public billboards and on line. There are a number of job advertisement sites in Addis. Take for instance the one around what is known as Arat Kilo area. One of the billboards for job announcement stands hugging the wall beneath Jolly Bar, a popular and fashionable cafe and restaurant that dates back to the 1960s and where student activists from the nearby college campuses meet to discuss the latest politics of the time. The place is crowded with youngsters, probably college leavers, judging from their manners and looks. Some of them are jostling to read the vacancy lists pasted in the glassed box. Others are taking pictures of the vacancy announcements with their cell phones. Still others are scribbling the information on pieces of paper. This is also one of the areas in the capital alive with the noise coming from the crowd of pedestrians and automobiles.
The view from any cafe on the street side running from the Faculty of Engineering down to the Art Kilo monument is amazing to say the least. Five in the morning and Art Kilo near Jolly Bar is crowded with a ceaseless flow of pedestrians as if they are coming out of a dozens of movie houses simultaneously. Youngsters going to or leaving nearby schools and colleges, street hawkers displaying their goods or calling on prospective buyers. Books and newspapers are on display right on the renovated street side, a paraphernalia ranging from household utensils to shirts, electric lamps, and fancy goods are on display. By the way, there are many newspaper vendors in the area who are earning their living by selling newspapers and magazines and some of the readers are job seekers who pay a few cents to scan the vacancy sections of those newspapers.
Wherever you go in Addis, the buzz is about politics and jobs. The former is available everywhere; on mobile phones and during casual conversations while the latter is in short supply. The city administration is trying to do its part to alleviate the problem in many ways. It has planned the construction of tens of thousands of housing units in the coming couple of years and this is expected to provide jobs for many youngsters. Unemployment is a very huge economic and social problem in Addis and resources to address it are limited indeed. More investments in the capital are also expected to create jobs once lasting stability is achieved, perhaps sometime after the coming elections in May 2020. The hope is that stability would help the flow of more FDI while the government’s economic reform program will start paying dividends. Meanwhile Addis continues to live and hope and thrive and build. these are signs of a city that never loses hope even if the problems sometimes appear insurmountable.
Ethiopian Herald Sunday December 8/2019
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
