Around 3.5 million Kenyan youth are jobless and not in school, indicating they are idle in an economic setting where businesses have frozen hiring.
Data published by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) show that 19 percent of 18.37 million youngsters aged between 15 and 34 were idle in the quarter ended December.
A combination of factors, including costly colleges, and growing unemployment, has reduced some of the youth's appetite for tertiary education.
Poor grades in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination has also limited the transition to higher learning in some cases.
More than a fifth or 198,580 students of the 881,416 who sat the KCSE exam last year scored a D- grade, which locked them out of technical schools.
Kenya’s years of strong economic growth have created jobs, but they are mostly low-paying, informal and coming at a rate that economists say is too low to absorb the rapidly growing youth population.
The number of Kenyans without jobs increased to more than 2.97 million in the quarter to December, underscoring the labour market woes in the wake of elevated inflation and reduced activity in the dominant agricultural sector.
“Youth aged 15-34 who were not in the education system and were not working or being trained for work during was 19 percent” said KNBS in the survey.
Those aged 20-24 years are the worst hit as 1.31 million or more than a third of idle youth fall in this age bracket. Twenty-seven percent of those aged 20-24 years are out of school and not working.
This is a major blow to Kenya’s job market given a large number of graduates without the skills to start a business or seek employment.
Around two-thirds of jobless Kenyans have given up looking for work or starting businesses, disheartened by reduced opportunities in a tough economy that has seen many firms freeze hiring in a survival race.
The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) covering the quarter that ended December shows that 2.01 million out of the total of 2.97 million jobless Kenyans aged between 15 and 64 — and who qualify for the labour force — were not actively looking for employment.
The number of graduates or retrenched workers who have given up looking for work has increased from 1.33 million in the quarter to June 2020 when businesses shed jobs and froze hiring at the peak of Covid-19 economic hardships.
