‘Unemployment rate declining, 800,000 new jobs targeted in 2023/2024’

The comprehensive remedy plan for unemployment should not be confined to reducing the numbers of jobless, but must be extended to face the overall imbalances and structural characteristics related to them, Minister of Planning and Economic Development Hala el-Saeed has said.

Such points include insufficiency of the labour market to take in all categories seeking work, and the rise in unemployment rates in both rural and urban regions as well as the different province, besides the spread of employment in the non –formal sector, a ministry report quoted el-Saeed as saying.

Based on these challenges, the quantitative goals of the state 2023/2024 plan includes providing about 800,000 new job opportunities, raising the number of employed people to 29.1 million, and in the meantime reducing the jobless to 2.4 million, about 7.6 per cent of the country’s total workforce, she explained.

Part of the efforts is to raise the employed females from 16 per cent of the workforce at present to 25 per cent, to lessen the qualitative differences in unemployment. It also seeks to bridging the gap between unemployment in the urban and rural areas, so that it does not exceed 5 per cent at most.

On the development of employment and joblessness  indicators, the ministry’s report revealed that over the last quarter of 2022 (October-December 2022) the country’s total workforce hit 30.3 million people, some 28.2 million of them employed people, showing that the jobless declined to about 2.18 million. It noted that unemployment fell to 7.2 per cent during the quarter compared with 7.4 per cent during the same period in 2021.

According to the report, latest workforce research bulletin showed that unemployment carried on with decline to  7.1 per cent during the first quarter of 2023, with the number of jobless at about 2.17 million.

As for the estimates of unemployment rates over the period (2023-2024 –2025-2026), it is expected to rise to 7.6 per cent during the first year, against the backdrop of expected economic growth rate, then it will resume its falling trend as the growth rate increases.