Agora Policy: Nigeria needs to create 3.6m jobs annually for 10 years to reduce unemployment

Agora Policy, an Abuja-based think tank, has recommended ways the government can tackle the country’s unemployment problem.

In its policy memo titled ‘Nigeria Needs Comprehensive and Coordinated Interventions
to Tame Unemployment’, Agora Policy said jobs are one of the foundations for a stable society and key to improvements in quality of life.

Recently, KPMG, the global audit and tax advisory firm, said Nigeria’s unemployment rate is expected to rise to 40.6 percent in 2023.

Agora Policy said unemployment is gravely implicated in Nigeria’s other pressing challenges, especially low productivity, poverty and insecurity.

“Although the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) claims to be working on an improved methodology for measuring unemployment, all we can say at this point is that unemployment is likely still high and at an undesirable level,” the policy memo reads.

”The situation has been particularly worse for young people who, as at 2020, faced an unemployment rate of over 40%.

“There is little doubt that this rising unemployment is linked to increasing restfulness and disenchantment among the youth.”

The think tank founded by Waziri Adio, former executive secretary of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), said to keep unemployment from rising, enough net new jobs need to be created to at least employ the majority of new entrants to the labour market.

Agora Policy said the current approaches by the government in tackling unemployment, while sometimes having merit, have failed to resolve the problem.

This, the organisation explained, is because the majority of the approaches cannot reach the scale of what is required.

To deal with the unemployment challenge, Agora Policy recommended that the government engineer growth in labour-intensive portions of value chains for export to large markets.

The organisation advised the government to resolve the dysfunction of multiple rates in the foreign exchange market, and re-focusing the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on its mandate of keeping inflation at optimal levels.

Agora Policy said the government should target infrastructure spending in particular areas that increase the competitiveness of Nigeria’s exports.

To improve the decency and capacity of agriculture jobs to provide a minimum income and quality of life, the think-tank advocated for the development and implementation of a productivity growth strategy for agriculture that will target improvement in yields for subsistence farming.

“The size of the Nigerian population and the scale of the unemployment challenge implies that piecemeal and uncoordinated approaches are unlikely to make a significant impact,” Agora Policy said.

“If Nigeria desires to get unemployment down to 5% by 2033, it needs to create 3.6 million jobs a year. To achieve this, it needs a scalable strategy.

“Given that jobs are simply part of the process of generating economic activity, then Nigeria needs to engineer growth in labour-intensive sectors in general, and labour-intensive parts of value chains in particular.”