NAIROBI, Kenya, April 11 – Kenya’s unemployment rate shrank to 4.9 per cent in the quarter running between October to December 2022, a 0.7 percentage point decline from 5.6 per cent in the corresponding quarter in 2021.
This saw the number of unemployed Kenyans shrink to 960,001 in the period up from 1,055,816 in Q4 2021, according to the Kenya Bureau of Statistics(KNBS).
This is out of an active labour force of 19,398,165 Kenyans.
The country’s unemployment rate is measured based on the strict definition of people who do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the past four weeks, and are currently available for work.
This means that the number of unemployed Kenyans who did not have any source of income, be it employed, menial jobs or self employed dropped by 95,815 in the period.
The KNBS also measured unemployment as all persons of working age who, during the review period, were neither in employment nor in unemployment and carried out activities to seek employment, were not currently available but would become available within a short subsequent period established in the light of national circumstances (i.e. unavailable jobseekers).
This group also has persons who did not carry out activities to seek employment, but wanted employment and were currently available (i.e. available potential jobseekers).
This group of unemployed under this category increased to 2,972,862 in the period from 2,703,194 in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Kenyans aged between 40 and 44 witnessed the highest growth in joblessness, with the number unemployed growing by 58,702, in the quarter to 175,578 persons, according to KNBS.
The unemployed aged 35 and 39 increased to 234,698 persons in the review period followed by unemployed youth aged between 20 and 24 whose number grew to 1,004,755 in the quarter.
This saw the combined rate of unemployment and potential labour force (LU3) measured as either unavailable jobseekers or available potential jobseekers for the fourth quarter of 2022 stand at 13.9 per cent.
This is slightly up from the 13.3 per cent recorded in the same quarter of 2021, this was, however, a 0.1 percentage point decrease from that recorded in the third quarter of 2022.
Further, labour underutilization in the country, which refers to mismatches between labour supply and demand, decreased to 9.0 per cent in the fourth quarter from 10.4 per cent recorded in the third quarter 2022.
The number of people who were time-related underemployed decreased from 980,817 in the third quarter of 2022 to 780,983 in the fourth quarter of 2022.
