AFRICAN YOUTH USE E-COMMERCE TO TACKLE UNEMPLOYMENT
The Potential Labour Force (PLF) of Zambia totaled 1,650,765 people according to the last Labour Force Survey carried out in 2017. This total included a huge 1,143,835 of youth (aged 15 to 35) representing a 69% of the PLF.
Many African countries are grappling with high youth unemployment. According to the African Development Bank (ADB) of Africa’s nearly 420 million youth aged 15-35, one-third are unemployed and discouraged, another third are vulnerably employed, and only one in six is in wage employment. On the continent the youth face roughly double the unemployment rate of adults and traditional recruitment drives are doing little to ease these statistics.
The continent is beginning to embrace new alternative innovations to traditional recruitment that have been propelled by the improved access to internet services on the continent. Project-based freelancing is the alternative that many of the continents youth are utilising. Millenials want to define their own career path and work hours. Freelancing allows an individual with high skills set to be outsourced and hired for a limited time to complete a task assigned at a fee. Less risky than entrepreneurship freelancing never yields losses for individuals (future article on this in the pipeline). This results based form of work ensures high efficiency as poor results will render the individual a bad review and jeopardise future hire. Additionally, project-based work allows collaborative teams to be created to effectively complete a task.
The E-commerce spring is spreading across the African continent with companies such as Jumia having a reach across six African countries. Dubbed the ‘Amazon of Africa’ the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on 12th April 2019 at an IPO of $14.5. The growth of Africa’s virtual economy is set to provide numerous opportunities as access to the internet increases for its 1.2 billion population. It’s youth in particular is embracing new technologies enabling them to work from anywhere at any time.
Author: Queen of the South (E-Hire)