Looming Mass Layoffs as Kenyan Companies Stop Hiring

Kenya’s unemployment crisis is far from over after a report by the Kenya Association of Manufacturers (KAM) showed that many companies are not recruiting and thinking of trimming their workforce.

The unemployment rate is currently at 43.5 percent according to an official from the National Employment Authority with 90 percent of the unemployed being the youth.

Kenya’s unemployment rate is still the highest in East Africa, ahead of Tanzania’s which stands at 24 percent while that of Ethiopia is at 21.9 percent. The unemployment rate in Uganda is at 18.1 percent.

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A report by KAM paints a harrowing future for those already looking for jobs and a scary one for those already holding employment positions.

According to the report, the majority of factories have stopped fresh recruitment of employees as they adopt the wait-and-see approach over uncertainties in regulatory and trade environments in Kenya.

More than three-quarters of manufacturers in Kenya, (75 percent) have no plan of hiring any new staff in the next six months. Scary. Right?

43 percent of manufacturers say that they will retain their current workforce while 33 percent of them are looking at laying off some of their staff to protect their profit margins.

Only 24 percent of manufacturers are thinking of hiring but only semi-skilled and unskilled workers who will work on a need basis and not on a permanent basis.

Most companies are going for unskilled and semi-skilled workers at 63 percent because most of them will take low pay and do a lot of work. White-collar workers being employed are only at 16 percent showing that the thousands of graduates already in the job market have a long way to go.

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