With more than 3.5 million Egyptians not being able to find jobs, Sherine Abdel-Razek takes a closer look at unemployment in the country
Young people aged between 20 and 24 years old have the highest unemployment rate in Egypt. Graduates have the lowest chances of being employed, and for every unemployed male there are three females who cannot find a job.
These details of the country's unemployment statistics are no less shocking than the rapid increases in unemployment that have taken place over the past two years.
Egypt's unemployment rate, as calculated by the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), jumped to 13 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2012 compared to 12.4 per cent in the same quarter the previous year and 8.9 per cent in that of 2010, immediately before the 25 January Revolution.
The increases mean that 1.2 million more people became unemployed after a Revolution that had social justice as one of its slogans.
However, experts believe that the figures are less than the real total. "The way the data on the number of unemployed is gathered is not credible," said Karima Koraiem, a professor of economics at Al-Azhar University in Cairo.
According to Koraiem, who has worked extensively on the country's labour problems, the figures do not include unemployed women who are married on the grounds that "they have husbands who can take care of their livelihoods and thus they do not need to work."
Samir Radwan, a labour expert and ex-minister of finance, agreed on the lack of credibility of the official unemployment figures.
Their inaccuracy was a shortcoming shared by many countries, he said, pointing out that such figures only tend to be accurate in developed countries where unemployed people register in order to get unemployment benefits.
"But in an economy where 30 per cent of the workforce is in the informal sector, the numbers are really not accurate and are misleading," Radwan said.
Experts agree that slow economic growth over the past two years has fed the unemployment figures. The number of factories that have closed since January 2011 is put by some observers at around 1,000.
Head of CAPMAS Abu Bakr Al-Guindi said that unemployment rates had been rising since the Revolution, noting that 27 per cent of those now unemployed used to work in sectors hit in the aftermath of the Revolution like tourism, industry, construction and real estate.
This contradicted another recently released CAPMAS report that stated that the general index of demand for labour had quadrupled in December 2012 compared to a year earlier.
Both Koraiem and Radwan expressed scepticism about the report. Radwan pointed out that the methodology used in making the index is not reliable.
"If the demand for labour over the last five years had been as high as shown by this statement, we would have been importing labour by now," Radwan said.
Twenty-six-year-old Mustafa Mansi worked for an American company that decided to withdraw from Egypt in the aftermath of the Revolution, and he has been applying for a new job for six months now.
Mansi has a BSc degree from the faculty of commerce, good computer skills and two certificates in accounting, but he has not been able to find another job. "I send in my resume and go to interviews where I do well, but then no one calls me after that," Mansi said.
One problem may be nepotism, since it is not only qualifications and skills that count when applying for a job in Egypt. Mansi, who has been engaged to be married for two years, has now started to look for jobs abroad.
Young people like Mansi, jobless and in the prime of their lives, are one of the most worrisome aspects of unemployment. According to Radwan, the unemployment rate in the 20-24 age group is almost double the national unemployment rate, meaning it is around 25-26 per cent.
According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the global youth unemployment rate was expected to be 12.7 per cent in 2012. "The high rate of unemployment at such a young age translates into both lost productivity and drastic social problems," Radwan said.
Another striking fact about unemployment in Egypt is that 39.7 per cent of Egypt's overall unemployed are those with university and post-graduate degrees. Meanwhile, the highest rate of unemployment is among those with intermediate vocational education, standing at 42.2 per cent.
"The problem with vocational education is the low quality of this kind of education in Egypt. It graduates young people with limited skills, making them a burden on the employer in many cases," Koraiem said.
The high number of graduates with university degrees but low real qualifications makes employing them a burden on small companies, while large and multinational companies look for graduates with better qualifications.
Many countries have faced similar problems, but the experience of South Korea in dealing them has been outstanding.
According to the UK magazine The Economist, South Korea has created a network of vocational schools, called "meister schools," that aim to reduce the country's shortage of machine operators and plumbers.
At the schools, the government pays the students' room and board and tuition. These technical schools contain exact replicas of workplaces in order to make it easier for students to cross the theoretical-practical divide.
Koraiem suggested that in Egypt businessmen should be given tax incentives to offer training programmes for low-skilled labour. "Rather than obliging the owner of the company to employ people at the minimum wage, currently set at LE1,200, they could recruit them at lower salaries and invest the balance in training programmes," she said.
As for the high number of jobless university graduates, Radwan said that this was due to the current recession and the poor qualifications of the thousands of university graduates joining the job market every year.
The unemployment rate among women reached 23.8 per cent in the last quarter, compared to 9.3 per cent for men.
"Employers prefer to recruit men as their female counterparts tend to be more focused on their personal lives and usually set this as their priority, a fact reflected in the multi-year leave they take to have children or to accompany their husbands to work abroad," Koraiem said.
According to Radwan, female workers are usually the first causalities of a recession, as an economic slowdown usually hits the feminised sectors of the economy first, among them textile factories.
© Al Ahram Weekly 2013
