NSA in youth unemployment rate bungle

The Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA) on Wednesday was forced to retract the findings of a youth unemployment study it released hours earlier, because of “technical errors”. The study - titled ‘Analysis of Youth Employment and Unemployment’ - built on previously released annual Labour Force Survey data for 2012 and 2013, was aimed at providing a more in-depth breakdown of current youth unemployment and its characteristics. In announcing the official youth unemployment rate for Namibia over the period, NSA Acting Statistician-General Sikongo Haihambo said it stood at 39.2% in 2012 and 43.4% in 2013. The agency, however, issued a retraction hours later, following media inquiries around inconsistencies in the findings, including the original Labour Force Survey pegging the youth unemployment rate in 2013 at 41.7%. The new report also includes a table suggesting unemployment among the target group which stood at an unsubstantiated 27.4%. “We regret to inform the media and the nation that we discovered technical errors in the report… released this morning,” Haihambo said late on Wednesday afternoon. “The NSA, together with its consultants, is hard at work to correct the error, with an eye on releasing the corrected version in the shortest time possible,” he added. Hiding potential Irrespective of the acknowledged technical errors in the new report, the latest analysis does concur with longer-term findings of an average youth unemployment rate of 40% (39.2% in 2014). Gaining particular interest from the researchers was the informal sector, which was identified as a key factor in raising employment among the youth. The sector, the NSA statisticians said, showed a low contribution to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but proved a valuable source of employment, with approximately half of the country’s citizens aged between 15 and 34 said to be involved in it. About half of the considered population was said to have been employed in the informal sector in both years of the review period, with employment among them in the most vulnerable sectors of the economy growing from 32% in 2012 to 54.7% in 2013. “While there has been a lot of debate on the definition of the informal sector, this sector is mostly best defined based on its characteristics and composition - primarily the lack of social protection, low level of technology, high prevalence of micro-enterprises, its domination by unskilled labour and its domination by women,” the report said. Some other findings include trends, such as that a high school education, being married, being in the age group 30 to 34 and living in urban areas, were factors generally associated with higher rates of employment. A worrying discovery was in the persistent high levels of unemployment found among female youth in all categories checked. “Results show that among females, the probability of employment was 1.57 times higher for youth who obtained a high school education, compared to those who did not,” the report stated. “However, surprisingly, the opposite is true among males, in which the likelihood of employment was lower for high school graduates, compared to those who dropped out.” Namibia uses a broader age range of 15-34 to define its youth, compared to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) definition of 15 to 24 years of age. DENVER ISAACS