Formal job employment sluggish
Mpho Mokwape | Friday November 23, 2018 13:16
The formal employment has reportedly shown only an increase of 0.1 percent between December 2017 and March 2018, with only 363 persons employed from 410, 329 persons in December 2017 to 410,692 persons in March 2018.
According to the 2018 Formal Sector Employment Survey, the slight increase was led by private companies and parastatals recording the highest increase of 0.2 percent each, followed by central government with 0.1%, while local government encountered a decrease in employment of 0.2 percent.
The survey also indicated that the decrease in local government was mainly prompted by the decrease in employment of the Ipelegeng Programme, which recorded a decrease of 0.3 percent.
Ipelegeng programme main objective is to provide short-term employment, support and relief and supplementary income for unskilled and semi-skilled labour.
Moreover, the survey report on the other hand indicated that mining and quarrying recorded an increase in employment of 1.6 percent between for the two quarters, followed by agriculture and water & electricity with 1.0 percent each.
On the proportion of male and female employees by sector the survey indicated that males dominated their female counterparts in private and parastatal sectors with 56.6% and 57.2% respectively.
Males reportedly constituted a total of 46.1% for central government and 34.9% for local government while female employees were higher in local government standing at 65.1%, followed by central government at 53.9%.
This came as no surprise since the preliminary results of the Botswana Multi Topic Household Survey under Economic Activity released in 2017 by Statistics Botswana showed that women were more affected by unemployment as compared to their male counterpart.
It revealed that a total of 19.1% of women were unemployed compared to 16.3% of males.
On the employee earnings, the survey indicated a decrease from P6,216 in December 2017 to P 6,211 in March 2018, which was a decrease of 0.1 percent while on the employment, non-citizens continue to also have a large share of the pie.
Monthly average earnings for citizens stood at P5, 874 while P17, 830 were for non-citizen and P6, 211 for all employees as at end of March 2018.
Further, according to the survey in March 2018, a total of 11, 582 (2.8 percent) employees were non-citizens. Out of this number, private and parastatal sectors recorded 10,510 employees.
Lastly, construction industry was reportedly the major employer of non-citizens at 23.0%, followed by education industry at 16.4% and manufacturing industry at 15.7%.