Transitioning to a green economy can help the world mitigate rising unemployment levels, particularly at a time when youth unemployment is peaking.
Globally, in 2013, 202-million people were unemployed, up five-million on the previous year, said International Labour Organization (ILO) Green Jobs Programme policy specialist Moustapha Kamal Gueye at the Department of Environmental Affair’s (DEA’s) ‘Green jobs dialogue’, in Midrand, on Wednesday.
An ILO report on global employment trends for 2014 indicated that the bulk of the increase in global unemployment emerged from East Asia and South Asia, representing more than 45% of the additional jobseekers, followed by sub-Saharan Africa and Europe.
And, if current trends continued, global unemployment was set to worsen, with more than 215-million expected to be unemployed by 2018.
“We are not in a very [optimistic] employment situation,” Gueye noted, pointing out that globally, youth – those aged between 15 and 24 – accounted for about 74.5-million of those unemployed, with youth in the Middle East and North Africa hardest hit.
Sub-Saharan Africa collectively was “better off”, with its youth unemployment percentage at 7.8%; however, while Africa was “not so bad off”, a critical concern was the high rate of “vulnerable employment”, which, at 77.4%, was much higher than the global average of 48%.
The ILO defined vulnerable employment as work with low pay, limited job security, poor working conditions and little or no social protection.
For many people in the developing world, vulnerable and informal jobs remained the only work available, the ILO pointed out in its report. READ MORE
Source: engineeringnews.co.za
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