E- Commerce can provide 23m jobs, boost economy
IF well explored, the electronic commerce ( eCommerce) sub- sector of the economy is capable of creating about 23 million jobs.
An economist, Dr. Hassan Kuja, who made the projection, based this on the opportunities the sub- sector can avail.
According to him, Nigeria is currently mired in the throes of a worsening unemployment tide, the profile, which currently stands at about 33.3 per cent.
Kuja, who is based in Taraba, said the National Bureau of Statistics ( NBS) report, released on March 15, makes for grim reading. This, he said, showed that Nigeria’s unemployment rate rose from 27.1 per cent in the second quarter of 2020 to 33.3 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2020.
In layman’s terms, Kuja said the foregoing translates to about 23.19 million unemployed people and this does not take into account millions of underemployed Nigerians.
Part of the NBS report, according to him, reads: “During the reference period, the computed national unemployment rate rose from 27.1 per cent in Q2, 2020 to 33.3 per cent in Q4, 2020, while the underemployment rate decreased from 28.6 per cent to 22.8 per cent. A combination of both the unemployment and underemployment rate for the reference period gave a figure of 56.1 per cent.
“This means that 33.3 per cent of the labour force in
Nigeria or 23,187,389 persons either did nothing or worked for less than 20 hours a week; making them unemployed by our definition in Nigeria. This is an additional 1,422,772 persons from the number in that category in Q2, 2020. Using the international definition of unemployment, the rate was computed to be 17.5 per cent.”
He said Nigeria now boasts of the unenviable status of being the country with the second highest unemployment rate in the world, second only to fellow African country, Namibia, which has the world’s highest unemployment statistic with 33.4 per cent. In achieving this unwanted feat, Nigeria recently surpassed South Africa on a list of 82 countries whose unemployment rates are tracked by