Urban Unemployment in East Africa*

Abstract

E now know how to avoid mass unemployment in the industrial countries. What had not occurred to us was that we would soon be facing a new kind of unemployment in the nonindustrial world. For twenty years the problem there had appeared to be how to accelerate the rate of growth of incomes, and in this a fair measure of success has been achieved. In many underdeveloped countries gross national product has been rising by 5 per cent. per year or more, and it was tacitly assumed that corresponding increases in employment would go hand in hand. But they have not, and since the numbers seeking jobs has greatly increased this has begun to pose a major problem to which the solution is not immediately obvious, and which is unlikely to be soluble by the kind of measures which have proved successful in industrial countries. This article will examine trends in employment in Kenya and Uganda, but what has happened there is probably not very different from what has happened in many other low income countries so that the significance of the ensuing discussion may not be confined to East Africa alone. I begin with a brief account of the nature of urban employment and unemployment and go on to ask whether one should regard the very slow growth of total employment as inevitable. Finally, I shall pose the question whether if the number of urban employment opportunities rose, unemployment in the towns could be expected to decline.