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Covid-19 gives job seekers sleepless nights

Wednesday January 27 2021
job seekers

A report has been released that indicate that there are employees doing jobs they are not qualified for. Picture:Cyril Ndegeya

By ANGE ILIZA

The coronavirus pandemic is making it extremely difficult for fresh graduates in the country to secure formal employment as most businesses have suspended recruitment due to the ongoing slowdown in the economy.

A mini-survey by Rwanda Today shows most fresh job seekers are struggling to find placements while others receive no response from employers at all when they apply for a job.

“I have applied to several organisations. Only one of them responded that there was no space for new employees. It has laid off some workers due to Covid-19 and is far from hiring new ones,” said Nick Nzambitare, a fresh graduate from the University of Rwanda.

He is one of the 15 percent of university graduates who, according to the Ministry of Public Service and Labour, remain unemployed. From his experience, job-hunting was already hard enough for inexperienced workers before Covid-19, but today it is almost impossible.

“There is a big difference in what employers are considering today as opposed to what they considered before Covid-19. They are looking for more experienced employees to help them overcome losses caused by Covid-19. Before, they could hire someone promising and ambitious and raise you into the job.

But that does not apply anymore,” Nzambitare narrates. The hope for unemployed people and graduates to get jobs or opportunities to create them is fading away as the pandemic seems to take its toll.

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Having to stay home, poor and idle, they say, might tempt them to develop destructive behaviors.

However, Rwanda created more jobs than anticipated by the National Strategy for Transformation in 2020, increasing demands for jobs sustain the problem.

The target was to create new 214,000 jobs in 2020 but 223,000 jobs were created.

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