Following the relaxation of measures aimed at containing the spread of Covid-19, the economy created the most jobs in six years, providing a boost to the more than one million young people who graduate from colleges and secondary schools.
According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) annual economic data, this brought the total number of jobs to 18.33 million in 2021, up from 18.4 million the year before.
According to provisional statistics, wages of employees increased by 164,700 to 2.907 million last year.Â
According to the data, wage employment in the private sector increased by 6.8% to 1.98 million workers, while wage employment in the public sector increased by 9.8% to 923,100 workers from 884,600 workers.
The number of self-employed and unpaid employees in family-owned businesses in the formal sector increased by 7,600 to 163,700, indicating a rebound from the previous year’s 6,600 job losses.
Employees in the Jua Kali sector, which has been a source of new job opportunities for many years, increased to 15.26 million in 2020 from nearly 14.51 million.
The Uhuru Kenyatta-led Jubilee government, which came to power in 2013 partly on a promise to create a million modern jobs per year, has struggled to create decent jobs, with the economy barely producing 100,000 formal jobs in recent years.
