The Nigerian Economic Summit Group, NESG, has urged the FG to collaborate with relevant stakeholders towards addressing the constraints to value chain development in high growth and employment-elastic, in a bid to fight the unemployment problem.
The NESG disclosed this in its First Quarter, 2021 Economic Report released on Sunday.
What the NESG is saying:
“Nigeria has struggled to achieve inclusive growth for many decades. Since recovery from the 2016 recession, the economy has been on a fragile growth path until it slipped into another recession in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This suggests that the country needs to attain higher and sustainable economic growth, to become strong and resilient.
“The relationship between economic growth and unemployment rate in Nigeria also suggests that economic growth has not led to a reduction in unemployment rate.
“To reverse this recurring trend, there is an urgent need for collaboration between the government and relevant stakeholders toward addressing the constraints to value chain development in high growth and employment-elastic sectors,” the group said.
The NESG urged the FG to address key constraints focusing on issues including illiquidity of the Foreign Exchange (forex) market and limited forex access, infrastructural and logistic bottlenecks, policy lopsidedness and distortions.
Nigeria’s unemployment rate as of the end of 2020 rose to 33.3% from 27.1% recorded as of Q2 2020, indicating that about 23,187,389 (23.2 million) Nigerians remain unemployed. 11.03 million individuals work between 1 and 19 hours (unemployed) while 12.16 million were without work in the period under review.
