Why this matters
Global unemployment increased by 33 million in 2020, with the unemployment rate increasing by 1.1 percentage points to 6.5%. However, unemployment numbers reflect only a small proportion of the jobs lost in the COVID-19 crisis. A further 81 million people became inactive as they could not see any opportunity to search for a job successfully, or they were simply unable to do so owing to the COVID-19 restrictions. Youth and women were particularly hard hit by the crisis, with employment losses in 2020 of 8.7% and 5.0% respectively, as opposed to 3.7% for adults and 3.9% for men.
In 2019, more than one in five of the world’s youth were not in employment, education or training (NEET), almost unchanged since 2005. Since young women were already twice as likely to be jobless and not in education nor training than young men, and as women have been disproportionally pushed into inactivity during the pandemic, the COVID-19 crisis is likely to worsen the NEET gender gap among youth.
Content from the UN, read more here.
Our response
In 2018, we launched the Future Jobs Finder, for jobseekers whose background is in non-technology fields. The Future Jobs Finder helps identify transferable skills and strengths, giving recommendations on tech professions and e-learning suited to people’s backgrounds and aptitudes. Since its launch, the Future Jobs Finder has supported over 600,000 people.
In South Africa, our ConnectU platform provides over 15.5 million Vodacom customers with free access to a range of services covering health, education, safety and security, social media and jobs. ConnectU’s job portal has enabled 3.1 million people to access seven different job search websites for free, with over a third of users being in the lowest income bracket.
This year, we launched our ‘Jobseekers.Connected’ offer across our European markets, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa includes discounted connectivity to help jobseekers remain connected and support them while they are searching for a new career opportunity. It includes free access to over 600 curated courses on global e-learning platform Udemy to help people re-skill.
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