Nigeria faces a job crisis when Nesg projects 30% unemployment without 27 million new formal roles

Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG) has warned that Nigeria must create at least 27 million new formal jobs in the next five years to prevent unemployment and unemployment rates from soaring up to 30 percent at the end of this decade.

This is contained in the NESG work and productivity report, released on Monday and published on the official group of the Group’s website ahead of the 31st Nigeria Economics Summit (NES#31) in Abuja.

According to the report, Nigeria faced “decisive challenges” because the working age population was projected to reach 168 million in 2030, putting great pressure on the economy to produce sustainable and high -quality jobs.

“Work and productivity are the center of Nigerian economic development,” the report said, adding that the creation of 27 million formal jobs was very important to absorb newcomers to the labor market and to transmit millions of people who are currently involved in informal work, low productivity.

This group identifies various obstacles that hamper large -scale job creation, including shallow private sector bases, skills incompatibility, weaknesses in the education system, pervasive information, and unemployment growth that fails to translate GDP expansion into meaningful work.

This report also appoints congestion of regulations, inadequate infrastructure, and low business competitiveness as a key factor that limits the ability of the private sector to expand and create jobs.

To overcome this problem, NESG urged coordinated reforms throughout the government and industry, emphasizing manufacturing, agriculture, digital technology, construction, and professional services as a critical sector that is able to provide large -scale work if supported adequately.

“These sectors have the capacity to absorb labor from low productivity areas and encourage Nigerian structural transformation,” the report said. “Collectively, they can contribute up to 35 percent, or 9.7 million, from new formal jobs, with manufacturing alone accounts for about 21 percent of the projected job creation.”

Think tank also calls for work agendas and national productivity, focusing on increasing labor productivity and stimulating the growth of the private sector through the implementation of data-based policies and inter-institutional collaboration.

This proposes the Nigeria Works framework that is built on six strategic pillars: Skills for productivity, sectoral machine growth, growth led by companies, data, institutions and accountability, and productivity for prosperity.

Nesg concluded that success will depend on strong political will, stakeholder collaboration, effective monitoring, and long -term commitment to implement the main structural reform.