Unemployment in an African Setting: Lessons of the Employment Strategy Mission to Kenya

Like earlier missions undertaken within the framework of the ILO World Employment Programme,1 the ILO mission to Kenya soon discovered that Kenya did not have one employment problem but many, and that the nature and causes of these various employment problems could not be investigated without making a broader analysis of the structure of the economy at large and the trends in its development. Extreme differences in incomes, productivity, access to resources and government services created imbalances between the structure and location of the jobs in demand and the type and location of available work opportunities. The rapid growth of the total population, not to mention that of the urban population and of school outputs, has far exceeded the growth of wage earning employment. These internal imbalances are linked to extreme imbalances between the Kenyan economy and the world economy — in trade, technology, and the conditions governing private foreign investment. Many of the imbalances were inherited at the time of independence, others have grown up since. All of them underlie Kenya’s employment problems.