Education Can Solve Unemployment
Amal wishes to find a job
Amal, an Egyptian 30-year-old girl, has been unemployed for the past three years. Her organization laid her off after being with them for 10 years because of the pandemic. Amal couldn’t continue her education because she had to help her family at a young age. Amal now spends all her time trying to get a job, but her efforts are not being paid off because of the country’s bad economic situation.
Amal’s case is very common in the world in general and in the Arab world specifically. To begin with, let’s define unemployment. Unemployment is the term for when a person who is actively looking for a job is unable to find work. The problem of unemployment lies in its consequences on the economy of the individual, society, and country. Some of the effects of unemployment on the individual, society, and economic levels:
Individual: Unemployment can also have a significant impact on a person’s physical health. Being unemployed is a highly stressful situation, so it may cause stress-related health issues such as headaches, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, back pain, and insomnia.
Society: Communities with high unemployment rates are more likely to have limited employment opportunities, low-quality housing, fewer available recreational activities, limited access to public transportation and public services, and underfunded schools.
Economy: When people are unemployed, they spend less money, which ultimately contributes to less contribution to the economy in relation to services or goods sold and produced.
The unemployment rate has been widely spread across the world. As the graph shows, the Arab region has the highest unemployment rate with 11.26% followed by the Latin American and the Caribbean region.
The impact of education level on unemployment:
The higher the level of education of a certain population, the lower the risk of unemployment. Research has shown that education has significantly increased re-employment success among the unemployed. Individuals with a low level of education have less chance of finding employment than those with a higher level. Such studies are proving the contradictory relationship between education and unemployment where the more a country supports the increase of education level the less the unemployment rate it has.
The graph above shows the unemployment rate with different academic levels among different selected countries. As shown, Brazil, a country from the Latin America region, has a higher unemployment rate with basic education, and intermediate education (9.41, 7.94 respectively) compared to advanced education (3.44). On the other hand, Japan has a low unemployment rate with three different education levels (3.51, 3.85 with respect to advanced and intermediate levels) compared to the other selected countries.
A way to decrease the unemployment rate:
Education can be a solution to unemployability in many regions of the world. A potential solution could be by adding more expenses on education to improve the level of skills of the citizen. This will lead to an enhancement in the market where new opportunities might be raised by educating people about entrepreneurship for example.
The graph shows the average expenditure on education across different countries. As shown, most countries with lower unemployment rates have higher expenditures on education. For example, Japan and Canada have a very low unemployment rate when it comes to advanced education, and they spend a good amount of money on their education sector as shown in the graph above. However, Brazil has a very high unemployment rate with basic and intermediate education, but it increases a lot with advanced education. Also, as the graph shows Brazil is spending a good amount of money on education.
To conclude, from analyzing a few indicators from the data, it is recommended that countries spend more money on their education systems. Aligning with the Sustainable development goal 4 – Quality education, this change can be done in a way that improves the skills of their citizens which will lead to the increase of their innovation to build new markets and follow up and produce new technologies that improve the country and create employment opportunities for the communities.
Full Dashboard:
