Socio-economic factors impacting youth unemployment in Namibia

Abstract

Youth unemployment is a great concern in Namibia due to the increasing rates of unemployment in the country between the periods of 2000-2008. The current overall unemployment rate stands at an alarming 51.2%. Therefore there is a great need to look into the factors impacting this alarming high unemployment rate. However this paper is only interested in youth unemployment and focuses on the socio-economic factors that impact unemployment. Past researches in Namibia focused solely on micro and macro econometric approaches. The data used for this paper was secondary in nature and was taken from Namibia Household Income & Expenditure Survey for the period 2009/2010. The methodologies used in this research were spearman correlation to test for correlation between youth unemployment and socio-economic factors, binary regression to assess the relationship between dependent variable and independent variable. The results obtained shows that youth unemployment is highly influenced by gender, age group, marital status, literacy, education level, citizenship and region. Thus planning methods taken to try and reduce youth unemployment should look in the factors mentioned above.