It was really a tragedy for many families: “About 20% of full-time staff at formal and informal businesses in Nigeria lost their jobs in the heat of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The startling figure is from a survey conducted by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in conjunction with the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS), who studied 2,964 businesses in every state in the country in order to understand the effect of the pandemic between the second and fourth quarters of the year.” The nation needs to ramp up initiatives to get these citizens back to work and more.
The full report here (PDF):
It is now over a year since the coronavirus outbreak was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization. COVID-19 has claimed over 4 million lives and infected over 200 million people worldwide. The pandemic’s impact has touched almost every aspect of modern life, upending public health systems, the global economy, travel, supply chains, community and social ties and how we work. Unemployment has risen, and the global economy shrank by 4.4% in 2020, according to International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates. The vast majority of nations around the world entered into recessions, having experienced negative GDP growth.
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Developing countries have suffered disproportionately due to the socio-economic fallout from the pandemic. Wealthier nations can afford to institute the crippling lockdowns and restrictions necessary at times to arrest the spread of the virus, and to support their populations so they can stay at home in an effort to limit community spread. Many developing countries however were often forced to rely on a mishmash of truncated measures to limit the fallout on populations already living in poverty or who rely on daily work for subsistence.
This report detail the ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic. Disruption in operations was evident across enterprises with at least two thirds of businesses currently operating in the country having had to close down during the pandemic. The results also shed light on resistance to lockdown directives and regulation by the government, particularly among informal enterprises where a third continued to operate throughout the pandemic. Around one in ten businesses were still closed at the time of the survey.
With that 20% paralysis, unemployment has ramped up in Nigeria.
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