The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has said that in Q1 2023, 92.6 per cent of employed persons in Nigeria were in informal employment which includes agriculture, while 89.4 per cent were in informal employment which excludes agriculture.
The NBS stated this in its “Nigeria Labour Force Survey” published on its website on Thursday.
According to the report, Nigeria’s unemployment rate was 5.3 per cent in Q4 2022 and 4.1 per cent in Q1 2023.
The figure indicates a significant drop in the unemployment rate, compared to the 33.3 per cent published by the statistics body as Nigeria’s unemployment rate in 2020.
The drop in the unemployment rate is attributed to a rejig of the metric used by the NBS to measure unemployment in the country.
NBS had earlier announced that it would use a new methodology that aggregates the number of employed and unemployed persons in the country to get accurate data on the labour force.
“Following guidelines adopted during the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) in Geneva in 2013, the aim of this re-evaluation was two-pronged. On one hand was to ensure that the methodology was in line with international best practices and locally relevant, and on the other hand, to ensure that a production process was robust enough to produce estimates on a sustainable basis (avoiding periodic gaps), and also, produce more labour market indicators and analysis that will inform government about the employment and job situation in Nigeria,” Adeniran had said.
Speaking during the launch of the new methodology in Abuja on Thursday, Adeniran said the new figure brings Nigeria’s Labour Survey in tandem with international standards.
He said the survey was conducted in collaboration with the World Bank and the International Labour Organisation and has been adopted by 26 countries in Africa.
He added that the figure for the fourth quarter of 2022 was 5.3 per cent.
Adeniran said the new methodology considered employed persons as those who engaged in at least one hour of work during the last seven days the survey was conducted.
He stressed that the new figure was not to give the new government a good face but to bring up the method used to conduct labour surveys in the country.
The old method defined those that are in the labour force to be from 15-64 years old but the newly adopted one views it to be 15 and above that are willing, available, and able when the survey is conducted.
