The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has unveiled new insights into the state of employment in Nigeria, indicating that 92.6% of the working population in Q1 2023 were engaged in informal employment, encompassing agriculture, while 89.4% were in informal employment excluding agriculture.
The release of this data is part of the “Nigeria Labour Force Survey,” as published on the NBS website on Thursday.
Notably, the unemployment landscape exhibited a significant shift, with a decrease from 5.3% in Q4 2022 to 4.1% in Q1 2023.
This decline reflects a remarkable change compared to the 33.3% unemployment rate reported by the NBS for Nigeria in 2020.
The observed reduction in unemployment figures is attributed to the NBS’s adoption of a refined metric to gauge unemployment, showcasing a more nuanced understanding of the employment scenario in the country.