Weekend Read| The Jobs Crisis Hidden Behind Zim’s 9.3% Unemployment Rate

By Tinotenda Bhunu

HARARE – THERE are numbers that inform us, and there are numbers that reassure us. Zimbabwe’s 9.3 percent unemployment rate is very much the latter kind.

That is the World Bank’s latest figure, for 2025 data now sitting in front of us in 2026. On paper it looks almost enviable. Stack it against most of Southern Africa, and Zimbabwe suddenly appears to be doing fine on jobs. But talk to anyone who has watched a cousin, a neighbour’s child, or a whole graduating class send out CV after CV and eventually cobble together some way of making money, and that number simply does not match what they are seeing.

That does not mean the World Bank got it wrong. It means we are probably asking the wrong question. Instead of arguing over whether 9.3 percent is accurate, we should be asking what it actually measures — because the answer is a lot narrower than most people assume.

This is the ILO-modelled unemployment rate, and what it counts is people who have no work, want work, and are actively looking for it. Fair enough — it is a standard measure built so labour markets can be compared across countries. But unemployment is not the same as inactivity, underemployment, informality, low pay, mismatched skills, or a simple lack of anything productive to do. In Zimbabwe, that gap matters enormously.

Take a fresh graduate. Four years of economics, accounting, engineering, law, agriculture, computer science, or whatever the field. The family paid for tuition, rent, food, transport — all of it — banking on those years eventually turning into a job and an income. Graduation comes. The CV gets polished. Applications go out. Interviews happen, or do not. Emails pile up unanswered. And then, more often than not, nothing.

So survival kicks in. One graduate starts selling clothes. Another launches a poultry project. Someone becomes a tutor, someone else starts driving for hire, another gets into cross-border trading, another picks up casual jobs here and there, another goes freelance, and another joins an informal business network. And some quietly stop looking altogether.

This is where the statistic gets interesting — and a little misleading. The graduate sitting at home, still searching, still available, gets counted as unemployed. But the one who starts selling clothes? Employed. The one driving? Employed. Tutoring, running an informal stall, picking up odd jobs — all employed. That is not a flaw in the definition; it is simply what the definition was built to capture. The trouble is, someone can cross from “unemployed” to “employed” in the statistics without moving anywhere near productive employment. That gap lies at the heart of Zimbabwe’s jobs problem.

ZIMSTAT’s own numbers are a useful reality check here. Their Q2 2025 labour-force survey put national unemployment at 20.7 percent — more than double the World Bank figure. Among 15–24 year-olds it was 39.3 percent; among 15–35 year-olds, 28.9 percent. Widen the definition to the “expanded” or “relaxed” measure, and it jumps further still: 37.1 percent nationally, 58.2 percent for youth aged 15–24, and 46.1 percent for those aged 15–35.

None of this means the figures contradict each other. They are simply measuring different things in different ways. The World Bank’s 9.3 percent tells us about open unemployment under one internationally standardised definition. ZIMSTAT gives us a messier, more textured picture of what is actually happening domestically. The mistake is not in either number — it is in treating one of them as the whole story.

And the bigger question, really, is what is happening to everyone counted as “employed.” Zimbabwe’s Q2 2025 survey found 58.5 percent of employment was informal, against just 35.8 percent formal. Now, informal work is not automatically a bad thing. A small trader is still running a business. A farmer is still producing. A freelancer is still working, and Zimbabwe’s informal economy is a testament to how resourceful people are under difficult conditions. But resilience is not the same as prosperity. You can work every single day and still be poor. You can be self-employed and still have zero access to affordable credit. You can have loyal customers and still have no room to grow. You can hold a degree and spend your whole working life never touching the field you trained in.

So the real conversation should not be “do people have something to occupy their time?” It should be whether people have access to work that is productive, stable, and pays enough to matter — and that question is especially sharp for graduates.

A graduate who studies economics for four years but cannot find economic work does not stay an unemployment statistic forever. The moment they start a small side business, they vanish from that number. But the economy may still be wasting their training entirely. And that is a real loss — to the individual, to the family that paid for the education, and to the country that funded the universities. All that investment, and the economy simply cannot create enough productive slots to use it.

None of this is the graduate’s fault, and it is not a criticism of entrepreneurship — quite the opposite. A graduate building a business out of necessity is doing exactly the kind of entrepreneurial discovery an economy needs more of. The real problem emerges when the environment around them will not let that small venture grow into something bigger. What happens when they cannot get financing? When formal premises cost too much? When the power keeps going out? When licensing and regulation consume whatever margin they had? When there is no clear way to use an asset as collateral because property rights are insecure? The entrepreneur stays active — technically employed — but stuck, trapped at a level of productivity that never really moves.

This is why Zimbabwe’s employment problem cannot be separated from the wider economic environment. You do not fix unemployment by shuffling people between statistical boxes. What is actually needed is an economy where small businesses can grow into bigger ones, where going formal is worth it because formalisation actually pays off, where a farmer can invest without fear of losing everything to policy shifts, where a graduate can turn what they know into a career or a company, where entrepreneurs can borrow money and hire people, and where investment builds real jobs instead of just short-term survival hustles.

That is a different policy conversation entirely — one built around predictable regulation, secure property rights, infrastructure that actually works, access to finance, lower barriers to starting a business, real competition in the private sector, and enough confidence for businesses to invest for the long haul rather than just get through the month.

The government cannot hire an entire generation of graduates, and public-sector jobs cannot be the country’s employment strategy. Durable job creation comes from a private sector that is actually growing — businesses spotting opportunities, putting capital to work, producing things, and hiring because it makes economic sense to do so.

So the graduate sitting at home is not just an education story or a labour-market footnote. It is a symptom of something deeper: an economy that cannot convert human capital into productive output at any real scale.

There is also a group that tends to be forgotten in all this — the people who have simply given up looking. Someone who becomes discouraged and drops out of the labour force does not register in the unemployment rate the way an active job-seeker does. That is exactly why unemployment figures need to be read alongside labour-force participation, employment-to-population ratios, youth NEET rates, informality, and broader measures of underused labour. Otherwise, a falling unemployment rate can look like good news when really it just means people stopped bothering to search.

So the question is not “Is the World Bank’s 9.3 percent accurate?” It probably is — it is a legitimate statistic, measured the way it is meant to be measured. The real question is whether 9.3 percent is enough to describe Zimbabwe’s employment problem. And it is not.

It tells us about unemployment. It says nothing about whether the other 90.7 percent are working productively. Nothing about how many graduates are stuck outside their field. Nothing about underemployment, or how many people are getting by on informal hustles, or how many workers earn too little to ever build savings or real independence. And nothing about how many young people simply walked away from the search out of exhaustion.

That distinction is not academic — it changes what policymakers should actually focus on. See a 9.3 percent unemployment rate and conclude that the labour market is basically healthy, and you will end up solving the wrong problem. Look past the headline number, though, and you will find high youth unemployment, widespread informality, underemployment, and graduates struggling to find work that matches their training — and suddenly, the priorities look very different.

The goal should not be merely “creating jobs.” It should be creating productive jobs — an economy that can turn a graduate’s education into real output, a farmer’s land into investment, an entrepreneur’s idea into an actual company, a small business into a bigger employer, and employment into rising income. That is what economic development is supposed to deliver. Not just keeping people busy, but letting them become more productive — earn more, save, invest, build assets, grow a business, and eventually hire someone else. That is how a country climbs out of poverty.

So yes — Zimbabwe’s 9.3 percent unemployment rate is true. It is just not the whole truth. The more uncomfortable reality is that a country can have a low headline unemployment number and still be in the middle of a genuine jobs crisis. You can see it in the graduate who cannot find work in their own field, the young person scraping by on precarious informal work, the entrepreneur who cannot expand no matter how hard they try, the worker who has a job but still cannot earn enough to get ahead, and the person who has quietly stopped looking altogether.

So the real problem is not that Zimbabweans cannot find work. It is that too many cannot find productive work — and that distinction matters enormously. A country can lower its unemployment rate without generating any real prosperity. It can raise employment without raising productivity. It can praise entrepreneurship while leaving entrepreneurs stuck at the subsistence level. It can produce thousands of graduates a year without ever producing enough opportunities for them.

The real measure of success, then, is not whether Zimbabwe can make the unemployment figure look smaller. It is whether Zimbabwe can build an economy where a young graduate can reasonably expect their education to lead somewhere, where an entrepreneur can grow an idea into a real enterprise, and where a worker’s job actually translates into a better life.

The number is 9.3 percent. The real question is much bigger than that: how many Zimbabweans actually have a shot at building a better life through productive work? Until we can answer that with confidence, we should be wary of treating a low unemployment rate as proof that the jobs crisis has been solved.

Tinotenda Bhunu is an economist by profession. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tinotenda-bhunu-114645208?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=android_app