“If I go anywhere, they do not accept me because I am from this city and there is no job for me. There are foreigners who have better jobs than me,” Ayad Sherwan, a young man from Erbil, told Rudaw. “We have no planning. Erbil’s planning is very bad. I don’t know what the ministry of planning is doing.”
“It’s all the government. If they give us salaries and jobs, we would not want for anything else,” said Samer Wahab, another Erbil local.
Boosting the private sector, especially in the areas of industry, agriculture, and tourism, and reforming labour laws to ensure jobs for locals over foreigners are priorities of the current government cabinet. In the past year, the government has invested millions in housing and agriculture projects.
Aryan Ahmad, spokesperson for the ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, told Rudaw's Dildar Harki on Thursday that their ministry has several ways to provide job opportunities and shift focus to the private sector, among them career-building programs, a job application website, and loans for start-ups.
"So far, 8,136 youth have been able to benefit from the loans and set up their own businesses," he said. "More than 7,006,500,000 dinars has been offered in these loans and, as we speak, 63 percent of these loans have been paid back."
In 2018, the unemployment rate was nine percent, according to data from the Kurdistan Region’s Statistics Office. With the arrival of the coronavirus in 2020 and a harsh economic situation caused by a drop in oil prices, many people in the Kurdistan Region and Iraq were driven into poverty and unemployment.
Iraq’s GDP contracted by 11 percent in 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It will take until 2024 to rebound to pre-pandemic levels, the IMF predicts, and that rebound is dependent on the government making “wide-ranging structural reforms.”
In October, the United Nations and World Bank predicted Iraq’s poverty rate would rise from 2017-2018 figures of 20 percent to just over 31 percent in 2020. The provinces of the Kurdistan Region are among the better off in Iraq, but they are not immune to rising poverty.
Kurdistan Region’s Statistics Office is preparing updated statistics, but the head of the office is optimistic the unemployment rate will drop.
“Even if unemployment increased in 2020, we expect that it has decreased in 2021,” Sirwan Mohammed told Rudaw’s Mohammed Sheikh Fatih on Thursday. He pointed to previous trends, when the Kurdistan Region went through an economic crisis in 2014 and the unemployment rate still dropped the following year.
Youth aged 15 to 24 are the largest group struggling to find a job, according to Mohammed.
Mohammed also warned of potential increase in poverty and instability of food security, explaining that that while many people think that unemployment and poverty are proportional, they are not, as someone can be employed yet still fall under the poverty line.
“If the government decreases the private sector reliance on the public sector, our situation would be much better if another economic crisis hits the Kurdistan Region, this will also affect food security,” Mohammed said.
“In 2016, we saw that 59 percent of Kurdistan Region residents have partial food security, so any shock would affect their ability to secure food,” Mohammed added. “When it comes to poverty, it is true that we have said that in 2018 poverty rate was at 5.5 percent, but there are many families close to the poverty line and any form of shock those families would fall into poverty.”
The Kurdistan Region has a bloated public sector and an economy that is heavily dependent on oil sales and payments from Baghdad. Out of 1.546 million people working, around 81 percent are employed in the public sector.
Updated at 2:23pm
