Unemployment and Informal Entrepreneurship in Zimbabwe: Implications for Regional Integration

This paper analyses youth unemployment and informal entrepreneurship dynamics in Zimbabwe and draws some evidence from a country-wide survey of informal metal manufacturing industry conducted in 2012. The objective of the paper is to highlight how these dynamics have shaped current trends in youth employment and entrepreneurship. It finds that informal entrepreneurship continues to flourish to the extent that informal has become normal. Having grown from less than 10% of employment and Gross Domestic Product, the informal economy currently employs close to 90% of the country’s labour force and contributes over 60% of GDP implying that it has become the virtual economy. However, government policy has remained ambivalent towards informal entrepreneurship despite its pivotal role in employment creation. Evidence from the informal metal industry survey indicates that the young entrepreneurs are mainly graduates from secondary school, vocational training centres and technical colleges who have acquired the reuisite qualifications and technical expertise but fail to land jobs in the formal job market and end up creating employment for themselves through informal entrepreneurship. The paper has argued and emphasised the need for creation of a conducive policy environment to facilitate formalisation through a comprehensive and integrated policy framework which addresses the negative perceptions towards informality at the same time maintaining the significant role it plays such as job creation and income generation.