The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) announced on Thursday that Egypt’s unemployment rate increased to 9.2% at the end of April due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
CAPMAS explained that the rise was due to the government’s precautionary measures to curb the further spread of the virus.
The agency also announced unemployment data for the first quarter (Q1) of 2020, with unemployment reaching 7.7% of the total workforce compared to 8% in Q4 of 2019. The figures for the quarter show a decrease of 0.3% on the last quarter of 2019, and a decrease of 0.4% over the corresponding quarter of the previous year.
The workforce size was recorded as just over 29m in Q1 of 2020, compared to 28.95m individuals during the previous quarter, with an increase of 0.2%.
The number of unemployed was recorded at 2,236m (which broke down to 1,076m males, and 1,160m females) representing 7.7% of the total labour force. These figures represented a decrease of 93,000 from Q4 of 2019, or 4%, and with a decrease of 31,000 from the same quarter of the previous year by 1.4%.
