Household Level and Individual Antecedents of Employment Status in Malawi
Keywords:
Household; individuals; employment status; poverty; binary logistic regressionAbstract
In the face of high levels of poverty and unemployment, there is need to dissect and turn
upside down any possible explanations that can assist in discovering a working formula. The most
recent data collected by statistics office of Malawi, has information on the employment status of
individuals and some important social economic characteristics. This paper uses the data to uncover the
socioeconomic and household level antecedents of employment status of individual using the individual
set of data. The main variables used were age, gender, literacy, religion, disability, and education level
to properly profile the nature of individuals that are employed, to see if this is an issue of the supply
side of the labour force or the demand side of labour from the industry. An understanding of this
dynamic can go a long way in finding lasting solutions to the unemployment questions and subsequently
the poverty question. The study used descriptive analysis, cross tabulation, and a binary logistic
regression model to analyse the data. The results showed that males had a higher chance of getting
employment as compared to the counterpart women, being literate also had a higher chance of getting
employment than those who were illiterate. Age of an individual showed that older people up to a
certain age had a better chance of getting employed than the younger generation and on education level,
those with at-least some form of education had a better chance of being employed than those without,
the disabled had a lower chance of getting employed than those not disabled. Lastly the study
recommended policy makers to emphasise on the policy of increase in school attendance across gender
to improve the literacy levels in the country and the level of education. Policies on gender
discrimination in workplaces should also be emphasised. Government should introduce and increase
the number of incubators of SMMEs to enhance entrepreneurship in the country which later may have.
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