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Zimbabwe's unemployment rate "of 85%" is a ticking time bomb Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the country's opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), recently said.
But how accurate is the 85% figure? Depending on the source, Zimbabwe's unemployment rate has been estimated at as low as 4% and as high as 95%.
In its 2013 election manifesto, President Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party claimed unemployment levels stood at 60%. The secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Union, Japhet Moyo, told a newspaper late in 2012 that the
unemployment rate was between 80% and 90%. The country's National Association of Non-Governmental Organisations (NANGO) suggested that overall unemployment in 2011 stood at 95%.
'Do research yourself'
The MDC say that the figure cited by Tsvangirai was drawn from a study carried out by the party in October 2013 and "updated" in April 2014. Spokesman Douglas Mwonzora told Africa Check that it showed that "formal unemployment has risen to over 85%". He however failed to produce a copy of the research report despite numerous requests.
Zanu-PF spokesman Rugare Gumbo said the 60% estimate referred to in the party's election manifesto "might have been accurate then, but things have changed". "You just have to come and do research yourself," he added before abruptly ending the call.
Documents provided to Africa Check by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions as evidence of their 80% to 90% claim contained no data to support it.
Christopher Mweembe from NANGO said the organisation had taken the 95% estimate from the CIA World Factbook, an online database of country information and statistics published by the US Central Intelligence Agency.
The website lists unemployment estimates of 80% (2005) and 95% (2009) for Zimbabwe, but does not provide references for the data. The site also cautions readers that: "[T]rue unemployment is unknown and, under current economic conditions, unknowable".
In stark contrast, the World Bank website lists Zimbabwe's unemployment rate at only 4%. It bases the figure on data compiled by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). But closer examination reveals that this "modelled estimate" draws on data that is a decade old.
5.4-million classified as 'employed'
A labour survey published in June 2011 by Zimbabwe's agency for national statistics, Zimstat, put unemployment at 10.7%. This figure was based on an "expanded" definition of unemployment that included people who had given up looking for work.
Figures based on a narrower "strict definition" of unemployment, which only counted people who were out of work but actively looking for a job, put unemployment at just 5.4%.
The 2011 survey provides the most recent official data on unemployment and was based on interviews conducted with Zimbabweans from 9,359 households. The Zimstat survey concluded that 6.1-million people aged 15 and older were "economically active". (Zimbabwe's population was estimated to be around 12-million at the time.)
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