The President of the Republic, Filipe Nyusi, said that the Government wants to lower the unemployment rate to 11% by 2035 from the current 17% on official records in 2020.

Nyusi referred to the unemployment figures in Mozambique at the launch of the Emprega program, an initiative of the Secretariat of State for Youth and Employment (SEJE), an entity directly under the Presidency of the Republic.

The initiative has an investment of $27.5 million and aims to finance young entrepreneurs and their companies to generate resilience and 50,000 jobs in five years.

According to data from recent studies by the National Institute of Statistics, in Mozambique only 17% of formal jobs are salaried.

"This program that we are launching today fits into this vision about the need and urgency of job creation. We are in a hurry to create jobs," said Nyusi, in a country where the bulk of the population works in the informal economy.

The young beneficiaries will receive "high quality" training and mentoring and will be selected based on the growth and job creation potential of their companies.

The Head of State pointed out that this second vector intends to cover 24 thousand young people. "This is the time for youth," he said, saying that the focus on youth employment is necessary because this age group is the majority of the Mozambican population and is part of a generation that is better educated and more open to change.

Mozambique has about 30 million inhabitants and more than half of them are young people, according to INE data. The Emprega program is supported by the World Bank through the Project to Harness the Demographic Dividend (PADD).