Majority of young people in the rural are in vulnerable employment and the rural unemployment trend is on upward trend, according to a research carried by Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences.

Vietnam currently has 17 million young people in the rural areas, accounting one-fifth of the Vietnam ’s population. However, young people in rural areas are mainly working in low-productivity job with meager income or jobless, researchers said.

More than one-third of 663 rural respondents in a recent survey said they were jobless while 35.8 percent of respondents are underemployment.

The survey also found that more than half of employed respondents were farmers, 11.1% others were public servants, 9.5 percent of them were workers and only 1.1percent of them were businessmen. As a matter of fact, about 70 percent of employed respondents said they had earned less than 2 million VND ( nearly 90USD) per month.

One of the main reasons led to increase unemployment rate among rural young people is the rapid urbanisation process. Besides this, it was said that many agricultural land was taken for building industrial zone, processing zone and public facilities.

From 2004 to 2013, 750,000 hectare of land in 49 provinces across Vietnam was used for 29,000 investment projects. Vocational trainings for young people in the rural areas have failed to meet the demand.

Many businesses in the rural areas were not considered rural labour force as their key human resource. They did not provided financial support for young people to help them develop their own businesses meanwhile investment in agriculture was very modest.

The Government has so far set up rural and industrial development programmes to solve employment issue for rural labour force. The Government has created over 1.2 million new jobs annually and majority of them went for rural labourers.

Vietnam is expected to have an additional 9.5 million people joining the labor force in the next 10 years, and needs to create 15.3 million new jobs during the period, according to the job department under the Ministry of Labour, War Invalids, and Social Affairs.-VNA