Why So Many Young Job Seekers Work for Nothing

Every year, roughly 160,000 students graduate from Ethiopia's public universities, according to Education Ministry figures presented to Parliament. Most will not walk straight into a paying job. Many walk into something else first: an internship, an apprenticeship, or an informal trial paying little or nothing. Understanding how widespread this has become means looking at the numbers.

Ethiopia's labor market has plenty of educated young people and too few jobs for them. As of the 2022 Urban Employment survey from the Ethiopian Statistics Service, unemployment among urban residents aged 15 to 29 stood at 27.2 percent, well above the general urban rate of 18.9 percent. Young women faced roughly double the rate of young men.

The picture worsens regionally. A 2025 peer-reviewed study of East Gojjam Zone found youth unemployment at 33.3 percent overall, with some clusters reaching 66.7 percent, and 72.5 percent of jobless youth in long-term unemployment beyond a year. As of 2023, an Education Ministry official told Parliament that only 58 percent of graduates from ministry-run universities were considered employable, meaning 42 percent were not job-ready by the government's own measure.

This gap is exactly where internships and informal apprenticeships have expanded, functioning less as training and more as a waiting room.

A wage floor that does not exist

Ethiopia has never enacted a national minimum wage for its private sector. Proclamation No. 1156/2019 created a wage board tasked with setting one. Years later, no floor exists, leaving pay for entry-level and internship work almost entirely at the employer's discretion.

The consequences show up in wage data. An ILO wage study found the median monthly wage nationwide sits near 3,000 birr, roughly 24 dollars at prevailing rates. The same reporting described garment workers starting at 850 birr monthly, with raises of only about 100 birr a year. Against that backdrop, an internship paying a small stipend, or nothing, looks less like an anomaly and more like the going rate at the bottom of an unprotected market.

Currency conditions made things harder. The birr lost roughly 20 percent against the dollar over the year to early 2026, per exchange rate data, even as headline inflation eased to 9.7 percent by February 2026, down from 15 percent a year prior. Food and transport, costs an unpaid intern cannot avoid, remain among the fastest-climbing categories.

Where the law stops looking

Ethiopian labor law recognizes two relevant categories, and neither cleanly covers the typical internship. The Proclamation defines a worker through a contract in exchange for a wage, and separately regulates apprenticeships, which must be written and must obligate the employer to deliver structured training.

The everyday internship, informal, unwritten, unpaid, and untracked, fits neither category. That leaves it effectively unregulated, a gap flagged by comparative research under the ILO's decent work program for Ethiopia, which notes the absence of enforceable standards on internship duration, stipends, or conversion to paid roles.

Does unpaid experience even pay off?

The assumption behind unpaid work is that it functions as an investment, trading forgone wages for skills and a stronger résumé. International research complicates that. An ILO working paper by economist Niall O'Higgins found paid internships produce better job market outcomes on average, and that internships overall are less effective than apprenticeships at bridging education and stable employment. A separate career-development study found unpaid interns earned less in their first year after graduation than paid interns or graduates with no internship at all.

There is a distributional angle too. Unpaid work requires a household able to cover months of transport, food, and rent against zero income, so research on internships and inequality finds these arrangements mainly reach job seekers whose families can subsidize them. In a country where the informal sector already absorbs close to a third of the urban workforce, that filtering effect narrows who gets a real shot at the formal economy.

What has been tried?

Ethiopia's Job Creation Commission previously targeted 14 million new jobs by 2025, a goal cited in reporting by The Reporter Magazine. Some universities have partnered with development agencies to place graduates in structured internships with government bodies, an approach traced at Bahir Dar University. Whether such programs can absorb 160,000 new graduates yearly remains unclear, and independent outcome data is thin. A few private employers have also begun paid, structured internship tracks with fixed durations, showing the model is workable without new regulation forcing it.

The debate turns on cause and effect. One view treats unpaid placements as a rational, temporary response to an oversupply of graduates, fading as the economy creates more entry-level jobs. The other, backed by international evidence on paid versus unpaid internships, holds that unpaid arrangements suppress formal hiring by letting employers substitute free labor for salaried staff, so the practice will not disappear on its own even as growth accelerates. Settling the question needs better Ethiopia-specific data on internship outcomes, data that, as of 2025, does not yet exist at scale.