Unemployment refers to a situation where able bodies and employable people are looking for jobs and cannot find them. It can also be described as the proportion of the economically active population that is not working but is how ever actively looking for employment. The ever increasing rate of unemployment in Zimbabwe can be traced to the 1990s, where Zimbabwe embarked on Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) coupled by the drought that struck the country in 1991-1992 . The drought forced the greater part of the rural population who were previously not on the job market to migrate to urban areas in search of employment thus worsening the unemployment rate. The bedevilling economic environment since the start of the new millennium coupled with retrenchments and company closures have also worsened the unemployment rate in Zimbabwe.
Unemployment is Zimbabwe has been caused by quite a number of factors. Some of these seem to be of a political nature. Some of these causes are discussed below. The cause and types of unemployment include frictional unemployment, seasonal unemployment, structural unemployment, demand deficiency unemployed, voluntary unemployment and technological unemployment.
