Graduates ‘hustle’ to fill the unemployment void

Living in Zimbabwe today is somewhat like an extreme sport. From poor public transport, bad roads, poor access to health care and electricity and water shortages, to a wobbly currency, you must navigate through a maze of challenges.

In this environment, where many of the country’s universities and colleges are churning out thousands of graduates each year, adding new numbers to the country’s high unemployment figures, young people have no choice but to be creative to earn a living and avoid being idle.

In 2020, a difficult year when the world was nearly brought to its knees by the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, I graduated with a degree in geography and environmental science at the University of Zimbabwe.

Like many graduates, I was optimistic that I would soon secure a good job but, since then, I have failed to get any formal work.

To survive, I earn a living through ‘hustling’ – a term commonly used by the youth nowadays to mean identifying one’s primary aim in business or life and taking relentless action toward achieving those desires.

My hustling entails hairstyling and selling wigs and hairpieces while I continue to search for that elusive job. This line of work is not what I studied for at university. I’m simply doing it because I have finished my degree and have nothing better to do.

University helps prepare you for the world

I’m beginning to enjoy my hustling. My business is picking up and, the more I style people’s hair and the more I sell, the more the rewards.

In a good month, I can make a profit of US$250, and that is not a bad income for a college graduate because it equals and sometimes even exceeds what many formally employed people are earning.

Right now, I’m not putting much of an effort into looking for a job; my energy is focused on growing my hustling.

While my course in geography and environmental science is a very marketable one in the job market, I think I’m largely unemployed because most industries have either been closed or are operating below normal capacity due to the impact of COVID-19 on the economy.

I believe that my university prepared me well to face the world and, generally, universities are doing a good job of it. Many institutions of higher learning are training students on how to get employment, and how to implement tasks and manage themselves and others.

However, many university graduates can’t get jobs or find anything worthwhile to do after college because, even though attachments (internships) give students an opportunity to link theory and practice, and attachments are part of the curricula at my university and, indeed, at other universities, teaching and learning at universities is still more theoretical than practical.

Choosing the right course

Students also fail to get jobs or integrate into society because many of them choose the wrong courses. We start programmes that we are not passionate about or suited to, and often do not do enough research on what we can do with the knowledge after completing the course.

Most of us pick programmes because that’s what is in line with our advanced-level marks, without knowing if the course is really what we want to do, and this has contributed to the high unemployment levels. People don’t love what they learned at school.

I chose geography and environmental science without understanding what I was going to do after graduation. So, I think there is a need for good career guidance at high school to adequately prepare students for university education before as well as during their university studies.

Universities must invest more in student career support programmes and equip the students with the skills they need to integrate into the workforce. But the starting point is students doing what they love most.

Where they can, universities should encourage entrepreneurship among students by creating or linking graduate entrepreneurs with sources of capital to start their own businesses.

Students, themselves, must also make efforts to educate themselves by enrolling in courses that enhance their life skills.

Gracious Takodza is a University of Zimbabwe graduate in geography and environmental science.