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The people of South Africa need many things, and employment sits near the top of that list.

A society where someone wasn’t murdered every 21 minutes would also be nice but that’s a story for another day.

For the quarter ending March 31, and starting on January 1, Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) has revealed that the official South African unemployment rate has decreased by 0,8 of a percentage point to 34,5%.

Essentially, 370 000 jobs were gained between the final three months of last year and the first three of this year.

Some context, via Engineering News:

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate according to the expanded definition, which includes discouraged work-seekers, also decreased by 0.7 of a percentage point to 45.5% in the first quarter.

The total number of people employed in South Africa was 14.9-million, against 7.9-million unemployed people at the end of the first quarter.

Those numbers can be further broken down by province and by metro, which the South African Cities Network (SACN), through its latest State of Cities Report (SoCR), has taken care of.

More from BusinessTech:

The report provides an insightful look at SACN’s nine participating cities, namely Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality, City of Ekurhuleni, City of Joburg, City of Tshwane, eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality, Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality, Msunduzi Local Municipality, Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality as well as Cape Town…

Nelson Mandela Bay currently leads with the highest unemployment rate, followed by Mangaung and Ekurhuleni – meanwhile, the City of Cape Town metro has the lowest unemployment rate.

It’s a Monday and I’m confident you’ve likely been hit with enough bad news already.

We will gloss over the nitty-gritty of what’s happening in Nelson Mandela Bay and focus on the City of Cape Town metro.

The City of Cape Town contributes R287 billion to the national economy. This said, poverty levels are high with 45.9% of the population living on less than R1,227 per month, while 9.3% receive social grants, the SoCR stated.

Positively a high number of households have access to electricity (98.6%), basic sanitation (92.4%), basic water supply (95.9%) and weekly municipal refuse removal (89.7%).

The unemployment rate sits at 21,3%. For a point of comparison, it’s 36,4% in Nelson Mandela Bay.

I don’t think either is a number that should be celebrated. The latest US stats show unemployment at 3,6%, and the UK’s jobless rate has fallen to 3,7%.

[sources:engineeringnews&bustech]