{"id":34298,"date":"2026-05-12T11:55:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T09:55:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/?post_type=news&#038;p=34298"},"modified":"2026-05-12T11:55:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T09:55:17","slug":"sas-unemployment-rate-rises-in-first-quarter","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/news\/sas-unemployment-rate-rises-in-first-quarter\/","title":{"rendered":"SA&#8217;s unemployment rate rises in first quarter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>South \u200bAfrica&#8217;s (SA) unemployment rate rose to 32.7% in \u200cthe first quarter of 2026 from 31.4% in the fourth quarter of 2025 data from the statistics \u200bagency showed this Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>Statistics SA (Stats SA) said \u200bthe number of unemployed people increased to \u20608.137 million in January-March, compared with 7.836 \u200bmillion in October-December.\u00a0 The official jobless rate has been \u200babove 30% for more than five years and is among the highest in the world.<\/p>\n<p>The coalition government formed in \u200b2024 has struggled to meaningfully boost job \u200bcreation, despite investor optimism about reforms and a modest pickup \u200cin \u2060economic growth. Job losses were broad-based in the first three months of this year, with only three out of 10 sectors tracked by Stats SA \u200brecording job \u200bgains.<\/p>\n<p>The community \u2060and social services sector had the biggest number of job losses \u200bin the first quarter of 2026.<\/p>\n<p>Manufacturing, mining \u200band \u2060agriculture saw employment increases.<\/p>\n<p>An expanded definition of unemployment rose to 43.7% in the first quarter from \u206042.1% \u200bpreviously.<\/p>\n<p>Young people and Black women \u200bremain especially vulnerable to unemployment in SA.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;Reuters&#8211;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":16392,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[78,26],"class_list":["post-34298","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-featured","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"Manufacturing, mining \u200band \u2060agriculture saw employment increases.","published_date":"","news_description":"Manufacturing, mining \u200band \u2060agriculture saw employment increases.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/34298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/34298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34299,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/34298\/revisions\/34299"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=34298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}