Beyond Employed or Unemployed: Development and Validation of a Youth Economic Engagement Ladder in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Abstract

In informal urban labour markets the employed and unemployed binary conceals more than it reveals, since young people whose work yields neither income nor security appear as employed and fall outside the population programmes are funded to reach. The NEET indicator improves on it only at one end, leaving the working but insecure undifferentiated. This article develops and validates the Youth Economic Engagement Ladder, a five-band ordinal classification built from sequential combinations of four components: activity, income, regularity and security. The design is a cross-sectional instrument development and validation study. Structured interviews covered 290 marginalised young people aged 15 to 24 across four municipalities of Dar es Salaam, recruited purposively against three markers of marginality. Analysis used Wilson intervals, Cronbach's alpha, Holm adjusted trend tests, Cohen's kappa and nested logistic regression. The ladder places 35.2 per cent outside economic activity, 16.2 per cent in work yielding no income, 18.6 per cent in precarious paid work, 22.8 per cent in vulnerable engagement and 7.2 per cent in stable engagement, whereas the binary counts 64.8 per cent as employed, including all 47 who work without earning. Position rose across six of eight indicators after Holm adjustment. The study concludes that engagement quality and income are distinct quantities, and the ladder measures the former. The study recommends that programmes classify participants by band at intake and match provision to band, since bands face different constraints.