Uganda: 90 percent workers face jobs lost and salary cut during COVID-19 says UBOS

Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) has revealed that 90 percent of workers and companies experienced salary cuts or loss of jobs during the COVID-19 lockdown since March, according to a news report by Daily Monitor.

The report said that 43 percent of the respondents in the service sector was no longer working during the last week before the end of August 2020.

"Since the COVID-19 outbreak, 87 percent of the households have reported reduced income or no earnings from at least one of their sources of livelihood," the report says.

While releasing the report in Kampala yesterday, the UBOS executive director, Chris Mukiza, said service, transport, and commerce were the sectors most hit by the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, having lost the highest share of workers.

"41 percent of the household could not sell their produce due to closure of weekly and monthly markets as well as travel restrictions," he said.

He, however, said that agriculture was the least affected with 93 percent of the respondents in this sector saying they remained working despite the anti-COVID-19 restrictions. Mukiza noted that the share of farming households increased from 72 percent in 2019 to 78 percent in 2020 and only eight percent of the livestock-keeping households reported that Covid-19 affected their livestock production activities.