Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Thursday, March 28th, 2024

Increasing Urbanization Causes Unemployment: AREU

Increasing  Urbanization Causes Unemployment: AREU

KABUL - An increasingly growing urbanization has boosted unemployment rate and caused disorder in cities in Afghanistan, a new research by AREU said. The research carried out by Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) said cities have been hit by a wave of rural and semi-rural settlers that could increase unemployment rate and mess up the lives of city dwellers.

The research finds Informal settlements and rapid urbanization as the two serious challenges ahead of municipal governments. The rapid urbanization that most cities in Afghanistan have seen fails city governments to provide services to people, the research said.

A Senior Publications Officer, Jay Lamey, at the AREU said: "The major issue of course is providing services to these people and the municipal governments need to be set up in a way that enables them to serve everybody."

"Now at the moment local governments, I mean city governments, are not able to get any tax from people who live in these informal settlements. So it's difficult for them to raise the necessary money to serve them. And there is also some existing government system, such as the master planning system and the system of converting land from rural to urban," Jay Lamey said. "They are very difficult and to them it makes it difficult for cities to expand in a legal way and therefore they end up with issues like land grabbing and informal settlement."

Findings of the research, that covered three cities in the country, indicate that insecurity and a high level of unemployment make the motives for most of the rural people to leave their neighborhoods for cities and to stop pursuing agriculture, the profession of their predecessors.