ZIMBABWEAN companies offloaded more than 65 000 workers in only three months last year, even as authorities insisted the economy was on a positive trajectory.
The early months of 2025 marked one of the harshest phases of an economic crisis characterised by firm closures, supermarket chain retrenchments and widening corporate distress, with thousands losing jobs.
Turbulence was also felt in diamond mines, after tailspins in global prices forced operators to revisit business models to stay afloat.
But authorities maintained at the time that the economy remained stable, citing improvements on the inflation and exchange rate front — a complex picture given the turmoil that was unfolding across some sectors.
The figures, contained in the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency’s (ZimStat) 2025 second quarter Labour Force Survey, paint a grim picture of a labour market under pressure from soaring operating costs.
The agency said the unemployment rate stood at 20,7% during the period, translating to 833 527 unemployed people nationally.
Some independent organisations place Zimbabwe’s unemployment rate at over 90%.
The report said youth unemployment remained significantly higher at 39,3% for those aged between 15 and 24, while unemployment among people aged between 15 and 35 stood at 28,9%.
The survey — exclusively obtained by the Zimbabwe Independent — also revealed the overwhelming dominance of informal employment in Zimbabwe’s economy. Out of the country’s 3,18 million employed people, 1,86 million were working in the informal sector, representing 58,5% of total employment, it said.
Only 1,14 million people, or 35,8%, were formally employed, while 182 017 people were classified under household own-use production and community sector activities.
According to ZimStat, women were slightly more concentrated in informal employment than men.
About 58,8% of employed females were working in the informal sector compared to 58,2% of employed males.
The survey showed that unemployment rates varied across provinces and between men and women, with urban centres recording some of the highest levels of joblessness as companies continue scaling down operations.
Mining has emerged as one of the sectors hardest hit by the latest wave of retrenchments.
Justice Chinhema, secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Diamond and Allied Minerals Workers Union (ZDAMWU), said the mining industry had entered a “dangerous” phase of accelerated job losses.
“We are deeply alarmed that the mining sector has entered a phase of accelerated job shedding since last year, with the heaviest impact being felt in diamond and lithium operations,” Chinhema said.
“Available industry figures indicate that the formal mining industry recorded over a thousand retrenchments in 2024, compared to just a few hundred in 2023, which also increased in 2025 — a clear sign that the crisis is man-made and accelerating under the current policy and regulatory environment.”
He said diamond companies, including had embarked on large-scale contract terminations, while some workers had gone for more than six months without salaries.
“Pensions to the Mining Industry Pension Fund are not being remitted, making life very difficult for workers,” Chinhema said.
He warned that the platinum sector was also facing viability problems and could soon experience retrenchments.
“These headline numbers do not even capture contract, outsourced and informal workers who lose income quietly when operations are scaled down,” he said.
“In reality, entire communities are being condemned to poverty while our mineral wealth is extracted.”
He blamed the crisis on falling commodity prices, weak labour protection, high electricity costs and policy inconsistency.
“Global price fluctuations may be the spark, but it is weak enforcement that has turned a price downturn into a full-blown jobs catastrophe,” Chinhema said.
Veteran labour lawyer Caleb Mucheche said the massive job losses were a sign that “our national economy requires the hands of all tripartite social partners stakeholders made up of government, labour and business on the deck for economic revival, saving of existing jobs and creation of new jobs”.
The ZimStat figures come as economists warn that Zimbabwe’s economic growth claims are failing to translate into stable formal employment, with millions increasingly dependent on informal trading and survivalist activities.
Tight liquidity, high interest rates and restricted credit have crushed consumer spending power, leaving retailers struggling to stay afloat.
Chenayimoyo Mutambasere, a development economist at the Africa Centre for Economic Justice, last week told the Independent that “stability without growth can become economically stagnant”.
She said small and medium enterprises, in particular, faced serious financing challenges.
Borrowing costs remain prohibitive, while limited liquidity in the market is reducing transaction volumes and slowing economic activity, she said.
Tapiwa Mashakada, executive director of the Maji-Marefu Institute of Economic Governance, however, painted a more optimistic picture.
Citing National Social Security Authority statistics showing that about 600 000 jobs were created in the last two years, he said this meant that the “net employment figure is still positive even after taking into account the 65 000 job losses”.
“The economic boom has created jobs for real. Informalisation is a typical African economic problem. People are buying and selling. In fact, people get livelihoods in the informal sector which has higher incomes than formal jobs. So the informal sector is not necessarily a bad thing,” he noted.