Annual labour force growth averages 2.5 percent and employers are wholly unable to absorb this. The traditional large employers in transport and nationalised industries are being privatised and downsized. Many more women are looking for work, while their employment opportunities stagnate. There are 12,000 street children in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, alone. Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, is estimated to have 10,000 street children.
Some children support whole families by scavenging.
Staving off hunger is seen as a major attribute of cannabis in Mozambique. Many use cannabis simply to cope with the general social pressure, while others use drugs to dull the impact of the horrors they have experienced. Thirty percent of the 1.7 million refugees who returned to Mozambique after the civil war had been tortured and 77 percent of child refugees returning had witnessed a murder. In Kenya, chewing qaat is culturally acceptable. It causes insomnia, so users need other drugs like cannabis to get to sleep.