The industry of employment in the district is presented in Table 4.4 by sex. From the table, the employed persons are distributed across several types of industry of employment. However, just about five of them are the most popular in the district by virtue of the size of the population they engage. Wholesale and retail; repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles engages one in four employed persons in the district, followed by agriculture forestry and fishing which provides livelihood for about 22 percent of all employed persons in the district.

Also, manufacturing, education, accommodation and food service activities engages 14.1 percent, 9.5 percent and 6.1 percent respectively of employed persons in the district. Each of the remaining industrial avenues provides jobs for less than five percent of the employed persons.

The distribution is, however, not uniform by sex. Among the males, 15.1 percent of the employed persons are into wholesale and retail; repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles compared to 37.1 percent of their female counterparts. At the same time, 31.7 percent of males and 11.0 percent of females are into agriculture forestry and fishing activities. Furthermore, only about one percent of the males are engaged in accommodation and food service activities compared to 11.7 percent of the females. Similar variations are observed by sex with regard to manufacturing and education.

Employment Status

Table 4.5 illustrates the distribution of employed population 15 years and older by employment status and sex. On the whole, the self-employed without employee(s) stands out as the highest proportion and engages 57.2 percent of the people and is made up of 49.2 percent of the males and 66.3 percent among the females. It is followed by the employee category with 25.6 percent with 33.4 percent males and 16.8 percent females. Again, employed persons who are self-employed with employees constitute 5.6 percent of the employed persons while others classified as contributing family workers represent 6.0 percent. It is also to be noted that while the proportion of males working as self-employed with employees are higher than the females, the reverse is the case with regard to contributing family workers.

Employment Sector

Table 4.6 depicts the employment sector of the employed persons by sex. By far, the private informal sector is the dominant provider of work for the population and consist of 77.5 percent of all employed persons in the district which is made up of 71.0 percent of males and 84.9 percent of females.

The big variation between males and females in the private informal sector may be attributed to the fact that most of the jobs in this sector involve trading which women tend to do better than men. It is also observed that the public (government) sector employs 15.9 percent of all employed persons in the district and it is skewed in favour of males (20.1%) compared to females (11.2%). The private formal sector also engages only 5.3 percent which is made up of relatively higher proportion of males (7.1%) than females (3.1%) The NGOs, semi-public/parastatal and international organisations do not constitute major sources of employment in the district and together engage 1.3 percent of the employed persons.