Syria Labor Market Assessment: Raqqa City (May 2024) – Syrian Arab Republic

Context and rationale

As Syria enters its 14th year of crisis, access to livelihoods has been consistently highlighted as a priority need for both host communities and internally displaced persons. However, the Early Recovery and Livelihoods Working Group (ERL WG) of the Northeast Syria NGO Forum noted that there is little systematic data on key indicators that could inform the design of implementing partners’ programmes, such as:

• How labour demand varies across economic sectors and which sectors have the greatest potential to absorb new workers or small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
• How demand for labour varies across employment types, including permanent, temporary or seasonal workers, and casual or part-time workers.
• The specific skills employers are looking for, both interpersonal skills and industry skills, and how they prioritize these skills.
• Key constraints employers face when trying to recruit workers. This assessment aims to shed light on these indicators for Raqqa City, Raqqa Governorate, north-eastern Syria, to enable implementing partners to better tailor their interventions to existing needs.

Key messages

• 51%, or 150 out of 295 surveyed businesses, cited “lack of access to finance or loans” as the top challenge they face across all sectorsand then “lack of access to electricity, water or fuel” – indicated 49% (145 out of 295) of surveyed enterprises.
• 97% of respondents indicated that the basic type of employment contract is oral contracts between employees and workers. The remaining 2% reported using written contracts.
• The most important skill that employees in companies from various sectors are looking for is work ethic (reliability, trustworthiness, etc.).This applies to the employment of employees in all three modes of work (permanent, temporary or seasonal, and occasional or daily) and has occurred in the case of small and medium-sized enterprises.
• The main way to find employees in Raqqa in various sectors of the labor market is through social contacts. “Referrals from friends and family” is the most frequently mentioned source across all three types of employment (permanent, temporary or seasonal, and casual or day-to-day), followed by “referrals from people they already know have worked with them before,” and in third place “referrals from other business owners they trust.”