The country’s 13 main cities are suffering from sinking employment opportunities, the National Department of Statistics tweeted.

Colombia’s unemployment rate is skyrocketing with rates surging to 12.8 in the final quarter of the 2018 financial year, a report from the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE) revealed Thursday.

The country’s 13 main urban areas are suffering from sinking employment opportunities, Dane tweeted with graphs and statistics analyzing 23 Colombian cities from Nov. 2018 to January 2019.

Since President Ivan Duque’s inauguration, the unemployment rate has surged from 8 percent to 12.8, the highest experienced in the South American nation since 2011. Despite the entrance of 58,000 Colombians into the workforce, some 298,000 others were left unemployed.

Dane registered an increase of 4.1 percent to the “public administration and defense, social security plans of compulsory membership, education, human health care activities and social services."

#Empleo | Para el trimestre nov 2018-enero 2019 #Quibdó y #Cúcuta comparten liderazgo en materia de desempleo. #Barranquilla es la ciudad con menor tasa y #Pereira la de mejor comportamiento: cae 1 p.p. frente al año inmediatamente anterior. pic.twitter.com/zPbT5SHbiw — DANE Colombia (@DANE_Colombia) February 28, 2019

"For the quarter Nov 2018-January, 2019 # Quibdó and # Cúcuta share leadership on unemployment issues. # Barranquilla is the city with the lowest rate and # Pereira has the best performance: it falls 1 pp against the immediately previous year."



Agriculture, service, commerce, and tourism sectors in the eastern and Pacific regions maintain the highest rates of unemployment, Dane Director Juan Daniel Oviedo said, adding that the cities of Quibdo with 18.9%, Cucuta with 16.9% and Ibagué were hit the hardest with rates hovering around 18.9 percent, 16.9 percent, 16.6 percent, respectively.

"Through economic activities we achieved a very important recovery of some sectors," said Oviedo, who noted that Colombia’s economy managed to "avoid a crisis" in the manufacturing industry, which ended 2018 with a growth of two percent after registering a decrease of -1.8 percent in employment in 2017.

However not all of the Colombian professionals have struggled, the department said. According to statistics, successful endeavors in the manufacturing, oil extraction, science, and technical industries have opened up new employment opportunities to experts.