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The COVID-19 pandemic exposed deep vulnerabilities in the livelihoods of hospitality sector employees worldwide, with particularly severe consequences in developing country contexts characterized by limited social protection and high employment precarity. Kenya's hospitality sector, a vital source of employment and foreign exchange, suffered widespread operational disruptions, workforce downsizing, and prolonged income instability, yet employees' experiences of these crises remain underexplored in the literature. Drawing on a comprehensive review of global, African, and Kenyan empirical literature, this paper examines the institutional lessons that the COVID-19 crisis offers for sustaining employee livelihoods in Kenya's hospitality sector. The paper is theoretically grounded in African Socialism Theory, the Capability Approach, and Social Constructivism, which together provide an ethical, human-centered, and interpretive framework for analyzing the relationships among institutional responses, employee resilience, and livelihood sustainability. The review demonstrates that employee resilience during crises is not solely an individual psychological attribute but is significantly shaped by organizational practices, leadership quality, communication transparency, and access to welfare support. Evidence further reveals that institutional responses in the Kenyan hospitality sector prioritized business continuity over employee welfare, leaving many workers, especially those on casual and non-permanent contracts, without adequate protection. The paper argues that sustainable employee livelihoods require proactive institutional frameworks that integrate crisis preparedness, ethical employment practices, and targeted welfare mechanisms. Lessons from comparative contexts, including South Korea, Germany, and South Africa, are drawn upon to propose strategies for strengthening organizational and policy responses in Kenya's hospitality sector. The findings contribute to emerging research on ethical organizational leadership, sustainable employment, and crisis management in the Global South.

This paper articulates on the challenges of unemployment in Butterworth, a town in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. The objectives of the study were to investigate psychological, social and economic challenges of unemployment respectively. Keynisian theory was used to explain the unemployment situation in the study area. The study made use of quantitative approach, where 80 respondents were drawn from the target population through a stratified sampling technique. Data collected from survey (questionnaire) were analysed with appropriate tools in the Statistics Package for Social Sciences. Demographically, the majority of the sample were females, people between the ages of 18-23, all of African race, were never married, had a diploma, were unemployed for more than three years and said they had not look for work in three weeks. The most prevalent feeling by the unemployed was disappointment and frustration, which according to them led them to engage in anti-social behaviour, especially being dishonest in many occasions and use of alcohol. The biggest social challenge among them include, not getting the expected support from family and friends. They face many economic challenges, in which they are unable and sometimes struggle to have money to apply for jobs or buy clothes. This study made recommendations on how to overcome the challenges of unemployment in the study area