Post-war Singapore was plagued with much economic and financial trouble. A largely-uneducated population and the then-chronic lack of jobs meant that the amount of available manpower in the country was quite scarce. By the end of the decade of the 1950s, the total unemployment rate in post-war Singapore stood at about 14%, which encompassed an estimated 200,000 people out of the whole population at that time. To add on to the problems of widespread unemployment and the subsequent general poverty of the people that followed, the government had to tackle the issue of the then-high birth-rate in the country, which increased every year by around 4%.