Jobs for youth critical to Africa’s success

ONE of the greatest challenges the African continent faces is finding productive employment for its 200 million youth aged between 15 and 24.

This is according to the just released Africa Development Indicators 2008/09, and its accompanying report, ‘Youth and Employment in Africa: The Potential, the Problem, the Promise’.
‘The energy, skills and aspirations of young people are invaluable assets that no country can afford to squander, and helping them to realise their full potential by gaining access to employment is a precondition for poverty eradication, sustainable development, and lasting peace,’ says the report.
According to the development indicators released by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank, ‘the median young person in Africa is a poor, literate but out-of-school female living in a rural area.’
This finding, according to the Bank, ‘has important implications for policy design, as well as for the politics of youth-sensitive policies.’
While the face of the average Namibian young person may be slightly different to the continental norm given Namibia’s position as a middle-income country, the definition of Namibian youth as a person aged between 15 and 35 years of age, and mass urbanisation, the huge disparity between the rich and the poor – among the worst in the world – remains a problem in need of serious redress.
The report explains that today’s world population counts an estimated 1,2 billion people at the ages of 15 to 24 – 18 per cent of the world population.
About 87 per cent of these people live in countries with developing economies, with 200 million people in Africa falling into this age range – accounting for 20 per cent of the continent’s population.
In 2005, 62 per cent of Africa’s overall population fell below the age of 25 years.
With this huge youth population, African economies are struggling to cater to their youth, and therefore to secure a sound future for their countries. In sub-Saharan Africa youth constitute 60 per cent of the unemployed population, and on average, 72 per cent of the youth population live on less than US$2 a day – the international poverty line.
This youth unemployment problem has led to large migration of young people to urban areas. We see this all over Namibia with the mushrooming of informal settlements such as Kilimanjaro, Havana, Babylon, Okahandja Park and others in Windhoek.
‘It increases the strain for jobs without necessarily improving the job conditions of those who are left in rural areas; impacts provision of public goods, education, utilities, housing, and infrastructure; and affects demographic and skills composition in both urban and rural areas,’ says the report.
The report prescribes an integrated, coherent approach in which policies appropriate for the youth in urban areas are closely connected with policies appropriate for the youth in rural areas.
‘This type of approach is essential if governments want to smooth the deleterious impacts of rapid migration while preparing the rural youth for a more rewarding mobility,’ it says.
In addition to changing demographics being the main factor behind high youth unemployment and underemployment rates, the report argues that youth employment challenges can also be related to labour market dynamics and opportunities, and highlights the need to give youth employment greater prominence in national development strategies.
While policymakers are hampered with a lack of information in tackling this challenge, the report cautions that a limited impact can be expected by simply reforming labour market institutions and implementing active labour market policies in countries with large informal sectors and a dominant rural population.
Instead, the report argues for more holistic approaches that ensure a coherent, co-ordinated and co-operative drive across different government institutions and agencies at all levels.
These include ‘expanding job and education alternatives in the rural areas – where most youth live; promoting and encouraging mobility; creating a conducive business environment; encouraging the private sector; improving the access and quality of skills formation; taking care of demographic issues that more directly affect the youth; and reducing child labour.’
In ensuring that the matter of youth employment is addressed in such a way that a sustainable solution to poverty eradication and sound development is reached, governments, including the Namibian Government, will have to find a way to ‘bridge the short- to long-term perspective, and to identify the appropriate policies to absorb the youth in the economy.’