Africa - Youth employment in Sub-Saharan Africa

TLDR: In this article, the authors identify specific areas where government intervention can reduce those obstacles to productivity for households and firms, leading to brighter employment prospects for youth, their parents, and their own children.

Abstract: This report begins by laying out the dynamics of the youth employment challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa today: the demographic transition, which created the youth bulge that is entering African labor markets and can, in the longer term, stimulate economic growth and development; the role of mineral exports, which have shaped the structure of recent economic growth but failed to sufficiently increase the number of wage jobs most desired by youth, and the prospects for reversing this trend in the future; the largely untapped reservoir of opportunities in farming, at a time of high global prices for agricultural commodities and rising local and regional demand for food; the massive expansion in access to education, which is adding many years of schooling, but much less learning, during childhood and youth; the aspirations of youth and policy makers, which focus on the wage employment sector at the expense of more immediate opportunities in family farming and household enterprises; and recognizing that it is the private sector that creates jobs, the report examines obstacles faced by households and firms in meeting the youth employment challenge. It focuses primarily on productivity, in agriculture, in nonfarm household enterprises (HEs), and in the modern wage sector, because productivity is the key to higher earnings as well as to more stable, less vulnerable, livelihoods. To respond to the policy makers' dilemma, the report identifies specific areas where government intervention can reduce those obstacles to productivity for households and firms, leading to brighter employment prospects for youth, their parents, and their own children.