Reflections for Africa Youth Month.
A photo taken from the Sea-Watch NGO’s Moonbird plane shows hundreds of migrants inside a rubber dinghy in the Mediterranean. Photograph: Sea-Watch
We are living is such extraordinary times…
Not only are we still trying to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, but only last month, at least 140 people drowned after a vessel carrying around 200 migrants sank off the Senegalese coast, the deadliest shipwreck recorded in 2020.
According to multiple media sources, the Senegalese and Spanish navies, and fishermen who were nearby, rescued 59 people and retrieved the remains of 20 others.
Throughout November, The African Union is celebrating Africa youth Month, an initiative which will be commemorated through series of thematic activities aimed at creating direct opportunities for one million young Africans in the areas of education, employment, entrepreneurship and engagement (4Es).
The African continent now accounts for over 75% of Africa’s 1.2 billion inhabitants under the age of 35, and 453 million Africans are aged 15-35, it goes without saying that the development outcomes of Africa’s young people will have a significant and lasting effect on the continents future.
The vast movement of young people in recent times is from outside Europe and the driving force is not politics or wars but this vast demographic transformation.
An exponentially expanding population of youth can turn into a problem or a demographic dividend, defined by UN experts as the economic growth that ensues when there are more working-age people (15 to 64) than the non-working people (14 and younger, and 65 and older).
As many young Africans are increasingly becoming frustrated by the lack of opportunities, they are also risking their lives on perilous journeys in search of a better life in Europe and many end up on deadly shipwrecks such as the one earlier mentioned.
So what can be done?
The challenge with certainty is how to create jobs and most importantly how to make agriculture more attractive to youth, promote technology, and make the school curricula relevant to the needs of our job markets.
John Page, a Nonresident Senior Fellow on Global Economy and Development at Brookings Institutions Africa Growth Initiative in his report titled “How industries without smokestacks can address Africa’s youth unemployment crisis” writes:
“In Africa, three-quarters of new entrants to the labor market will work in self-employment or in microenterprises. Some 20 percent will work for wages in the service sector, and only about 4 to 5 percent will find a wage-paying job in industry. If these trends continue, only about 100 million of the 450 million Africans expected to reach working age over the next two decades can hope to find decent work. The growing population of more educated and urbanized youth encountering few jobs is a crisis in the making.”
The last statement stands true. Because indeed there is a growing population of more educated youth. However is our school curricula relevant to the needs of Africa’s job markets? Do we understand our markets? And is Education alone enough?
Many years ago, before making my own less perilous trip to Europe with the intent of hunting on new shores for the security and prosperity my country could not provide me, I felt I had been educated but had no clarity on whether I was equipped enough to be of service to myself or to my country.
With certainty, education is needed for more than earning money—it should also have the ability to enable an independent youth to thrive and most of all to secure work they see as dignified and fulfilling.
Maybe this could explain my own reluctance and maybe the reluctance of many others like me to return to an environment which never really showed us the positive outcomes of years of education or how prepared we should be for our job markets.
These are some of the issues at the heart of the conversations we have at The Better Futures Foundation.
As the African Youth Month comes to an end in a few weeks’ time, we would like to celebrate young Africans who are contributing daily to Africa’s progress, laying the foundation for others and resisting the draw of Europe.
There is hope.
