How Africa is blissfully letting its young people down

By 2050, the population of Africa would have doubled to reach 2.5 billion. That means, out of every five children born in the world, two will be born in Africa. This is a staggering fact which has serious implications politically and economically.

One of the biggest questions is how the continent will manage the youth unemployment issue that is building up. To appreciate the enormity of the challenge, consider the fact that while the average age of populations in India and China are 29 and 37 respectively, in Africa it is only 19 and getting younger fast. That implies that there will be hordes of young people flooding the job market, and that will continue for many decades to come.

By 2050, Africa will have 360 million new entrants in the job market, all aged between 15 to 24 years.

If the situation remains as it is, Africa won’t have the capacity to absorb that number of people in its job market. Today, according to the World Bank, at least 60 percent of the youth are unemployed, 38 percent are employed in the informal sector, and only 2 percent are employed in the formal sector. This means very few of those who enter the working age today will ever get decent employment.

As a result, politicians are coming up with a number of patched-up responses to try to manage this situation. Unfortunately, most of them are misguided and doomed to fail.

The most popular is the call to get the youth to self-employ. In Tanzania, it is not uncommon to hear one leader after another urging young people to ‘seize opportunities’ and join self-employment. Even some top businessmen have joined this chorus.

While one has to admire the nerves of those who, from the comfort of their exalted offices, condescendingly tell college graduates to employ themselves, as if it is quite natural for a person that is perpetually hungry, generally immobile, and who squatters in a shared room with his colleagues to have some capital to start a business! One needs strong guts to do that without blinking one’s eyes.

However, while it is understandable for politicians to try to seek a degree of legitimacy, the question is – what if the youth actually take up their words and get self-employed? Will that address the youth unemployment problem?

Not at all.

A 2018 report by OECD observed that most businesses started by young people are usually for self-sustenance and very few of them, at most 5 percent, will ever graduate to employ five or more people. This approach will not create enough jobs to solve the problem.

Another popular solution is to get students to stay longer in school. Lack of decent jobs is associated with lack of proper education and job skills. While there may be some truth in that, the argument disregards one fact – that there are thousands of graduates who remain unemployed today.

Think of medical doctors in Tanzania, where there’s one doctor for every 20,000 patients in the country, a ratio which is much higher compared to the WHO recommended ratio of 1 to 1,000. Considering that ratio, one might get the impression that there is a huge vacuum for doctors in the market. Quite the opposite.

The fact is that there are many doctors who graduate from universities every year and thousands of them have not been absorbed into the workforce yet. While universities have ramped up their capacities over the years, many doctors are unemployed, underemployed, or leaving the medical profession altogether. A review by Global Health Action suggests that over 50 percent of the doctors trained in the past one decade in Tanzania will either leave the country or the profession by 2025.

Neither education nor training is the issue here. This evidence suggests that the market is oversaturated with doctors that it cannot absorb. In other words, those doctors are overqualified!

Today, Tanzania has an army of students who are destined to stay in school longer than any other generation of students before them, 12 million strong in primary schools alone. This is thanks to, firstly, the government’s decision to extend mandatory school years by four years and, secondly, the students’ wild geese chase of extra credentials in an attempt to delay the inevitable – unemployment.

Ultimately, competition for fewer and fewer jobs will stiffen and, as more and more overqualified individuals remain in the streets breeding malcontent and social unrest, we will go back to where we started – that youth unemployment still needs to be managed.

If done well it may be that those highly fertile African women will finally be the saviour of this race after all – leading to the repositioning of Africans in the world. But if not, this issue will continue to add to Africa’s miseries – poverty, insecurity, and social unrest.

History beckons.

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