World Bank (Washington, DC)
4 December 2008
press release
Johannesburg — The World Bank has called on African countries to adopt a range of actions to help deal with the youth employment challenge it is facing. According to the African Development Indicators (ADI) 2008/09 released today, a job-seeking African youth - typically a poor, out-of-school female living in a rural area - will likely face increasingly greater challenges in securing employment on the continent.
Arguing for a multi-sectoral approach, the report, titled "Youth and Employment in Africa - The Potential, the Problem, the Promise" - suggests several key areas to begin tackling the employment issue, including expanding job and education alternatives in the rural areas; encouraging and supporting entrepreneurship; improving the access and quality of skills formation; and addressing demographic issues.
Citing examples of interventions designed to integrate young people in the labor market, the study reinforces the point that comprehensive and integrated approaches tend to do better than fragmented ones. Given the challenges faced by the youth in labor markets, success in pursuing employment for young people will require long term, concerted actions, spanning a wide range of policies and programs.
Due to an increase in youth population, as well as the still very high fertility rate that characterizes the region, African countries will likely face an increase in job creation pressure for the youth over the coming decades. The definition of youth is a person between the ages of 15 to 24 years.
Young people make up 18 percent of the world's population today, or 1.2 billion in absolute terms. Of these, 87% live in developing countries. In Africa, roughly 200 million people fall within this age range, accounting for over 20 percent of the population, but this is expected to increase rapidly because 42 percent of the current population is below 15 years of age. While the youth population in Africa is not homogenous, the typical African youth, as given by medians, is an 18 year-old female who lives in a rural area, is literate but no longer attending school, and likely to be married with children.
"Finding productive employment for the 200 million Africans between the ages of 15 and 24 is surely one of the continent's greatest challenges," said Obiageli Ezekwesili, World Bank Vice President for the Africa Region. "The findings from this essay, especially with regards to the median African youth who is a poor female living in the rural area with little education and even less job opportunity has important implications for policy design," she highlighted.
In Africa, three in five of the total unemployed are youth (ILO 2006) and on average 72% of the youth population live with less than US$2 a day. Furthermore, about 70% of this youth population is concentrated in rural areas. According to the ADI essay, some stylized facts suggest that:
The youth employment challenge is one that confronts all African countries, regardless of their stage of socio-economic development, although the socio-economic context does contribute to the nature and extent of the problem. Apart from demographics and high reproduction rates, factors such as lack of work experience, difficulty accessing education and training, and lack of organization and voice to ensure their needs are addressed in policies and programs, also present barriers to youth entering the work force .
The report also highlights the valuable resource that young people are to their countries, and points out that helping them gain access to employment is a critical precondition for poverty eradication and sustainable development. "One of the challenges faced by policymakers in considering such measures thus far has been the lack of information on what their options are, what works in different situations, and what has been tried and failed. These are outlined in the paper, which also examines past youth employment interventions in the region, and discusses how successful they have been," said Shantayanan Devarajan, Chief Economist for the Bank's Africa Region.
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