- YOUTH
It must be a unique institution that is driven by the singular purpose of wage generation for the youth. It must have the strong support of governments, have the full authority, resources as well as the strategic and executional capabilities to carry out its mandate. It must be performance driven. It must be Africa-focused. Governments must bite the bullet and dissolve existing non-performing youth related state institutions for the sake of sanity and effective resource re-allocation. A quick re-orientation of such institutions is not an alternative due to long-standing and entrenched miscultures of non-performance, lack of accountability and transparency. Private institutions and NGOs that target the youth must be compelled to contractually commit to put wages in the pockets of a quantifiable number of young people within specific time periods. Politicians must simply keep off the youth for nefarious purposes such as instigating self-serving civil unrest and election malpractices.
When all is said and done, citizens must make it very painful for the leadership of respective African governments to have any single youth out of work because of the tired excuse of ‘there are no jobs.’ Citizens must break out of this conditioning and agitate for real solutions. The prevailing charitable attitude of expecting gratitude from the few youth who are lucky enough to secure low quality jobs must simply stop. Dignity must be restored. The youth numbers are huge, but they are finite and predictable. It is therefore a manageable problem. It is the right of each and everyone of these individuals to earn a living. It is the responsibility of those in leadership positions to cut the Gordian knot and bequeath well-being and prosperity to current and future generations of young people. That this has not been done already, is really just lazy, grossly irresponsible and deserving of the Greek kind of mortal punishment.
Author Sheida Mutuku
Chief Executive Officer
Woodside Africa Group LLC
Decade after decade, numerous efforts have been applied towards addressing the youth unemployment problem that seems to be a perennial issue across Africa. There has been little to show for it. Consequently, millions of young people – through no fault of their own – are condemned to an extremely low quality of life. Understandably, there is a rising disenfranchisement that is palpable and a real threat to the continent’s already fragile stability.
It only takes a cursory glance to note that the divine blessing of the vast youth population across Africa has been submerged by a colossal curse thrown by players with political and commercial interests. The youth platform is constantly misused and abused to gain political electoral advantages, to drive top and bottom line objectives, and to secure grants and/or donations. For but a handful of institutions, the well-being and prosperity of the young people never ever feature genuinely as central issues.
Incidentally, a keen analysis of the disposition of the majority of players within the youth space reveals a laissez-faire attitude of ‘throw to the wall and see what sticks.’ For such a grave issue that requires one to totally apply themselves to the situation, no sense of urgency is demonstrated towards strategy formulation and implementation of solutions that are truly sustainable. So far, recycled measures applied are tactical, stop-gap in nature, ad-hoc and experimental; with the hope and prayer that they will address the stubborn problem to some degree.
In all of this, the biggest setback so far has been the generalised and fuzzy approach in searching for answers to the youth unemployment problem. The question has always been broadly framed as, ‘How do we solve the problem of youth unemployment?’ How do we get the darts on the board? The commensurate responses are usually all over the board, so to speak. Some of these include setting up commissions, task forces, funds, benchmarking, training and more training, mentorship, policy frameworks….just a flurry of empty calorie activities. It would help to move the needle significantly by asking the right question that is simple, unambiguous and tightly framed such as, ‘How do we put money in the pockets of each and every youth?’ In other words, how do we hit the bull’s eye? A deliberate, systematic, no nonsense approach is required to address this question.
Indeed, the Gordian knot of youth unemployment can be cut by mapping each youth to a job. The intricate solutions must be extremely detailed and deeply thought through – year on year. In order to address current and future situations, this outlook demands a dual strategy that encompasses both short and long term perspectives. Statistics are readily available on youth growth rates stretching as far ahead as 50, 100, 150 years from now.
- What is the desired average youth wage?
- How many youth will need this wage each year?
- In each particular year, where will the wages come from? SMEs? MNCs? NGOs? Governments? Self-employment? Diaspora?
- What are the specific numbers from each of these sources? If one million jobs are anticipated, how many will each specific organisation contribute? Must drill down to that level.
- What kind of support should we give each of these organisations? What distress signals should we look out for? What contracts must be in place?
- What is the shortfall? How do we address this shortfall? Social security protection?
- Where will the resources come from?
- What specific measures should we start installing today to generate a specific number of wages in 10,20,30,100 years from now?
- What kind of research is needed to address the issue of wage generation now? In the future?
This kind of approach requires strong, conscientious leadership that will shepherd diverse players and harness concrete solutions from collaborative efforts. This is strategy. This is practical and methodological. This is being on top of the game. And it really is not nuclear science. Of critical importance is the formation structure of the ideal institution that must be non-parastatal and non-NGO.
