It is estimated that 80 per cent of East Africa’s population is below the age of 35. Moreover, with 200 million people aged between 15 and 24, Africa is the youngest continent in the world. From a workforce and labour supply perspective, this is the perfect demographic structure for prosperity.
But Africa’s demographic is not a dividend, at least not for now or the foreseeable future, and especially under a business as usual scenario. According to the World Bank, Africa’s youth account for 60 per cent of all of Africa’s jobless.
A study conducted by the East Africa Institute of Aga Khan University revealed that one in two young people in East Africa with university education were unemployed. The study also revealed that unemployment was 86 per cent among youth aged between 18 and 26. Unemployment among rural female youth was 68 per cent.
According to a Brookings Institution report, more than 70 per cent of youth in some of Africa’s fastest-growing economies such as Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ghana and Tanzania work in the informal sector, are self-employed or contribute to family labour. Africa’s growth, the so-called Africa Rising, has failed to create decent, well-paying jobs for the youth.
A report by the International Labor Organisation (ILO) revealed that 82 per cent of Africa’s workers were working poor, compared to the global average of 39 per cent. This has led some experts to advance the argument that Africa’s youth employment might be more about quality of work than the absence of jobs.
In a video clip that has been widely viewed across the continent, Oxfam CEO Winnie Byanyima speaks to the heart of Africa’s employment crisis. She recounts a conversation with a Nairobi taxi driver who shares a single room with two other taxi drivers. The taxi drivers sleep in shifts. The point she makes in this story is that the quality of the jobs matter. Our fellow citizens work so hard but don’t take home decent pay.
Last week I moderated a panel at a workshop on ‘Boosting Decent Employment for Africa’s Youth’. While one panelist argued that lack of skills was a barrier to decent employment, another disagreed and argued that the large numbers of unemployed university graduates suggested that the problem lay elsewhere. In his view, African governments were not doing enough to stimulate employment creation.
According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, formal sector jobs grew from 2.03 million workers to 2.68 million between 2009 and 2016. In the same period informal sector workers grew from 8.68 million workers to 13.3 million workers. About 83 per cent of Kenya’s 15.9 million workforce is in the informal sector, where jobs are ephemeral, low paying and productivity is low.
Let’s face it, while Africa’s growth is impressive, it has produced spectacularly low numbers of decent jobs. The conversation about unemployment among Africa’s youth must question the structure of Africa’s economy and the quality of the growth miracle attributed to the so-called Africa Rising.
Alex O. Awiti is the Vice Provost and director of the East Africa Institute of Aga Khan University