Youth Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa

This report begins by laying out the dynamics of the youth employment challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa
The demographic transition, the role of mineral exports, the largely untapped reservoir of opportunities in farming, and the aspirations of youth and policy makers, which focus on the wage employment sector at the expense of more immediate opportunities in family farming and household enterprises.

The report then examines obstacles faced by households and firms in meeting the youth employment challenge. It focuses primarily on productivity because it is the key to higher earnings as well as to more stable, less vulnerable, livelihoods. The report identifies specific areas where government intervention can reduce obstacles to productivity growth.

Opportunities and Challenges for Youth Employment in Africa

This chapter assesses the specific challenges and opportunities related to youth employment on farms, in nonfarm household enterprises, and in modern wage jobs. It examines these issues and possible interventions in light of two types of binding constraints to higher productivity for young people in those sectors: constraints related to human capital and constraints related to the business environment.

Youth: A Time of Transitions Because adolescence is a critical period of transition and development, including for socio-emotional skills, economic or health shocks occurring during that time can have long-lasting consequences. Many types of market or government failures could potentially constrain these transitions. Examples include labor market rigidities that lengthen the school-to-work transition, inadequate information on the risks of certain choices, and lack of access to finance for pursuing higher education or starting a business.
The chapter examines ways to enable youth to manage these transitions better—in particular, to develop pathways to higher productivity and higher-earning jobs.

Skills for Productive Employment

Skills strongly influence where people work and how much they earn. In Africa, rapid increases in school participation and educational attainment have often come at the cost of quality, contributing to a serious shortfall in the skills for productive employment. This chapter explores ways to increase the quality of schooling to ensure that it delivers actual learning and skills. Other important priorities reviewed are means to identify and directly build the social-emotional and behavioral skills that contribute to productivity, including the skills demanded by employers.

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