Baffour Ankomah
Consulting Editor
Africa runs the great risk of seeing something worse than the Arab Spring if countries do not take seriously the massive youth unemployment problem on the continent and prevent it from developing into a conflagration.
Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the 27th Board of Governors Meeting of the Harare-headquartered African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) in the Cameroonian capital, Yaounde, last Wednesday, Erastus J. O. Mwencha, the Kenyan who chairs the ACBF Executive Board, graphically brought home the danger that the huge youth unemployment problem on the continent poses to national security when he equated the peril to something far worse than the Arab Spring that overthrew governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya in 2011, and caused the ongoing disastrous civil war in Syria.
Thankfully, “most governments in Africa,” Wencha said, “have started to acknowledge that there is a problem of youth unemployment and that the stability of the continent is going to depend largely on how we respond to this pressure. You saw what happened during the Arab Spring, when it starts in Africa, it will look like a tea party because the young people here cannot continue to sit and watch forever.
“So governments that are alert, I am sure, will try to respond, and ours [at ACBF] is not to prescribe solutions or give ultimatums and deadlines for the implementation of policies to fight youth unemployment. Yes, we would like to see a clear roadmap with dates, but this pressure is bottom up and what we need is not to respond with a panic button but to respond in a systematic and quiet manner. And that is where we [ACBF] are coming from.”
Asked how ACBF could help diffuse the youth unemployment timebomb, the Kenyan said: “One of the challenges facing Africa is the mismatch between what our tertiary education is offering and where Africa wants to go. As economic transformation is a major component of the AU Agenda 2063, we have talked about transformation for some time, but we must now be implementing it to change our economies from being very much dependent on primary products to value addition.
“If you look at Agenda 2063, one of the critical challenges that stand in our way of achieving the set goals is the lack of critical skills. And that is where ACBF comes in. No one country will be able to produce all the skills it needs. In fact not one country in the world has been able to solve the skills problem. That is why even Canada, an OECD country, has a policy to give incentives to skilled immigrants to gain citizenship because they know that they cannot solve the skills problem alone.
“For Africa, we can close the skills gap if we coordinate our efforts. Some schools in Africa can specialise in aeronautical engineering, others in climate science, and others more in engineering, science and technology, and ACBF will be at hand to coordinate those skills to fill the gaps on the continent.”
Vexing question
Speaking at the same meeting, Prof Emmanuel Nnadozie, the ACBF Executive Secretary, said in his welcome address that “evidence today highlights the unstable economic conditions besetting the youth in Africa. A 2016 African Development Bank (AfDB) publication on ‘Jobs for Youth in Africa’ states that, of Africa’s nearly 420 million youth aged 15-35, one-third are unemployed and discouraged, while another one-third are employed vulnerably, largely due to skills mismatch with labour market requirements. This is indeed a paradox as the continent is currently grappling with serious shortages of key technical skills.
“Our study in 2016 on Capacity Requirements for the Implementation of the First 10 Years of the AU Agenda 2063 indicated that Africa had about 55,000 engineers of an estimated 4.3 million needed. Similarly, the continent only had about 80,000 agricultural scientists while needing an estimated 150,000 agriculturalists. What these figures show is that while Africa is investing in education, whether the scope and quality is sufficient to deal with the problem, remains a vexing question.”
For some time now, ACBF has been beating the drum of how the frightening youth unemployment problem on the continent has become a bomb ready to explode, and the Foundation has been urging African countries and leaders to provide a visionary and transformative leadership to prevent the bomb from exploding.
The topic once again dominated the 27th Board of Governors Meeting in Yaounde, with all the key speakers hacking back to it. To be fair, the theme of the two-day meeting was “Youth Employment in Africa: Focus on Developing the Critical Skills”.
Contributing to the debate, Alamine Ousmane Mey, Cameroon’s Minister for Economic Planning and Regional Development, said the issue of youth employment in Africa remained a vital challenge for the continent, especially if Africa was to achieve the goals set in Agenda 2063 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals of 2030.
“Youths are an asset, not a liability,” Mey said. “Youths are an opportunity, not a threat. Youths are a source of innovation and transformative power. Youths are a demographic dividend for our continent. All these we have to take into consideration in transforming our economies for the betterment of the living conditions of our population.”
More questions than answers
Joining the discussion, Goodall Gondwe, Malawi’s Minister of Finance and the immediate past Chair of the ACBF’s highest governing body, the Board of Governors, pointed to the manner of the ACBF contribution to the youth unemployment discourse.
In a speech read on his behalf because he was unable to attend this year’s meeting, Gondwe reminded the participants of a significant study conducted by ACBF in 2016, entitled African Critical Technical Skills: Key Capacity Dimensions Needed for the First 10 Years of Agenda 2063.
“This study draws our attention to the importance of the skills deficit currently being faced in Africa,” Gondwe explained. “The Decade for Youth Development (2009–2018) is coming to an end, with many African countries experiencing some high economic growth rates which unfortunately have not translated into tangible job opportunities for our youth. Youth unemployment therefore remains a major developmental challenge for many of our countries.
“In this regard, despite concerted efforts, it appears we are yet to record meaningful achievements that could lead us to celebrate the ‘Decade for Youth Development’. Time is now of the essence. We must act purposefully to ensure the successful implementation of developmental programmes that will create diverse and accessible employment opportunities for the youth.”
According to him, the key questions left are: “Why are we not achieving the progress we had anticipated? Are we lacking effective policy options? Is it due to an inadequate skill base? Is there a lack of demand for labour, or is it labour rigidity?”
To move forward, Gondwe said Africa must have conceptual clarity on where the challenges lie so it could design appropriate solutions with specificity to its different contexts.
He, therefore, asked the meeting (which brought together stakeholders from government, the private sector, youth organisations, development partners and civil society) to carefully reflect on country specific challenges and to explore opportunities to share experiences across countries and regions.
Calling on African countries to reflect on the critical technical skills needed for the successful implementation of the flagship projects under the First 10-Year Plan of Agenda 2063, Gondwe said he had a “few suggestions” by way of the following questions:
“What are the specific capacities and critical technical skills required to enhance youth employment opportunities?” he asked. “How can African countries and the various stakeholders tap into the expertise of universities, think tanks, and the private sector to build the required technical skills? What are the existing initiatives in our respective countries aimed at building the required critical skills? What can we learn from each other when it comes to effectively strengthening the capacities to better support skills development?”
It was obvious that there were more questions than answers, a situation that Prof Nnadozie tried to diffuse by saying: “On our part, we believe we have made our contributions [as ACBF] and we will continue to make even more contributions.”
Looking back at the performance of ACBF in 2017, the Executive Secretary said the Foundation achieved significant results across Africa. For instance, ACBF provided support in policy research and analysis that led to concrete achievements in service delivery in Rwanda, preventing election violence in Ghana, provided evidence-based economic policy-making in Kenya, and helped domestic revenue mobilisation in Ethiopia.
Other achievements included building public sector management capacity to improve public service delivery in West Africa; strengthening financial systems through capacity building in banking and finance in Southern and West Africa; and promoting critical skills in science and technology in Burkina Faso, Nigeria and Tanzania that supported the sub-regions.
“Our achievements also include the establishment of the flagship African Think Tank Summit for peer-learning and exchange of innovative solutions to support Africa’s development agenda,” Prof Nnadozie added.
He expressed sincere gratitude to ACBF’s 45 member states and its other partners, in particular the World Bank, the African Development Bank Group, UNDP, Afreximbank and BADEA for their tremendous support in making it possible for ACBF to deliver for Africa.
The meeting elected Ghana to chair the ACBF Board of Governors, the Foundation’s highest governing body, with immediate effect.
