Leveraging on Africa’s youth potential for development and prosperity

By Stephen Mokoro

The potential of the youth as the most important cog in the wheel that will drive Africa to prosperity cannot be gainsaid. With recognition of this fact, former Secretary General of the UN, Koffi Annan, once said that a society that cuts off from its youth severs its lifeline.

According to The African Development Bank (2010), Africa boasts of the fastest growing and most youthful population in the world. According to the United Nations World Youth Report (2010), the youth between 15 and 24 years constitute 20.2% of the continent’s total population. This is projected to increase significantly by 2015.

The youth bulge in Africa represents both a challenge and an opportunity for tremendous development. This high population of the youth in Africa is a potential asset that if tapped can lead to rapid social, political and economic development. 

The responsibility of harnessing this potential lies in governments, businesses, non-profits and most importantly on the individual youths. In this article, focus is on what these different players need to do to transform the youth from a threat to an opportunity, from job seekers to job creators and from despair to hope. 

There are a number of economic blue-prints that have been set with a view to advancing social-political and economic development in Africa. One of them is the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This blueprint has eight pillars. According to the UN (2013) the first goal is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. One of the causes of poverty is rampant unemployment among the youth and the major cause of hunger is overreliance on rain-fed agriculture.

To start with, thousands of hectares of arable land in Africa that lie in arid and semi-arid regions. These regions have low populations due to prevailing dry climatic conditions. The dry conditions limit the number of agricultural practices hence vast land remains unused. This vast land has the potential to provide employment to millions of youth and become a source food security. This can be achieved through a government led initiative to invest in agribusiness in the regions through irrigation.

Governments in each African country need to rehabilitate and set aside at least 100, 000 hectares of land in the arid and semi-arid regions for agribusiness. A number of boreholes, wells and water reservoirs should be constructed.

About 300,000 youth should be recruited and taken to form a company or a cooperative where they will practice farming using the modern best practices under the guidance of trained extension officers.

The government in conjunction with the other parties will organize training forums for the youth on subsistence farming while at the farms. Individuals trained in agribusiness should also volunteer and dedicate at least one day a week to share their skills with these youth. This will equip them with the necessary knowledge and information to initiate and manage properly their own agribusiness projects. It will also provide them with experience that will see them being employed in related fields. 

The recruited youth should remain in the company as shareholders for at least 3 or 5 years after which they will leave the camp to replicate the skills acquired in to other parts of the country. They should also share the proceeds from the sale of harvested produce.  By so doing, they will have been equipped with capital and skills to initiate their own agribusiness projects and the continent will become a breadbasket of the whole world.

 A new group with an equivalent number of youth should be recruited and taken to different parts of the countries every year. Within five years of doing this, each country will have created direct and indirect employment for millions of youth. The recruited youth should be drawn from all ethnic communities and gender balance should be observed. By doing this, we will have promoted ethnic and gender balance and promoted national cohesion.

Secondly, a policy that requires every player in business and non-profit sector should have an equivalent of at least 10% of its workforce as youth on either apprenticeship or on industrial attachment each year. If this policy is introduced, millions of youth will also be equipped with skills that can help them either secure employment or create employment for themselves and others. The dragon of extreme poverty and hunger will be slayed as envisaged in the first MDG. 

In addition to that, we, the youth, should know that we are the architects of our own lives. It is our responsibility to remain industrious and focused on improving our socio-economic wellbeing. We need to be innovative enough to come up with practical initiatives that will generate income and create employment opportunities. We should be willing to share our entrepreneurship skills with our fellow youth as a youth-to-youth initiative to empower ourselves.

 Being the majority in Africa, the youth need to use their influence on socio-political matters to provide the necessary environment for development. We should discourage situations that could lead to civil unrests since peace is necessary in the continent’s development. We should also take advantage of our numbers to elect the right leaders into governments to spearhead the development agenda towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

In conclusion, the youth bulge in Africa is an unutilized development asset that can be transformed into an economic powerhouse by maximizing their potential through effective collaboration between governments, non-profits, businesses, individuals and the youth themselves. Through the joint effort of these parties to promote agribusiness, the continent will say good bye to food insecurity and youth unemployment even as its population continues to rise. The agribusiness project initiative will also increase the total acreage of arable land in Africa and reduce pressure on land due to population bulge.