Youth Employment Challenge and Rural Transformation in Africa
The study investigated youth employment challenge and rural transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa. The study employed panel data analysis for 54 independent African countries from 2010 to 2017. The results suggest that youth employment (rural and urban) to
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Introduction Africa is said to be the world’s most youthful continent. Africa has the youngest and fastest growing population. The median age of the population in Africa is 18.3 years old. Each year, over 11 million young Africans are entering the labor market. Presently, the continent is facing an employment crisis of lack of jobs for the teeming youth. Most Africans of working age have no access to social protection schemes such as unemployment compensations and hence cannot afford not to work even if the returns to labor are very low. It is also argued that around 80% of African youth are in vulnerable employment (International Development Research Centre 2018). One of the most defining challenges of the twenty-first century will be to provide productive and decent jobs to more than 40 million additional people who enter the global labor market every year (Brussels Rural Development Briefings 2011). For Africa, this is a race against time. By 2035, the number of Africans joining the working-age population will exceed that of the rest of the world combined. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (2015) “Regional Economic Outlook: Sub-Saharan Africa,” the region will need to create about 18 million jobs per year until 2035 to absorb this growing labor force. The stakes are high. Africa’s growth rates have outperformed the global rate over the last decade, but job creation has not kept pace. Moreover, the gap between Africa’s youth and decent work has D. K. Ude (*) Department of Economics, Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike, Nigeria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. S. Osabuohien (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Agricultural and Rural Development in Africa, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41513-6_3
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not reduced. Nevertheless, youth employment has the potential to become Africa’s most powerful development engine. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO)’s “World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2015,” Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest labor force participation of all regions, estimated at 70.9%—compared with a global average of 63.5% in 2014. Unemployment stood at 7.7% in 2014, while the youth unemployment rate in the continent was 11.8% in 2014; only East Asia and South Asia had lower rates at 10.5 and 10.0%, respectively. Tactlessly, Africa’s population and labor force has continued to grow rapidly, but opportunities for decent employment are expanding at a slower pace (Adesugba and Mavrotas 2016; Osabuohien et al. 2019). Sub-Saharan Africa has the youngest and fastest growing population. The median age of the population in Africa is 18.3 years old and in Asia it is 30 years old (37.0 in China, 26.6 in India). Youth are two or three times more likely than adults to be unemployed. This is because the majority of youth are jobless or do not participate in labor markets (United Nations [UN] 2015). As a consequence, high youth unemployment rates seem to act as a disincentive for youth to participate in the labor force. The youth un
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