Africa’s youth unemployment crisis: Are digital jobs the answer?

Africa boasts the youngest population in the world, with 200 million people aged between 15 and 24. However, economic growth on the continent has not generated enough employment opportunities to absorb the large number of school leavers entering the workforce each year.

At a time when 60% of Africa’s unemployed are youth, and 72% of all youth live on less than US$2 a day, a new briefing from the Institute of Development Studies explores whether digital jobs are the answer to Africa’s youth unemployment challenges.

While many see information technology as contributing to African growth and as a major future employment opportunity for young people, the report stresses that the real long-term benefits of digital jobs are not in the low-skilled delivery of digital products or services but in digital design, creation, and engineering.

The briefing makes the following recommendations:

Broaden education to develop African digital creators and makers, not digital deliverers.

—Build digital on the continent’s existing capabilities and resources, e.g. agriculture and minerals.

Strengthen digital entrepreneurship—young businesses, especially fast-growing ones, are a prime source of new jobs.

—African government to lead the way in the basic research and science investments that will provide the platform for the digital developments of the future.

Yoonyoung Cho has written about entrepreneurship in developing countries for IZA World of Labor. She recommends a comprehensive approach to designing entrepreneurship programs that combines skills training and access to finance—found to be more effective when offered together than alone. Programs should be designed for the specific needs of each target group (e.g. out-of-school youth, self-employed women). Private sector and social enterprise involvement also appears to improve the impact of program delivery.

Policymakers should also be concerned with whether women can access better jobs and take advantage of new labor market opportunities that arise as a country grows, notes Sher Verick in his IZA World of Labor article. He proposes that policies “consider both supply- and demand-side dimensions, including access to better education and training programs and access to childcare, as well as other supportive institutions and legal measures to ease the burden of domestic duties, enhance women’s safety, and encourage private sector development in industries and regions that can increase job opportunities for women.”

Related articles:

Entrepreneurship for the poor in developing countries, by Yoonyoung Cho

Female labor force participation in developing countries, by Sher Verick

Who owns the robots rules the world, by Richard B. Freeman