Motivation:The Sustainable Development Goals target decent work for all, including youth, by 2030. In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), however, a "youth employment crisis" is now central to public and policy discourse. Consequently, the idea of "investing in youth" grows in importance, leading to a proliferation of interventions targeted to and specific to youth. Purpose: This article interrogates the framing of the problem as a "youth employment" crisis. Approach and Methods: The article brings together evidence from a range of sources and disciplines, indicates where the evidence supports the current policy orthodoxy and where it does not, and maps out an alternative framing. Five pillars of the dominant narrative about youth employment are identified: demography, violence and civil unrest, training and skills, rural economy and urban economy. Three critical dimensions of Africa's broader employment crisis are highlighted: economic risk, stability and protection. Findings:The dominant narrative about Africa's youth employment crisis foregrounds young people themselves, and strongly suggests that the crisis is all (and often only) about them. Little about the employment crisis, however, is youth-specific. The "it's all about the youth" framing ignores that young people are caught up in a broader "missing jobs crisis" that reflects fundamental structural constraints within African economies. In other words, the problem is with the economy, not the young people. Policy implications: The emphasis on youth-specific targeting and youthspecific interventions is largely misplaced. Instead of initiatives that only or specifically target youth, priority should be given to broader structural issues which have the potential to deliver better and larger results, for both young people and others. Reframing the problem from a youth employment crisis to a missing jobs crisis is a necessary first step. We provide a counter-narrative to support this shift.
a a institute for development Studies, university of Sussex, brighton, uK; b centre for Human Rights and Policy Studies, nairobi, Kenya ABSTRACT Networked, transnational forms of violence pose a significant threat to peace and security in a number of sub-Saharan African countries. In recent years, Kenya has witnessed an expanding number of attacks involving Al-Shabaab -the Somali-based militant organisation. Kenya's state responses to these attacks derive from a social construction of Somalis as a threatening presence, justifying a raft of hard security measures. However, this targeting has been counter-productive by driving a deeper wedge between Somalis, other Muslims and the state, and levels of Al-Shabaab violence have remained high. Seen from the social and political margins that Kenya's Somali and Muslim populations occupy, recent violence continues a long-standing dynamic of insecurity in which the state itself is a central actor. Internal stress relating to state-led planning of social order built on unequal citizenships and the use of violence, enmesh with the external threat of Al-Shabaab, producing the conditions for insurgency and violence to spread. Reducing violence and building peace require greater understanding of how violence and security are seen and experienced at the margins.
This article draws on qualitative case study research in Murewa, a rural district town in Zimbabwe, to extend the use of the concept of ‘social navigation’ from conflict-affected settings to repressive regime contexts. Through the concept of ‘the everyday’, it analyses how youth experience political violence and repression, and the tactics they use to access paid work and secure self-employment. The findings show that youth accept existing forms of political violence and repression as normal, and that the historical construction of politicized youth matters for how they understand their room for manoeuvre within it. Since partisan actors control many of the economic opportunities, social navigation is about the need to assess the political affiliation of actors that offer any economic opportunity, and the potential implications of being associated with a particular ‘side’ in the political landscape. Contrary to dominant discourses that portray youth as violent, this study shows that many will avoid relationships through which they risk being mobilized into violence.
In 2011, Myanmar started its political transition after decades of military rule. In Kachin State this coincided with the breaking of a 17‐year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Organization/Army (KIO/A) and the state army, the Tatmadaw. For youth living in Kachin State, this meant that opportunities for civic and political participation opened up while at the same time their context remained volatile and uncertain. Using citizenship theory and the concept of the ‘everyday’, this article analyses how youth in Kachin State connect the challenges they experience to their sense of citizenship, and how this informs everyday forms of youth action as well as youth participation in policy processes. The article argues that young people act out of moral and political reasons to ‘build Kachin’, in response to deeply historically rooted experiences of discrimination and state repression. While the agency of young people living in conflict settings is often believed to be limited to tactical agency for individual and immediate survival, an analysis of youth's experiences of citizenship shows that they also act strategically to advance the interests of their society.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.