Tackling youth unemployment: Why Africa must reimagine the meaning of work
The starting point is how do you design the systems of the society around the young person,“
Before taking up her new role as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maryana Iskander spent years working on build solutions for South Africa’s unemployed youth. She speaks to Inspiring Open’s Betty Kankam-Boadu about youth unemployment in Africa.
Born in Egypt, Maryana spent most of her life in the United States where she schooled and trained as a lawyer.
As an immigrant, her parents taught her to study hard so she would be guaranteed many opportunities. While this was true for her, Iskander recognizes that the reality may be different for many people across the globe, especially in Africa.
She came to South Africa when she fell in love and made the unexpected jump from the United States to the southernmost tip of Africa.
In this new country she had come to love, she wondered “what are the biggest problems in this country that I’m new to?” She then settled on helping to address what is the biggest challenge facing South Africa and even the entire continent; youth unemployment.
This was how a decade long career path at Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, (a non-profit social enterprise building African focused solutions for the global problem of youth unemployment.) began.
The world’s youngest population is in Africa. Though this ordinarily should present good prospects in terms of increased productivity resulting in economic growth, the reverse is true. According to the World Bank, by the year 2050, half a billion of the continent’s population will be under the age of 25, stressing the urgency of employment opportunities for the continent’s young blood.
South Africa, where Iskander worked has the highest rate of youth unemployment in the world. Over the years she and her team worked tirelessly towards removing all the barriers that prevent the youth from reaching their economic potentials.
As Africa’s youth continue to grow, governments have not been able to meet this growth with the commensurate employment opportunities. Though education continues to be touted as the sure way to escape unemployment, the figures of unemployed graduates across the continent is crushing. Accra-based Center for Economic Transformation a policy think tank says 50% of university graduates don’t get jobs.
The question is, what is the quality of that education, and how does that translate into employment prospects?” Iskander asks, “How do we help our economies grow so that there’s opportunities for young people? How do we think differently about what does experience mean? Because if I can’t get a job, to get experience to get a job, I’m trapped in this impossible circle of I don’t have enough experience to get a job, but I can’t get a job to get the experience to get the job.”
She says there has to be a new way of thinking about “young people showing what they know, showing what they can do that doesn’t look like traditional qualifications or traditional experience.”
The efforts by governments, private sector and NGOs to get a lot more of Africa’s youth into the workforce feels like a drop of water in the oceans. Iskander says for these efforts to yield tangible results, the conversation about work as Africans should be different.
“It’s a very hard truth. And I’ve had to say it to a lot of politicians and ministers and CEOs,” she says. “And we have to accept the truth that in Africa, the number of jobs is much smaller than the number of people. And we’ve got to, like use that crisis to imagine something different and something new.”
She suggests one of the initial steps in supporting young people to find economic independence is seeing them as a solution instead of a problem and designing the systems of society around them. This, she says is key, because young people have “the least amount of information, typically, the least amount of power, the least amount of resources. Whereas governments, corporations, NGOs, development organisations, all of us have resources, power, money and we have to design ourselves around the young person.”
A lasting solution to this unemployment menace may seem implausible due to the gravity of the situation but Iskander says there is hope because “we’ve seen that you can create new jobs for young people in big numbers that are about the future of work, and about the digital economy and about what’s possible. The role of technology in your societies, has to give us hope that there is a different way of doing this and that again, young people can be seen as the leaders and the solution and the ones to take the society forward”
She adds, “the concept of openness, of sharing, and of learning, and making it a two-way way of being, holds promise as the only way to achieve progress.”
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