Youth throw rocks at Kenyan police outside the Mewa hospital in the
Majengo area of the Coastal city of Mombasa in February. Unemployment is
said to be one of the factors responsible for violence. PHOTO | FILE
AFP
By TREVOR ANALO
In Summary
- The youth, frustrated with ageing leaders clinging to power, corruption among government officials and corporations and growing inequality, have taken to the streets to voice their anger.
- While Africa’s youthful population has been hyped as a “dividend” in the midst of an economic boom, it may be hard to manage millions of poor, unemployed and uneducated young people trooping into overcrowded cities in the hope of a better life.
- Kenya and the rest of the region are not ready to take advantage of the benefits of a big youthful population because the majority of young people are not educated and are mostly engaged in the informal economy
Youth-led protests have continued to spread
across the world since the Arab Spring in 2011. And taking inspiration
from the Occupy Movement in the US, young people frustrated with the
ever increasing social inequality, unemployment and economic policies of
their governments, have taken their anger to the streets from New York
to Mexico City, London to Berlin, New Delhi to Tokyo.
These anti-government protests have not spared
socialist regimes like Venezuela, whose high levels of violence,
inflation, and chronic shortages of basic goods saw thousands protest
for months early this year.
Authoritarian regimes like Vladimir Putin’s Russia
have not escaped this wave of discontent. Protests against President
Putin drew thousands to an anti-war rally in September. Young people
took to the streets to voice their disapproval of Russia’s involvement
in the Ukrainian crisis.
In Hong Kong, the Occupy Central democracy
protests are still going on four months since they started in September.
Africa too, has had its own Occupy movements in Nairobi, Johannesburg,
Luanda, Lagos and Accra.
The youth, frustrated with ageing leaders clinging
to power, corruption among government officials and corporations and
growing inequality, have taken to the streets to voice their anger.
Unhappy and unemployed
Recent data from the UN reveals why young people
all over the world are angry. Today, the youth make up 17 per cent of
the world’s 7.2 billion people — about 1.2 billion are aged between 15
and 24 — and 87 per cent of them live in developing countries,
particularly in Africa and Asia.
Globally, the youth make up 40 per cent of the
world’s unemployed and according to the World Economic Forum (WEF), the
risk of being unemployed for a young person today is three times higher
than that of an adult. According to WEF, 357 million youth were not in
education, employment, or training in 2010, and the number is
increasing. Of these, 341 million are in developing countries. And 78
million live in Africa.
While Africa’s youthful population has been hyped
as a “dividend” in the midst of an economic boom, it may be hard to
manage millions of poor, unemployed and uneducated young people trooping
into overcrowded cities in the hope of a better life.
In a world where the demographic shift has tilted
in favour of a youth increasingly impatient with the “old ways” of doing
things, these waves of protests are likely to continue.
The East African region has one of the youngest
populations in the world and it exemplifies the opportunities and
challenges of demographic and economic growth.
While the region seems to be doing well
economically, registering an average growth of six per cent this year,
alongside the discovery of massive hydrocarbon resources in Rwanda,
Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, the benefits of this newfound prosperity may
not trickle down fast enough to the average East African who is between
15 and 24 years.
At 78 per cent, Uganda has the world’s largest
percentage of young people under 30, according to the 2012 State of
Uganda population report by the UN Population Fund. And according to the
African Development Bank, unemployment in this cohort could easily be
around 83 per cent.
Youth unemployment in Tanzania is low on average
and the country may not be facing the same unemployment “time bomb” as
the rest of East Africa. In Tanzania, young people below 24 are the
majority, accounting for 64 per cent of the entire population, according
to the country’s 2012 census. While only 8.8 per cent are unemployed,
youth in Tanzania hold low wage jobs in the agricultural and informal
sectors of the economy.
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