Why Kenya needs educated youth and low fertility rate

Jobseekers at Bandari College in Mombasa after Kenya Ports Authority advertised vacancies. PHOTO | FILE 

By MIKE ELDON, mike.eldon@depotkenya.org

In Summary

• Training and right family size will lift standards of living as well as global competitiveness.

Who doesn’t know about Africa’s youth bulge? And who isn’t filled with concern over whether it will be anywhere near possible to create enough jobs for our young people, never mind empowering them with the skills and attitudes to handle the jobs that will be available?

Just as we worry about those Arab countries where the sense of hopelessness among young people provoked the Arab Spring that has turned out to be such a disappointing false dawn.

Thus the doomsday scenario. But in among the conventional pessimism there’s a less common countervailing one, which assumes that having a disproportionately high number of working age men and women in one’s population is an asset, or at least a potential one.

Those who assume it is possible to create an environment where young people are skilled enough to take advantage of job opportunities and that such opportunities can be created describe the outcome as the “demographic dividend”.

Development economists are hard at work all over the world, including here in Kenya, figuring out what it will take to deliver such a dividend.

I like this positive focus, this antithesis to the fatalistic acceptance that we are condemned to a future where large numbers of idle unemployed youth will be increasingly available to sublimate their unutilised energy into committing crime or turning to extremist violence or to some other dysfunctional behaviour.

The components that must come together for such an optimistic scenario to be actualised are not surprising.

On the supply side, young people must benefit from an education that relates to the emerging needs of the job market and of entrepreneurial opportunity.

And on the demand side the private sector must be motivated to create jobs. Also, responsible government must be dedicated to building an enabling environment within which this can happen.

So far so good — however ambitious. The extra components needed to take us from the necessary to the sufficient are good health and appropriate family planning.

It is when we get to this that the demographers come into play, plotting trends in population numbers by age groups, based on such factors as fertility and mortality rates.

If the birth rate is too low, the working age population of a country will, through the taxes they pay, be called upon to support an increasing proportion of elderly people — such as we see in Europe and elsewhere.

It is most prominently on display in China, whose one-child-per-family policy some say will see it “get old before it gets rich” (in contrast to India, whose higher birth rate should enable it to “get rich before it gets old”).

The consequences of having too high a proportion of dependents beyond working age is exacerbated by having too many who have not yet reached that stage, young ones who also do not create wealth or pay taxes and who must be educated.

Demographers cite examples of countries that have got the balance right, with cultures and policies that have brought the population to a healthy and sustainable level of fertility.