Youth in Africa: Between Marginalization and Demographic Dividend

Introduction[1]

Africa’s policy debate has been enlivened in recent years by the prospect of a substantial demographic dividend emanating from the strategic deployment of its young people. Although youth disaffection with the status quo currently runs deep, the young people’s relative marginalization and lack of influence are providing a platform for a higher degree of youthful solidarity and political activism today than in the past. Many watchers of the continent wonder, however, whether we are witnessing the beginning of a broad youth insurgence or whether youth anger will simply dissipate with time. This note looks at how African countries are responding to the youth demands, and the plausibility of reaping the demographic dividend.

Youthful Ambiguity

The African Youth Charter, launched by the African Union in 2006, set the youth age bracket at between 15-35 years, while the UN, for statistical purposes, defined the “youth” as those between 15-24 years. Typically, the youth bracket not only includes minors but also household heads, seasoned professionals, and/or budding politicians. Hence, while the “youth” moniker suggests a well-defined and homogeneous group within the broader population, it has proven too fuzzy a concept for the mobilization of young people or the design and targeting of public interventions.

While the bulk of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is composed of children and adolescents (median age (i.e. 50% of the population) below 16 years for some countries), the middle-income countries of north Africa (median age about 30 for Tunisia) have a larger number of youths already employed or transcending into family life, and hence more politically alert and impactful. This could explain to some extent why the Arab Spring happened in north Africa and not in SSA, where poverty is more acute, but where also the youth are younger, on average, and hence less politically agile i.e. there might not be enough “youth,” in the right age bracket, to sustain a rebellion.

Youth Violence

Youth violence, though closely associated with today’s young people, is not new in Africa. Sharp increases in rural-urban migration in the 1960s, as colonial-era restrictions to urban residence were revoked, had led to spikes in petty crimes and urban thuggery in the face of high unemployment, lack of housing, and poor access to social services. Still, in retrospect, youth violence was more of a social irritant at the time than the threat to social and political stability that it is today.

Poverty and inequality are the underlying causes and propagators of youth violence. However, while addressing household and communal poverty has potential to reduce societal stresses, including youth violence, resources are scant and the public sector’s reach in terms of social service delivery is quite limited. Moreover, there are a number of aggravating factors that require attention: unplanned urbanization and the ghettoization of cities; insecurity and victimisation related to small-arms proliferation, and illicit drug activities; internecine conflicts among the youth, including gender-based violence; and the de facto pauperization of the state owing to feeble finances, corruption and cronyism.

In many African countries, electoral cycles have tended to fan youth violence as a matter of course, with politicians using young people as their foot soldiers during elections, but abandoning them when the job is done. This breeds a level of cynicism among the youth that could have (and indeed has had) debilitating consequences.

Youth and Politics: #Not Too Young to Run

Governments have sought to contain youth disaffection by appealing to young people’s nationalism and love of country and by formulating new national youth policies or refurbishing older ones[2]. The latter have borrowed from the African Youth Charter mentioned above, including its emphasis on youth rights and freedoms. It urges State Parties to ensure that “every young person should have the right to social, economic, and political and cultural development” and that all planning and decision-making should integrate and mainstream a youth perspective.

Political admonitions aside, national youth policies have thus far had limited impact on youth welfare or their attitude toward governments. Given resource constraints, governments, development partners and NGOs have tended to focus on more tractable subgroups i.e. rural youth, ex-combatants, unskilled workers, sex workers, slum dwellers, school dropouts etc. and leaving others, considered better-endowed, such as university students, to fend for themselves. On their own, such piecemeal interventions have limited traction at the macrolevel, underlining the danger of seeing the youth challenge as not part of the broader one of social and political inclusion.

With respect to youth in politics, a portent question is the extent to which effective youth coalitions could coalesce around common grievances and influence government policies. In Nigeria’s recently concluded federal elections, the youth expressed their consternation at being excluded from vying for top office (top candidates were above 70) by using the hashtag #Not Too Young to Run. As there have been similar outcomes in many other countries in recent years, the youth think that establishing their own political vehicles might be the way out of their present quandary.

The example of South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) shows, however, that it is easier to establish a political foothold in a vibrant democracy than in a country where youthful ambition could be misconstrued for attempts to overthrow the established order. A political challenge for the youth in many African countries will therefore be how to transform their movements from pushing the causes of the moment, such as anti-corruption and anti-poverty, into effective political party structures, with manifestos that transcend the grievances that helped launch the movement in the first place.

Harnessing the Demographic Dividend

Africa’s demographic dividend will be determined by how well countries are able to harness the social and technical capabilities of their young populations. It will require reforms that generate sustainable growth, adoption of new technologies, and the provision of quality education and health services to boost productivity. However, the youth expansion is happening in an environment of institutional weakness and fiscal fragility in many countries, with high rates of unemployment and paucity of social services. While these constraints also affect other groups in the economy, the youth, lacking assets and steady sources of income, and often with limited access to credit and financial networks, feel quite marginalized and exceptionally vulnerable. Their ability to contribute to growth is often severely constrained. The demographic dividend cannot be harvested in a vacuum and strategies are needed to create a conducive environment for youth participation.

While Africa’s youth, like their counterparts elsewhere, have been fervent at adopting social media and other ICT-related technologies, their efforts are not yet sufficiently linked to a big development idea, for example, as part of the creation of ICT and knowledge dissemination platforms, to help countries leapfrog to the frontier in research, health and education service provision, logistics, and environmental protection. This broad-based thinking is being promoted in some recent national development plans, but is yet to take firm root on the ground through budgets and implementation strategies.

All too often, however, Africa’s demographic debate is made to sound like a Malthusian redux, with countries’ development potential choked by the burgeoning population. However, Africa is a rapidly changing place today: the youths are much better educated and tech-savvy than ever before and its expanding Diaspora is beginning to do for it, in terms of remittances and transfer of technology, what the Asian one has done for its region for decades.

Conclusion

There is not a country in Africa today that has not tried to respond to youth demands in one form or the other. However, in spite the elaborate national youth policies introduced in recent years, emphasizing youth rights and freedoms, in reality few African governments envision the youth challenge as a labour of love, rather as an exogenous threat to the body politic that must be exorcised. The political inclusion that the youth are demanding is not forthcoming.

Thus, in spite the creation of youth forums, ministries of youth and special-purpose vehicles focused on youth matters, the level of youth disgruntlement in many African countries is on the increase with ripple effects on the rest of the population. This is mostly because “youth matters” such as unemployment, poverty and hunger are also affecting the rest of the population. You cannot realistically deal with youth concerns, without addressing similar ones among the broader population. In this regard youth pressure is good for public policy, but quite destabilizing for domestic politics.

With a whiff of arrogance, the youth are adamant that real change can only happen when they get access to power. However, while the youth have proven effective in pushing national causes, including anti-corruption, to have traction party politics require the creation of formal structures—and hence a transition from largely voluntary activities to political contestation (and even horse trading). The traditional parties consider the youth perceptibly “too young to run” and will not help during the transition. Establishing their own youthful political vehicles will not be easy, however.

With regard to the demographic dividend, it is ironical that Africa’s youth “bulge,” considered a policy headache today, is actually the result of the continent’s considerable success in reversing the triple curse of “poverty, ignorance and disease” inherited at independence. Notably, child and maternal mortality were slashed in subsequent decades, thanks to better education, health services and nutrition. Nothing suggests that such positive impacts will not recur in the future, enabling Africa to harvest the demographic dividend on a sustainable basis. Still, backsliding is a perennial problem and the populace, spearheaded by the youth, must remain vigilant.

 [1] The note draws on the lecture I gave at Cornell University, Ithaca, on March 21, 2019 as part of the Spring-2019 Seminar Series of the Institute for African Development, where I am a Visiting Fellow. I thank participants for their comments and the Institute’s Director, Prof. Muna Ndulo, for his support.

[2] For a presentation of national youth policies from around the world refer to www.youthpolicy.org