dissertation on youth unemployment

The Global Youth Unemployment Crisis: Exploring Successful Initiatives and Partnering with Youths

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Labeled the “global youth unemployment disaster” by world leaders, the issue of youth unemployment is one that demands the attention of governments, businesses, and NGOs in developing and developed economies alike. Globally, youths are three times more likely than adults to be unemployed, and over 350 million young people are not engaged in education, employment, or training (NEET). With a demographic bulge that means about 3.5 billion global citizens are below the age of 25, there is a high level of urgency in addressing this concern. This study first conducts a region-by-region analysis of five areas affected greatly by youth unemployment, analyzing factors unique to particular areas and common aspects of the problem. In exploring four shared issues – a skills gap between students and employers, a lack of skills among NEETs, a lack of awareness of job opportunities, and a lack of support for youth-led entrepreneurship – this study identifies five groups of corresponding initiatives and policies that have had success and can potentially be scaled. These solutions include apprenticeship programs for students, skills-building initiatives for unengaged youths, more prevalent vocational schooling, job awareness-raising initiatives, and programs to invest in and incentivize youth-led entrepreneurship. The study then analyzes the perspective of young people themselves regarding these problems and solutions, and asks for their own ideas. The “Global Youth Leader Questionnaire,” a web-based survey taken by 50 global youth leaders from 30 nations, gathered results that include young leaders’ perspectives on the realities of life as an unemployed youth, evaluations of the potential solutions discussed, ideas for other solutions, accounts of youth-led development initiatives that are working in their countries, and views on the state of youth involvement in decision-making. Finally, the study proposes that the best way for institutions – governments, businesses, educational institutions, and NGOs – to go about designing, scaling up, and driving impactful initiatives is to partner with youths, harnessing their ideas and abilities in tackling the challenge of youth unemployment.

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Hanna, Andrew Leon (2014). The Global Youth Unemployment Crisis: Exploring Successful Initiatives and Partnering with Youths . Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9024 .

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YOUTH AND UNEMPLOYMENT IN AFRICA: THE CASE OF SIERRA

Sierra Leone is undergoing a major transformation in the 21st Century with changes in the political, economic and social spheres. The country is transforming its image from that of a conflict-ridden, politically instable and pervasively corrupt to that of an investor’s backyard and construction nation. This improvement in economic growth and development is marginalised as unemployment remains a stumbling block for the youths in the country. The various national governments of Sierra Leone since the end of the war have made steps to address the youth unemployment question through the creation of jobs and other opportunities for the youths and this is seen in the multiple poverty reduction strategies developed since 2003 aiming at youth employment. High youth unemployment threatens and presents a challenge to the post-conflict reconstruction and development agenda of the country in achieving a Middle Income Country status by 2035. It is for the purpose of this paper to critically discuss the youth unemployment context of Sierra Leone in the 21st century and its implications on Sierra Leone’s development.

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Youth unemployment is an important problem for Uganda, with the official national estimations indicating levels up to 22.3%. We review the problem of youth unemployment in Uganda from a cultures and development perspective; we examine the constraints of the present approaches to youth unemployment and give suggestions for new directions. We explore youth unemployment as a major force that is aggravating the marginalisation of young people in Uganda, leading to their further exclusion from socio-cultural, economical and political processes. While youth unemployment in Uganda is a crucial concern of politicians, policy makers and other stake holders, the current approaches do not give enough attention to its socio-cultural and political dimensions and fail to involve the voices of young people themselves, thereby missing chances to address the crisis in more holistic way. We search for theoretical and methodological tools to fill this gap. In Uganda, the rapidly increasing youth population and the alarming youth unemployment figures urge for more effective policy intervention and programs based on solid conceptualisation and critical theoretical and methodological frameworks. This study contributes to the current the endeavours by academics, politicians and policy makers to bring youth at the centre of development agendas and strategies both at global and national levels. We plea for a multidimensional approach to youth unemployment. We propose cultures sensitive and participative models in which young people themselves are involved, not as victims, threats or problems, but as agents contributing to their development. There is urgent need to revisit the present approaches, which treat young people as objects and less as agents of their own destinies.

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This paper provides an overview of the size of youth unemployment in Zambia and its effect on national economic development. The paper also offers recommendations on the enhancement of youth empowerment in Zambia. This paper is based on a study conducted for the National Economic Advisory Council of Zambia. The paper contains 6 sections: Section one is the introduction; Section two gives an overview of Zambia's labour market; Section three outlines youth empowerment initiatives in Anglophone African countries with the aim of providing a proper model of youth empowerment programs for Zambia; Section four presents the analysis of Zambia's job creation strategies and policies currently being implemented on the one hand and the existing or foreseeable impediments on the other; Sections five discusses the legal and regulatory challenges relating to the employment of youths in Zambia; and section six which gives recommendations and the way forward in resolving the unemployment dilemma in Zambia.

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This article addresses the issue of post-conflict job creation in Sierra Leone by focusing on the post-war interventions for reform which were expected to produce economic opportunities. It provides an overview of the challenges facing the national government and its international partners in generating growth for job creation, and explains the outcome of the post-conflict reforms on employment. The argument is made that the current orthodoxy of liberalisation lacks the right credentials to address the issue of unemployment in the local context. The policies for intervention appear to have made little impact on formal job creation for the majority of citizens, yet this was a key objective in the post-war reconstruction. This situation is of concern because building long-term peace and the continued legitimacy of government rests predominantly on the production of tangible dividends for a waiting population; a population which previously experienced economic exclusion of mass proportions and indescribable hardship during the conflict years, and which expected change when peace eventually came.

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Unemployment Scarring Effects: An Overview and Meta-analysis of Empirical Studies

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• Mattia Filomena   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4099-9168 1 , 2  

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This article reviews the empirical literature on the scarring effects of unemployment, by first presenting an overview of empirical evidence relating to the impact of unemployment spells on subsequent labor market outcomes and then exploiting meta-regression techniques. Empirical evidence is homogeneous in highlighting significant and often persistent wage losses and strong unemployment state dependence. This is confirmed by a meta-regression analysis under the assumption of a common true effect. Heterogeneous findings emerge in the literature, related to the magnitude of these detrimental effects, which are particularly penalizing in terms of labor earnings in case of unemployment periods experienced by laid-off workers. We shed light on further sources of heterogeneity and find that unemployment is particularly scarring for men and when studies’ identification strategy is based on selection on observables.

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Experiencing Long-Term Unemployment in Europe: A Conclusion

The Effects of Unemployment on Non-monetary Job Quality in Europe: The Moderating Role of Economic Situation and Labor Market Policies

The effects of unemployment assistance on unemployment exits

Data availability.

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Moreover, further outcomes discussed by the literature on scarring are family formation, crime and negative psychological implications in terms of well-being, life satisfaction and mental health (see e.g. Helbling and Sacchi 2014 ; Strandh et al. 2014 ; Mousteri et al. 2018 ; Clark and Lepinteur 2019 ).

A further strand of the recent literature focuses on the effect of adverse labor market conditions at graduation, for example focusing on the effect of local unemployment rate or graduating during a recession (see e.g. Raaum and Roed, 2006 ; Kahn 2010 ; Oreopoulos et al. 2012 ; Kawaguchi and Murao 2014 ; Altonji et al. 2016 ). The consequences of economic downturns on wages, labor supply and social outcomes for young labor market entrants have been recently surveyed by Cockx ( 2016 ), Von Wachter (2020) and Rodriguez et al. ( 2020 ).

The stigma effect means that individuals who have been unemployed face lower chances of being hired because employers may use their past history of unemployment as a negative signal.

Thus, papers using traditional multivariate descriptive analysis, duration models, or OLS regressions with a reduced number of controls which do not properly address endogeneity issues and are unlikely to have a causal interpretation (endogeneity issues are discussed in SubSect.  3.2 ).

For intergenerational scars we mean that studies focused on the effect of parents’ unemployment experiences on the children’ future employment status (see e.g. Karhula et al. 2017 ). For macroeconomic conditions at graduation we mean that we excluded that literature focused on the local unemployment rate at graduation or other local labor market conditions, rather than on individual unemployment experience and state dependence (see e.g. Oreopoulos et al. 2012 ; Raaem and Roed, 2006 ).

When we could not directly retrieve the t -statistics because not reported among the study results, we computed them as the ratio between the estimated unemployment effects ( \({\beta }_{i}\) ) and their standard errors. If studies only displayed the estimated effects and their 95% confidence intervals, the standard error can be calculated by SE  = ( ub − lb )/(2 × 1.96), where ub and lb are the upper bound and the lower bound, respectively.

We removed from the meta-regression analysis 8 articles because they did not contain sufficient information to compute the t -statistic of the estimated scarring effect. They are reported in italics in Tables 5 and 6 .

For employment outcomes we mean the likelihood of experiencing future unemployment, the probability to have a job later (employability), the fraction of days spent at work or the hours worked during the following years (labor market participation), the call-backs from employers in case of field experiment. Earning outcomes include hourly wages, labor earnings, income, etc.

Since many studies did not provide precise information on the number of covariates, we approximated \({dk}_{i}\) with the number of observations minus 2. Indeed, given that in microeconometric applications the sample sizes are very often much larger than the number of the parameters, the calculation of the partial correlation coefficient is quite robust to errors in deriving \({dk}_{i}\) (Picchio 2022 ).

The publication bias is the bias arising from the tendency of editors to publish more easily findings consistent with a conventional view or with statistically significant results, whereas studies that find small or no significant effects tend to remain unpublished (Card and Krueger 1995 ).

We employed the Precision Effect Estimate with Standard Error (PEESE) specification because its quadratic form of the standard errors has been proven to be less biased and often more efficient to check for heterogeneity than the FAT-PET specification when there is a nonzero genuine effect (Stanley and Doucouliagos 2014 ). Nevertheless, the results from the FAT-PET specification are very similar to the ones from the PEESE model.

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Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges financial support from the Cariverona Foundation Ph.D. research scholarship. He is particularly grateful to Matteo Picchio and Claudia Pigini for their comments and suggestions on a preliminary version of this paper. He also thanks the Associate Editor Massimiliano Bratti and two anonymous reviewers, whose comments were very useful for an important improvement of the paper.

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Filomena, M. Unemployment Scarring Effects: An Overview and Meta-analysis of Empirical Studies. Ital Econ J (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40797-023-00228-4

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Analysis: Africa’s Youth Unemployment Crisis Is a Global Problem

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Africa’s Youth Unemployment Crisis Is a Global Problem

Governments and donors must stop focusing solely on skills development and entrepreneurship—or risk more youth migration, unrest, and terrorism..

Africa has the world’s youngest population, with a median age of 19.7 years. Such a large youthful population might ordinarily symbolize an ample and energetic workforce, a boon for the development prospects of any region. But the dire employment situation for young people across Africa continues to snuff out their potential. According to the African Development Bank , in 2015, one-third of Africa’s then 420 million young people between 15 and 35 years old were unemployed, another third were vulnerably employed, and only 1 in 6 was in wage employment.

Although Africa has the lowest unemployment rate globally on paper among youth ages 15 to 24 (10.6 percent in 2021, according to the International Labor Organization), the majority of Africa’s youth work informally, and many are underemployed or remain in poverty despite working due to low wages and the lack of a social safety net, making it difficult to compare African countries to more advanced economies.

The African Development bank reports that while 10 million to 12 million youth enter the workforce in Africa each year, only 3 million formal jobs are created annually. African youth have no choice but to work, because most countries on the continent have little or no social protection. According to the African Development Bank, it is therefore common to see humanities and social sciences graduates driving taxis in Algiers and Cameroonian engineers ferrying passengers on commercial motorcycles in Douala.

Africa’s youth employment problem is a global problem. The world can’t achieve and sustain global development with a large segment of youth alienated and unprepared to lead their continent and the world. Hordes of struggling African youth will continue to migrate en masse to developed countries. And foreign investors can’t be assured of peaceful business climates in Africa, as poverty and inequality fuel looting, insurgencies, and terrorist activity on the continent.

Studies have highlighted mismatches between the skills African students obtain at school and those required by employers. African governments and development partners have therefore attempted to address the employment challenge, mainly by implementing skills development programs for employment in high-priority sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing, and promoting entrepreneurship in these areas. Youth enrolled in such programs learn technical and vocational skills, as well as other life skills to help them find employment and run their own businesses.

But focusing on these solutions alone excludes young people who are not inclined toward entrepreneurship, as well as those with other skills and capabilities that could be nurtured with alternative means of support. Indeed, it perpetuates the very cause of Africa’s youth employment problem by concentrating the talents of youth in a few professional areas to the exclusion of many others.

According to a Brookings Institution report , such interventions do not have a good track record in developing countries. Just a small number of young entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa find success, and they are rarely able to subsequently hire fellow young Africans. African labor markets are also not able to absorb the available skilled workers. Moreover, surveys in rural Ghana and Uganda showed that young people in these regions often struggle to get the funding they need to start a business or land to farm on, and they don’t benefit from government and donor initiatives—particularly concerning as two-thirds of new job seekers across Africa live in rural areas.

African societies have long valued professions like medicine, law, and business, while creative fields such as writing, art, music, drama, and fashion are regarded as hobbies.

Africa’s youth employment crisis has been a long time in the making. An adequate solution to this problem requires addressing its root cause: the lack of job creation in many professional fields. Africa’s slow pace of development is not the only reason for its limited range of jobs.

African societies have for a long time valued a few professional fields to the exclusion of many others and have therefore not created ample jobs in less popular fields. Fields such as medicine, law, business, and economics are highly regarded, so parents push bright children to pursue courses in these areas. Many students who do not initially get to study such subjects later pursue work in related areas, both for the prestige and because jobs are more abundant in these fields.

Creative fields such as writing, art, music, drama, and fashion are often regarded as hobbies. Many African parents discourage or prevent their children from pursuing careers in these fields. It’s little wonder that such renowned African writers as Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Tsitsi Dangarembga all initially studied medicine.

To reverse the continent’s employment woes, Africans would need to begin appreciating the utility of all careers. African governments must introduce policies that shift the educational focus from passing exams to exploring a degree’s actual applications to society. African governments, together with the private sector, must actively create jobs related to all professional fields. Development partners can advise African countries on creating jobs in less popular fields, because their countries have successfully employed their talent in such fields.

For instance, plenty of jobs could be created for students graduating with botany and urban planning degrees. African cities and rural areas need more botanical gardens and parks. The value they provide in developed countries is evident. Botanists and urban planners can beautify African streets and make them greener by lining them with trees and other plants. Botanists can also set up private practices to advise households and institutions on the ideal plants to grow in their gardens and compounds.

America’s Hollow Africa Policy

Washington’s focus on stability over human rights is alienating Africa’s youth.

Africa’s Disappointed Demographic

Young people across the continent have been hit hard by the pandemic, lockdowns, and economic stagnation—but their protests have largely been ignored by elderly elites.

Likewise, Africans have a greater need for psychologists than they realize. An estimated 100 million Africans have depression in what some have called a “silent epidemic.” Meanwhile, according to the Lancet , Africa has only 1.4 mental health workers per 100,000 people, while the global average is 9 per 100,000 people.

The large numbers of graduating psychology students should not feel compelled to find jobs in other fields. Governments can introduce policies that mandate hiring psychologists at all schools. Like their Western counterparts, young African children and older students can’t always turn to family members and friends in difficult moments. They need the emotional support of a trained professional at such times.

Even older adults in Africa appear to need the counseling services of psychologists. As a substitute for these services, they consult pastors and find solace in church services. The pastoring profession has proliferated across Africa as a result, but the consolation Africans receive from church is an inadequate substitute for the professional care trained mental health workers provide.

Archaeology doesn’t have to be seen as a useless course in much of Africa. Africans need archaeologists to preserve their rich cultural heritage and develop historical sites. Africans can reap huge tourism revenues by building world-renowned museums to house their treasured artifacts, including those repatriated from the museums of Western countries. And if coastal countries across Africa took oceanography and fisheries more seriously, Ghana would have discovered earlier than 2012 that it had coral reefs. Such reefs and aquariums could be huge tourist draws in these countries. Seismic oceanography could likewise lead to more discoveries of oil and gas in the waters off Africa.

Institutions like the World Bank and the International Labor Organization can introduce an index (similar to the defunct Doing Business ranking) to measure the extent to which countries develop and utilize the knowledge and skills of their youth. Such a ranking would compel African governments to concentrate on harnessing the varied skills, knowledge, and talents of young people.

Development partners, private foundations, and foreign companies (as part of their corporate social responsibility) can also help African nations create jobs in other professional fields by building public institutions such as libraries, art galleries, and music conservatories across the continent, and funding art workshops and music lessons. Libraries are scarce across Africa. Kenya, with a population of 55.3 million, has just 64 public libraries, while Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country with a population of 212.7 million, has an estimated 316 public libraries. By contrast, France with a population of 65.5 million has 16,500 public libraries.

With increased access to books, more Africans would develop interests in reading and writing, spawning higher numbers of writers and journalists. More Africans would be able to articulate themselves in writing, enabling them to document the continent’s history and contribute their perspectives to debates on public policy and foreign policy rather than letting the world write about Africa. More libraries would provide spaces for unemployed and self-employed youth to research and develop their ideas, work on independent projects, and hold meetings with others.

Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country with a population of 212.7 million, has an estimated 316 public libraries. By contrast, France with a population of 65.5 million has 16,500

In addition, students across Africa would perform better academically if they had dedicated spaces like libraries for studying; Africa’s youth employment debacle has been partly blamed on the continent’s low educational outcomes. Libraries could also go a long way toward curbing Africa’s astronomical population growth by providing teenage girls in rural areas (where there is a higher incidence of teenage pregnancies) both a refuge from the abusive men who prey on them and a more productive way of spending their time.

Similarly, Africa’s already significant share of the world’s renowned artists and musicians would multiply if young people were exposed early to art and musical instruments, and were given access to training facilities and quality instruction. Youth with training in art and music can also work with these skills on a part-time basis, as well as for supplementary income. Furthermore, the construction of libraries, art galleries, and music conservatories would provide work opportunities to architects, who are in short supply across Africa.

Young Africans lack access to grants to pursue professional ambitions such as language study abroad, internships abroad (as well as local ones), book-writing projects, and online classes. African governments and development partners must make grants available to people with varied interests, not just entrepreneurs. With these grants, African youth would gain the relevant skills and experiences to qualify for the jobs they seek. They would be able to pursue unconventional career paths and work independently. And they would have access to expert training online in areas as diverse as screenwriting, novel-writing, acting, cooking, and coding.

Development partners can also encourage their nationals to hire suitably qualified African youth in nonprofit and private organizations around the world. African youth lack opportunities to work abroad because their countries do not have development agencies operating abroad and relatively few African companies have subsidiaries outside their countries or the continent where their youth could travel to work. In addition, African countries have smaller diplomatic missions, and professional positions in these missions are usually restricted to foreign service officers, many of whom are older and more experienced.

Just a few African governments—including Egypt, Morocco, and South Africa—sponsor their youth to enter international organizations such as the United Nations as junior professional officers and volunteers. The weak passports of African countries are an additional impediment. Unemployed African youth aren’t able to travel abroad to network and search for opportunities the way a young French or American job seeker might.

If African governments and development partners implemented such varied solutions, they would succeed in harnessing the skills and knowledge of the vast majority of African youth. If young Africans could easily find jobs across diverse professional fields, fewer of them would choose to be nurses, and their countries wouldn’t have surplus unemployed nurses to export to developed countries. Parents would also be more accepting of their children pursuing less popular careers if their prospects of finding work in such fields were greater.

Adopting a holistic approach to the employment problem would enable African governments to better target entrepreneurship and skills training programs to those who would benefit most from them, especially youth from rural areas where the majority of agricultural and manufacturing activities take place. Targeting entrepreneurship and skills training there would also help to stem their migration to urban areas.

This approach would be more difficult than the current approach focused on entrepreneurship and skills training, but it stands a better chance of solving the employment problem.

African governments must do the difficult work of creating jobs for their youth, but donor countries and nongovernmental organizations can help them by thinking beyond the current development paradigm.

Audrey Elom Donkor is a writer and international affairs analyst from Ghana. Twitter:  @AudreyDonkor

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