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.

READ: Region falls short in creation of jobs for youth, MDG report says

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.

The unemployment situation will become even more precarious as more than one million young people will be joining the work force annually by 2020 and close to 2.5 million by 2050. Currently, the numbers of new jobseekers entering the market is about 700,000 per year and will continue rising.

Rwanda has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world. But while only 0.8 per cent of the youth are unemployed, as in Tanzania, 64 per cent of these are underemployed. Since 2007, the government has been implementing five-year strategic plans to reduce youth unemployment. Business development centres offering entrepreneurial training have been put up across the country, and all schools have career advisory centres to help young people develop skills that meet the needs of the market.

Investments in labour-intensive sectors such as agriculture are insignificant, and the industrial sector is not expanding fast enough; in fact, much of the region is de-industrialising as energy costs rise and cheap imports from East-Asia flood markets.

The rising insecurity, radicalisation and rampant crime in Kenya, where the unemployment rate among 15 to 34-year-olds is anywhere between 60 per cent and 80 per cent, shows how having a big population of marginalised and alienated young people could severely impact a nation’s security and development.

“The populations in Kenya and the region are dominated by young people and this trend will continue in coming decades,” said Eliya Zulu of the African Institute for Development Policy in Kenya.

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.

“Huge investments need to be made, particularly in education, to go beyond developing artisan skills and have highly skilled young people who can produce quality goods and services in the mainstream economy,” Mr Zulu said.

Addressing the problem

The Kenyan government has started a number of initiatives to address this problem which is now manifesting itself, through a high crime rate, inter-communal conflicts over scarce resources, and radicalisation among the country’s Muslim youth in Nairobi and Mombasa.

While promises by politicians during campaigns to create millions of jobs have never been met, a number of steps have been taken to fix this problem.

President Uhuru Kenyatta has promised to allocate 30 per cent of all government tenders to the the amount his predecessor earmarked for the same group. While this initiative was hailed as a major breakthrough in reducing unemployment, a recent report Youth Access to Government Procurement shows that of the 30,000 youth who registered companies to do business with the government, only 6,000 benefited. From the $695 million allocated for this empowerment programme, only $33 million was used.

But this slow uptake has been blamed on red tape that could have locked out many young people from the tenders.

There is also the Uwezo Fund, which disburses small loans to young people to start businesses. This year, about $66 million was allocated to fund small start-ups, also, about $55 million in grants was disbursed by the Youth Enterprise Fund started by Mwai Kibaki’s administration.

Another much talked about initiative is the ongoing revamping of the National Youth Service (NYS). The government aims to recruit 21,000 young people a year, up from about 2,000, and equip them with paramilitary training. The Kenyan government hopes to train about 200,000 young people who will help counter the vigilante menace by deploying the NYS trained youth to counties to help with administration and security.

To inculcate a spirit of patriotism, the recruits will be involved in constructing public projects such as dams and community service such as the ongoing slum upgrade programme in Nairobi’s Kibera, according to one of the consultants involved in the restructuring of the NYS.

In Uganda, the government’s plan to solve youth unemployment by promotion of self-employment through the establishment of a $10 million Youth Venture Capital Fund appears not to be addressing the challenge nearly three years after the government unveiled it.

The initiative was meant to support various sub-sectors, including manufacturing, agro processing, transport, education, tourism, information and communications technology, and construction for enterprise development, job creation and business skills training.

READ: Uganda targets skills, agriculture in fight against youth unemployment

Gemma Ahaibwe, a research analyst at Uganda’s Economic Policy Research Centre, who has also co-authored a paper recently titled “Promoting self-employment through entrepreneurship financing: Lessons from the Uganda Youth Venture Capital Fund,” said the country’s initiatives are yet to bear fruits as they are concentrated in the central region and urban areas.

“The employment creation results based on 2011 and 2013 indicate that the base year average number of employees was not significantly different for both the youth fund beneficiaries and non- youth fund beneficiaries at an average of three employees per enterprise,” Ms Ahaibwe said.

Ms Ahaibwe said promoting self-employment and entrepreneurship or “do it yourself employment strategy” through the funds is not a panacea for youth unemployment, adding that the government should instead continuously implement policies that will attract more foreign direct investment and boost industrialisation to create sustainable jobs.

A Youth Venture Capital Fund worth Ush25 billion ($8.95 million) was introduced in 2011 and more recently, in September 2013, government significantly boosted youth schemes by allocating Ush265 billion ($94.9 million) to the Youth Livelihood Programme over a five-year-period.

In 2012, the government also initiated a 10-year strategy dubbed “Skilling Uganda,” emphasising a paradigm shift in a business, technical and vocational education training institutions.

The strategy was to ensure that education and training follows a modular curriculum that ensures that the content is relevant to the world of work and assessment is based on industrial work standards.

Additional reporting by Christopher Kidanka and Isaac Khisa