African youth need trade skills not university degrees

An International Conference on Putting Youth to Work is underway in Dakar, Senegal until 30 January 2014. The event has been organized by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in partnership with the Partnership for Economic Policy. It is meant to be a platform for sharing ideas towards solutions to Africa’s predicament of mass youth unemployment.

It has been reported that 83 percent of the unemployed in Uganda are youth; the figures in Zimbabwe and Senegal stand at 68 and 56 percent respectively.

Youth unemployment is not unique to Africa. Western Europe and other parts of the world are in difficult circumstances as well. In the UK, it has been found that half of the parents are in the dark about their children’s career options.

In a survey done by Ernst and Young in the UK, it was found that parents and employers had different perceptions about the value of going to university. While parents valued a university qualification, employers were more interested in work experience. In the OECD’s Africa Economic Outlook 2012 Report focusing on youth employment, it was noted that though schools and institutions of higher learning in most African countries are not providing young people with the skills employers are looking for, a bigger problem is the low demand for labour.

Instead of going sheepishly following everyone spending money on university programs that lead into the unemployment abyss, let us encourage young African men and women to look for trade skills that give them power to work with their head and hands and offer high quality services that we need every day (vehicle, power installation repairs, plumbing, fabrication, computer software solutions, etc). Charles Handy called it portfolio work.

A generation without work!

A few days ago Pope Francis, enroute to the Catholic World Youth Day in Brazil, warned of a global crisis of unemployed young people.  He said we run the risk of losing an entire generation of young people to unemployment. The pope has probably had a look at the OECD 2013 youth employment projections where Spain and Greece are expected to reach about 28 percent (in both countries) in 2014.

(Courtesy of Freedigitialphotos.net)



The Economist also addressed this issue a couple months ago. It was reported that about 300 million 15-24 year olds around the world are without work. How did all this begin? What can we do about this crisis? Is it failure of individuals or system failure?

I think that a close look at the ways our schools and other institutions of learning operate and the ways employers (especially industry) seek out, recruit and retain workers may provide some clues. In this post, I will address the school system.

A fair portion of young people without work are those who may have left school early or had to leave prematurely. Others have in fact attended university or a college and still find themselves jobless.

A key problem may be the expectation that spending a few years at university or college equips one for the world of work. It turns out that a whole new mindset is now required to avoid the unemployment trap. Young people should be encouraged to reach an engagement level where they aim to do something with what they know other than simply passing knowledge tests and qualification certificates.

Tony Wagner, a Harvard professor has outlined the skills our schools and homes should seek to impart if young people are to innovate in an increasingly competitive world. They are: critical thinking and problem-solving, collaboration across networks, agility and adaptability, entrepreneurism, effective oral and written communication, how to access and analyze information and curiosity and imagination.

School experiences of young people should engage them in real work and prepare them to work, not to seek work. The management consultant Charles Handy has observed that the work of the future is portfolio work. A portfolio worker will not depend on an employer in the long term. They will only look for individuals who require their services and once they get a job done (probably short contract), they move on to the next task. We can already see the rise of freelance work with such sites as oDesk and Elance.

Finally it is time to reform our schools to reflect the new circumstances in which we live. We must prepare young people to perform in the real world and not simply remember facts here and there.

This, in my view, is one way to deal with the crisis of youth unemployment.