AFRICA today is at the highest statistical peak of its youth populace that history has ever recorded. The continent is into a crisis of figures, and the facts are sounding wild alerts. Our population is in a turmoil of hordes of job seekers trying to find themselves a place on this congested grid. Our media is restless at throwing the facts in our face, and our people are hopeless. They are tired of running within an endless maze of lower-middle management survival and seek social redemption.
Africa has also been dealt with the greatest opportunities for this century. With a large young population and a rapid growth rate, Africa stands to become the world's biggest human resource hub. Many of these youths contribute to more than two-thirds of the sole breadwinners for their households. They make the majority of people investing in locally-oriented small scale business units. Most importantly, they are running a monopoly of innovation and invention in initiatives in the business sector.
The narrative in Africa has continuously placed them on the periphery of the informal sector; taking the description of the Rwandan 20-year-olds persuading passersby to purchase their clothes in malls or 22-year-old Ghanaians clad in blue and shoving their food baskets between taxi windows along or the dust raising force and fuss of youths in Nairobi-Kibera streets. They have taken on jobs this era has chosen to call hand-to-mouth. Their motivation has persistently been said to be survival and not more.
The kind of perspective that the development experts and demographic analysts have cultivated undermines the considerable potential of youths engaged in small scale businesses. Many of these are running self-initiated start-up projects capable of bringing forth the greatest employment blueprint for the next century of Africa's economy.
To revamp the narrative and trigger policy reforms, the MasterCard Foundation and Restless Development's Youth Think Tank researchers just launched a scintillating report on 'how to Support SMEs to create employment in Sub-Saharan Africa.' The young people's accounts in this report are indicators of a collective effort to overturn things and deliver us socioeconomic salvation. This is a collage of aspirations, dreams and objectives of a young tribe of risk-takers who set out to challenge the norms and alter the trajectory. They have remained firm, stood strong amidst a major global crisis, and are ready to take on even bigger challenges.
Young entrepreneurs in Africa are more willing than ever to enlarge their units of operation and foot the cost for it. All they need is a structural set-up to enable the productivity of their processes and unlock possibilities for the success of their plans. Over time, the youths' prowess to determine current market demands, consumer tastes, and trends has stood out despite the deficient organization skills. They hold a great individual effect and are constantly looking forward to new avenues of expanding their consumer circles.
The different development partners ought to reconsider the kind of support offered to the young business proprietors regarding whether it fits within the business' vision and acknowledge the contextual variety of these enterprises. The policymakers may as well consider creating a competitive environment to spur creativity and innovation. This will then birth a generation of a hybrid entrepreneurial resource.
We are optimistic that if the youths are exposed to a more friendly local context, the large pool of hand-to-mouth labour could transform into a mass corporate entity. The youths are willing to increase their leverage and enable the growth of their peers to achieve a universally coveted dream. If these findings inform the resolutions of the top decision-making organs in Sub-Saharan Africa, we stand to become a global economic cradle.
Patrick Karekezi is a Global Youth Researcher with the Youth Think Tank under MasterCard Foundation and Restless Development .
The views expressed in this article are of the author.