MALABO - in a bid solve the chronic unemployment affecting African youth, the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) seeks to provide support to African countries through a variety of training programs.

This was confirmed yesterday in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea by Dr. Frannie Léautier, Executive Secretary of ACBF while presenting the foundation’s perspective on the issue of youth unemployment in Africa.

African leaders are currently attending the 17th AU Summit in Equatorial Guinea under the theme ""Accelerating Youth Empowerment for Sustainable Development”.

"ACBF’s new strategy gives pride of place to emerging issues in African development.

The critical role of capacity development and employment creation for the youth is to strengthen the enabling environment and enhance governance, in order to unlock the potential of the youth, either for self-employment or for their integration into the productive sectors,” she said.

"ACBF will do this by developing skilled individuals through training and continuous learning; creating an enabling policy environment and a critical mass of policy makers who shape the job,” she added.
 
Dr Frannie noted that ACBF in collaboration with the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) will work closely to ensure the elimination of problems that affect the African youth.

"Working with NEPAD's Capacity Development Strategic Framework, we expect to support African countries in their identification and strategic use of capacity development to solve development problems, including those of creating jobs for young people,” she stated.

Frannie added that it was important to understand the needs of African youth and opportunities provided by their ideas on national and regional level in order to design and implement the right policies aimed at unlocking their innovativeness and creativity.

The Chief Executive of NEPAD Agency Dr Ibrahim Mayaki, highlighted that ACBF is committed to working with the NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency to enhance collaboration and streamline capacity development initiatives in Africa.

In an interview with The New Times, a Rwandan youth, Silvia Mbabazi, welcomed the ACBF decision saying that it would be beneficial to involve the youth in government institutions.

"The initiative of empowering youth is good to Africa. ACBF’s decision means that the world has started realising our significance in the development,” she said.

"Therefore, for the effective realisation of that, African government must employ youth in government institutions and not rely on old people,” she asserted.

According to the 2011 statistics of the International Labour Organization, about 60 percent of the unemployed people in Sub-Sahara Africa are the youth with an average of 72 percent of them living on less than US$2 a day.

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