During the third African job creation forum that took place here in Addis Ababa over the week, African Union has called on focus on industrialization and innovation to accelerate the employment opportunity.
Doing so will help the continent to extract maximum benefit from its large number of dynamic and trainable youth that are important factor to drive its growth.
We can raise two simple examples about the value of African youth. Africa loses a significant number of its trained human resource mostly the talented youth due to brain drain (fact and figure). The educated and trained youth who would have contributed immensely to their continent are rather enticed by those who pay them more.
And those who do not have pursued higher education are still targeted by the drainers, but in a different way. They are highly exploited by human traffickers and they do not even receive proper treatment and remuneration. Had their labor and knowledge not been valuable why do the traffickers spend all that billions of money to the illegal industry?
Those who understand the value of the educated and uneducated African youth are doing their jobs diligently. Yet the leaders of the continent and relevant continental and international organizations should surpass them by taking all the necessary actions to retain the youth in their continent so that they can chart out their own future in their homelands.
At the Fourth Financing for Development Forum that was held in Seville, Spain, Under Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the ECA and Former Ambassador and Permanent Representative of the Republic of Rwanda to the United Nations in New York Claver Gatete indicated that Africa needs 1.3 trillion USD annually to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet this claim, despite being true and just, it seems very farfetched seen from the perspective of donors who mostly drag their feet in discharging commitment to assist the continent.
Without doubt, Africa is a developing continent that needs timely financial and technical support to address its pressing challenges, including those implicated by the SDGs. The SDGs directly or indirectly affect the issue of the youth.
As emphasized by both the African Union (AU) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), urgent and substantial efforts must be made to create as many jobs as Africa’s youth require each year—jobs that are also adaptable to the continent’s evolving socio-economic realities. African states need also to work on designing policies that create more jobs for the youth. They have to give more focus on education and training.
Failure to address this challenge will pose serious consequences not only for Africa but for the global community at large. The continued outflow of young, undocumented migrants from Africa is already a shared concern across regions. Moreover, when youth see no viable future, they become more vulnerable to exploitation by armed insurgents, criminal gangs, and terrorist networks.
Hence, all stakeholders must act with urgency and commitment, aligning development projects with the immediate needs of Africa’s youth to secure a brighter future for the continent. Ethiopia’s ongoing efforts to generate employment opportunities for its young population deserve recognition, along with robust financial and technical support to enhance their impact. Expanding manufacturing, tourism, and other strategic sectors holds great promise in unlocking sustainable livelihoods and harnessing the full potential of the continent’s youth.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD THURSDAY 10 JULY 2025
