Policies for Youth Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

A qualitative analytical framework, policy discourse analysis, is applied to understand the prevalence of youth-targeting in national policies related to employment. Forty-seven policies from 13 Sub-Saharan African countries promulgated in 1996 to 2016 were selected for the evaluation, based on their direct or indirect relevance to youth employment via themes of development, rural transformation, and agriculture. The main findings show that policies focus more on promoting labour supply strategies, e.g. training programmes on entrepreneurship skills, rather than demand-side ones—such as reducing the constraints to business development and job creation at the sectoral level. Policies rarely touch on known constraints faced by youth, like their limited engagement in agribusiness activities and representation in policy dialogues. SSA policies with a youth employment lens associated to the different pillars of the Decent Work Agenda are assessed.