Young people not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET) in Sub-Saharan Africa: Sustainable Development Target 8.6 missed and reset

ABSTRACT

Sustainable Development Goal 8, Target 8.6, represents a direct commitment to improving the dramatic labour market situation of young people by substantially reducing the proportion of young people Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET) by 2020. This deadline has now passed, and while progress has been made in most EU countries, the situation of young people categorized as NEET in Sub-Saharan Africa has worsened over the past ten years. In this paper, we review the existing literature on youth employment in Africa and analyse the reasons for stalled progress. We debunk five myths of youth unemployment and underemployment, which have hampered understanding and progress. These are that: (1) education and training systems are defective, (2) youth micro-entrepreneurship and self-employment offer a panacea, (3) the informal sector is part of the problem and not part of the solution, (4) care work equates to inactivity, and (5) the agricultural sector has little potential for job creation. We recommend more research on the supply side of the African labour markets to provide a more nuanced understanding of the structural barriers to youth market entry and call for a concerted international effort to battle the youth employment crisis through job creation.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth employment
• Sub-Saharan Africa
• NEET
• literature review

1. Introduction: the time is up!

Sustainable Development Goal 8 (SDG 8) advocates for full and productive employment and decent work for all.¹ Within SDG 8, Target 8.6 represents a direct commitment to improving the dramatic labour market situation of the youth by substantially reducing the proportion of young people not in employment, education or training (NEET) by 2020'².). As this deadline quietly passed last year, overshadowed by the social and economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, we set out to review the existing policy initiatives, analyse the reasons for stalled progress and propose an agenda for action.

Here we focus on Sub-Saharan Africa where the labour market situation is particularly severe (Sumberg et al. 2020; Filmer and Fox 2014). The populations of sub-Saharan Africa (in particular, Chad, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and South Sudan) are forecast to continue growing until at least 2100, witnessing up to an eight-fold increase in current population sizes by 2100 (Ezeh, Kissling, and Singer 2020). Of the 420 million young people in Africa today, more than 140 million are unemployed and another 130 million are underemployed and/or in working poverty (AfDB 2018, Fox and Kaul 2018). Each year, more than 12 million young people seek formal employment but less than three million wage jobs are created (ILO 2020a). Here we ask: what do we know about the labour market for the young people in Sub-Saharan Africa? What are the common misconceptions concerning youth employment? What course of research and policy action could help the situation?

The significance of youth employment extends beyond national labour policies. The lack of productive employment prospects for young people is believed to have profound impacts on critical global issues such as poverty and migration; it is also believed to increase the risk of social discontent (Escudero and Mourelo 2014). Despite its global relevance, the youth unemployment rates in most African countries are higher today than in 2015, when the SDGs were adopted (O’Higgins 2020). Research on young people classed as NEET in Africa remains scarce, and the existing papers tend to take a country-specific or intervention-specific perspective (Gelb et al. 2009; Pollin, Githinji, and Heintz 2008) while the structural constraints and inefficiencies remain relatively unexplored (Sumberg et al. 2020).

In order to fill this gap, this paper adopts a critical review perspective, scrutinizing the labour market situation of young people in Sub-Saharan Africa. We analyse five strategic intervention areas, exposing counterfactual assumptions and debunking common myths. These are (1) education and training systems are defective, (2) youth micro-entrepreneurship and self-employment offer a panacea, (3) the informal sector is part of the problem and not part of the solution, (4) care work equates to inactivity and (5) the agricultural sector has little potential for job creation. We provide examples of both international policy schemes (the UN’s Youth Employment Network and Global Jobs Pact, African Development Bank’s Jobs for Youth in Africa, African Union Action Plan) and country specific initiatives (like the Youth Revolving Funds in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia). In our analysis, we argue that it is necessary to re-evaluate the existing labour market approaches and to design new policy tools to adequately respond young people’s experiences of work and employment. We conclude with proposing a new, youth-centred research agenda and formulate a call for action to respond to the youth employment crisis with youth-inclusive policy.

With this paper, we aim to contribute to the existing scholarship on youth transitions that the Journal of Youth Studies (JYS) has been curating for the past two decades. We build on the key research on the NEET problematic already published in JYS (see e.g. Holte, Swart, and Hiilamo 2019; Contini, Filandri, and Pacelli 2019; Simmons, Russell, and Thompson 2014; Tamesberger and Bacher 2014; Thompson, Russell, and Simmons 2013; Roberts 2011, 2012; Yates and Payne 2006) and broaden the debate with a critical perspective on the labour market crisis in the Global South. In doing so, we respond to the editorial call from 2019, encouraging greater youth-focused research from the Asia-Pacific region and across the Global South (MacDonald, Shildrick, and Woodman 2019).

The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 introduces the context of SDG Target 8.6, reviewing the critical debate on the utility of the ‘NEET’ concept. We then discuss the available statistics on progress made in relation to young people classed as NEET globally and in Sub-Saharan Africa. Section 4 debunks five common myths and misconceptions regarding youth employment in Sub-Saharan Africa which have collectively distorted understanding and slowed progress for young people categorized as NEET and their contemporaries. Section 5 positions our criticisms in the broader context of political economy of youth employment. Section 6 concludes and presents an ‘agenda for action’.

2. Youth, NEET and the SDGs: a critical analysis of core concepts

Set in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly, the SDGs outline the critical societal goals to be reached by 2020 and 2030 respectively. While SDG 8, concerned with achieving full productive employment and decent work is due only in 2030, Target 8.6, setting out to substantially reduce the global number of NEETs, expired in 2020.

The UN definition delineates the age bracket for the SDG 8.6 NEET category from 15 to 24 and covers both unemployment (i.e. young persons actively seeking employment but not finding any) and inactivity (young persons who withdrew from the labour force). Being NEET is said to have a strong negative impact on physical, emotional, and psychosocial wellbeing of young people (Dickens and Marx 2020) and life-long negative socio-economic consequences, including chronic unemployment and poverty (Backman and Nilsson 2016). While critiqued by some, SDG Target 8.6 engages a pressing societal challenge regarding the declining quality of work worldwide. Gig work and temp jobs are some of the examples of the changing relations of work, leading to the emergence of the ‘precariat’ – a social class of workers who lack work security, predictability, occupational identity and benefits (Standing 2011).

The inclusion of youth employment as an explicit Target in the SDGs represents an appreciation of the dire situation of young people in present-day labour markets (Buheji 2019). The earlier Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) resulted in the Youth Employment Network (YEN) created by the United Nations, International Labour Organization, and World Bank, to mobilize action on the commitment of the Millennium Summit for decent and productive work for young people (UNESCWA 2001). Unfortunately, these efforts proved insufficient: the MDGs progress report from 2015 states that the youth, especially young women, continue to be disproportionately affected by limited employment opportunities and unemployment (UN 2015, 17).

While the inclusion of the NEET category in SDGs validates the concept, in both the sociological and the youth studies literature there is a heated discussion about the current usage of the ‘NEET’ concept. The term originated from educational and social work discourses in the United Kingdom to explore the reasons for social exclusion of young people (Holte 2018; Holte, Swart, and Hiilamo 2019). The correlation between NEET status and certain demographic characteristics is longstanding, with low educational attainment, living in a deprived neighbourhood, low socio-economic status, and barriers to participation like pregnancy or disability being overrepresented among the population categorized as NEET. At the same time, causation attribution is ever changing: depending on timing and context, young people can be excluded and marginalized as either the result of, or the reason for, becoming NEET (Holte 2018; see also Colley and Hodkinson 2001). NEET is a category of population statistics, not a sociological group, essentially, a policy construct (Thompson, Russell, and Simmons 2013). As such, it is argued to have little explanatory power in relation to abstractions such as labour markets, macroeconomic trends and economic and societal costs (Holte 2018, 7) and it is both too broad and too narrow to be an indicator of exclusion from labour markets’ (Furlong 2006).

A number of researchers (Elder 2015; Reiter and Schlimbach 2015) question the usefulness and application of the NEET concept for both research and policy purposes. Colley and Hodkinson critique locating the causes of non-participation (solely) within individuals and their personal deficits (2001, 345) while Yates and Payne argue against defining young people with what they are not, a negatively-perceived label, instead of considering how structural forces shape young people’s lives (Yates and Payne 2006; see also: Robson 2011). O’Higgins and the ILO tease apart the components of the term NEET: the ‘discouraged’, those ‘with family responsibilities’, the ‘disabled’, and a highly diverse ‘other’ group (O’Higgins 2020). Focusing specifically on young people classed as NEET in Africa, Abbott and Teti (2017) distinguish between the unemployed NEETs, those actively seeking employment; the withdrawn (e.g. disabled) and those not actively seeking work as they are on waiting lists for public sector jobs.

It is important to note that definitions and conceptualizations have consequences for policy making, from problem framing to intervention design. Elder (2015) describes how, in policy circles, NEET has become an indicator for not just labour status, but also the generalized well-being of youth. As a result, policies aimed at reducing NEET rates are automatically believed to address a broad range of social vulnerabilities. The NEET label shifts the focus from labour market inefficiencies onto ‘barriers to participation’, often assumed to be the young people’s incapacity or unwillingness to find productive employment. This reduces the complex issue of social and economic opportunity to a supply-side reform, resulting in interventions focused on training, job market information provisioning and career guidance services, while ignoring the structural inefficiencies (Abbott and Teti 2017), in what Yates and Payne (2006) call a ‘fire-fighting’ approach.

In this paper, we remain mindful of these criticisms but we concede to the use of the NEET concept for the sake of congruency with the wider SDG framework. We also note that several core criticisms of the NEET concept stem from its misuse. Discussing youth employment in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa, we look beyond the available statistical data on NEETs and include research from diverse scholarly traditions that tackles youth employment/unemployment at large. Adhering to the UN understanding of NEETs³ would fail to capture the diverse and complex situations of young people in Sub-Saharan Africa, skewing the picture towards a deceptively positive outlook (see Section 3.1 for more detail). This problem has a long tradition in development studies, specifically in the critiques of the global dynamics of knowledge production (see e.g. ‘Northern’ bias of mainstream social science and the ‘Southern perspective’ MacDonald and King 2020; Connell 2007).

3. NEETs: where are we now?

The labour market situation of young people is characterized by extreme disparities in terms of economic, social and cultural resources, which vary greatly across regions, localities and population groups (MacDonald 2011). The main source of data on the progress made in terms of Target 8.6, is the United Nations Statistics Division’s Open SDG Data Hub; however not all countries provide up-to-date statistics. In 2020 ILO published a timely and comprehensive report; in this section, we review its main insights (ILO GET Youth 2020; see also O’Higgins 2020 for a summary).

There are currently around 1.3 billion young people globally, of whom 267 million are classified as NEET. O’Higgins (2020) evidences that progress is stalled and uneven: in 2015, the global NEET rate was at around 21.7 per cent, compared to 22.4 per cent in 2020. In 2020, more than one in five (22.4 per cent) young people in the world were categorized as NEET, the vast majority of them, young women (14.0 per cent of young men compared to 31.2 per cent women). NEET status also appears to be more permanent for young women than for young men. While developed countries reduced their NEET rates in a concerted effort after the economic recession of 2008, in developing countries the numbers (both rates and counts) are still growing. The highest NEET rates are in Southern and Northern Africa and in Southern Asia. Between-country comparisons, however, may be misleading: section 3.1 explains the unique situation of young job seekers in developing countries.

3.1. NEETs and youth employment in Sub-Saharan Africa

Interpreting NEET-related data for Sub-Saharan Africa is a challenging undertaking: almost half of the labour force works in agriculture and up to 90% derive their livelihoods from the informal sector (Chen and Carré 2020). For example, in Uganda, the agricultural sector employs almost 60% of the country’s youth labour force (Jjuuko, Tukundane, and Zeelen 2019). Even though these young people are formally not in education, employment or training, they are de facto subsistence labourers on their family farms (Mukembo et al. 2015). Similarly, in large urban dwellings, a large majority of young people who could potentially be categorized as NEET juggle between different forms of temporary informal employment (such as trading in local market places), education (some drop in- and out- of formal schooling institutions) and training (e. g informal apprenticeships with relatives) (Mwaura 2017).

Studies also show that while the numbers of young people categorized as NEET in Europe and North America tend to rise during periods of economic recession, in Sub-Saharan Africa the rising youth unemployment rates are attributed to population dynamics (‘the youth bulge’, Kraak 2013). For example, a macroeconomic study by Escudero and Mourelo (2014) in Kenya finds that there is a large gap between the youth and the overall employment elasticities in the country, concluding that economic growth alone does not translate into improving employment. As Fox, Senbet, and Simbanegavi (2016) put it, actual unemployment – including youth/NEET unemployment – in sub-Saharan Africa is in fact not that high, as it is considered a luxury to not have to find some work to get by (see also: Porter et al. 2010). For this reason, reports based on standard measures may present a distorted picture of youth unemployment in SSA as lower than in other regions (Betcherman and Khan 2015). The available data on NEETs specifically are scarce. Looking at the data from North Africa, Abbott and Teti (2017) reveal that the vast majority of male NEETs in the region are unemployed, while the majority of female NEETs have full-time caring duties and thus withdrew from the job market (see also O’Higgins 2020). Young people with higher educational attainment and those living in rural areas are at greater risk of being a NEET, though numerically there are more NEETs living in urban than rural areas (O’Higgins 2020).

These trends translate into a grim prognosis for the future. By 2050, sub-Saharan African youth, aged 15–24 (the NEET bracket age) will account for 30 percent of all world youth (Losch 2016). According to Page (2013), three-quarters of these new entrants to the labour market will engage in micro-entrepreneurship, up to 20 percent will find waged jobs, and only 4–5 percent will find a wage-paying job in industry. As a result, only 100 million of the 450 million Africans expected to reach working age over the next two decades can hope to find decent work.

3.2. NEETs’ lives on hold: between the ‘waithood’ and the ‘side hustle’

The data on youth employment in Sub-Saharan Africa are not only discouraging but also seemingly contradictory (Jerven 2013). If young people have no tangible prospects of employment, yet cannot afford to be unemployed due to the lack of welfare support, how are they spending their working lives – how are they ‘getting by’?

Sociological and anthropological researchers introduced two core concepts that capture the unique experience of young job seekers in Africa (Honwana 2012; Singerman 2007; Di Nunzio 2012; Thieme 2013). Referring to the combination of precarious socioeconomic conditions and the lack of employment prospects for young people, Singerman (2007) and Honwana (2012, 2013) coined the term ‘waithood’. ‘Waithood’ is defined as a prolonged, involuntary period of suspension between childhood and adulthood (2012, 1; Jeffrey 2010), when the young people are unable to progress to adulthood and become fully independent members of society. As such, it is not unique to Sub-Saharan Africa, and concerns a number of young people, globally, without tangible job prospects.

While their chronological age may define them as adults, they have not been able to attain the social markers of adulthood: earning a living, being independent, establishing families, providing for their offspring and other relatives, and becoming taxpayers. They are consigned to a liminal space in which they are neither dependent children nor autonomous adults. (Honwana 2013)

This extended youth, or ‘waithood’, is attributed to bad governance and failed neo-liberal social and economic policies that have exacerbated long standing societal problems (Singerman 2007; Honwana 2012, 2013) creating labour market conditions to which young people are particularly sensitive (Barford, Coombe, and Proefke 2020). Even more worrisome, they observe that because of hindrances to social mobility, in many countries in Africa, ‘waithood’ is now becoming a semi-permanent state rather than a transitional stage (Locke and Te Lintelo 2012). This is also true for the so-called ‘transition temp jobs’: having studied employed youth cohorts from 10 African countries between 2012 and 2015, Morsy and Mukasa (2021) refute the human capital theory, which assumes job mismatches are a temporary phenomenon, likely to be resolved as young jobs seekers gain experience.

Apart from causing socio-economic and psychological harm to young people (‘extended liminality’, Honwana 2012), ‘waithood’ also necessitates improvising livelihood strategies (‘survival strategies’). ‘Hustling’, ‘straining’ or ‘getting by’ is the second term that denotes ‘eking out’ a living by the youth in Africa – which stands in stark contrast with the aspiration to ‘make a life’ (see Barford and Coombe 2019; Barford and Cieslik 2019). According to Di Nunzio, ‘a side hustle’ is a form of temporary work performed within the informal economy for a task-based compensation (Di Nunzio 2015; Mwaura 2017). In order to get by, hustlers connect people and provide petty services within the informal sector (e.g. retail and transport) (Di Nunzio 2019). In order to make a living, ‘hustlers’ must build and maintain elaborate networks of social relations within the street economy (Thieme 2013). Juggling several ‘gigs’ at once, young people also learn valuable social skills: navigating social contracts, honouring commitments, negotiating conditions and forging partnerships are important competencies, potentially transferable to many forms of formal and informal employment. At the same time, because of their informal character, these are not considered ‘work experience’ and do not advance the young hustlers’ position on the job market. Other, less recognized responses are volunteering and social work, whereby young people unable to find sufficient work actively contribute to their communities and gain work experience (Barford, Coombe, and Proefke 2021).

4. Debunking common myths

Over the past decade, the struggles that young people are facing on the job market have attracted considerable policy attention. The African Union’s Youth Decade Plan of Action (2009–2018), African Development Bank’s Jobs for Youth programme, and a number of micro-entrepreneurship-based interventions by national governments such as Youth Revolving Funds (Uganda, Ethiopia) and the Youth Enterprise Development Fund in Kenya are all examples of targeted interventions, meant to facilitate young people’s entry into the labour force. In this section, we address a number of false assumptions behind the existing policy responses and recommend alternative approaches.

4.1. Education and training systems are defective

The NEET concept sets up education and training, alongside employment, as core productive activities for youth. Along these lines, the vast majority of youth employment policies build on what Louise Fox et al. (2020) call a ‘deficit model’, based on the proposition that young people in Sub-Saharan Africa simply lack the skills and training that economies and employers need. As a result, the prevailing focus of interventions by both national governments and third sector actors has been on training and skills development, i.e. the supply side of labour markets. Education, training and upskilling programmes for young people have been the backbone of the UN (ILO) and the World Bank interventions since early 2000, in particular after the ILO Resolution on Youth Employment in 2005 (Freedman 2005). At the same time, research evidence demonstrate that education and training programmes have little impact on youth employment when administered in the absence of wider job market policies (McKenzie 2017, Fox & Kaul 2018, Kluve 2017).

When discussing the assumed incapacity of existing education systems, it is worth noting that, over the past twenty years, enrolments in higher education have more than doubled in Sub-Saharan Africa, with higher education systems on the continent expanding at almost twice the global rate (UIS 2019). As a result, the large cohort of young people entering Africa’s labour market today is the best educated to date (Fox, Senbet, and Simbanegavi 2016). The young people most likely to be unemployed in low- and lower-middle-income countries are the most educated (Fox et al. 2020) and the majority of young people classed as NEET in cities are, in fact, university graduates (O’Higgins 2020). This is because the rapid increase in the number of young people in tertiary education has outpaced the demand for highly skilled labour, pushing down graduate wages through the labour supply effect (ILO 2020). Globally, the returns to tertiary education have been declining over the past decade, evidencing that encouraging university enrolment is not, in itself, a solution (Psacharopoulos and Patrinos 2018). As concluded by Sumberg et al. (2020), training does not create jobs, and thus training and skills interventions, though frequently deployed, do not substantially increase youth employment rates (Kluve 2017 talk about a ‘moderate effect’).

The vast literature on youth aspirations offers additional insights here (Arias, Evans, and Santos 2019). Almost half of all employed youth perceive their skills as mismatched with their jobs in terms of education, skills, remuneration and aspirations, finding themselves underemployed in terms of both working hours and professional capacities (AfDB 2020; Barford, Coombe, and Proefke 2021). According to Nordman and Pasquier-Doumer (2014), in-company training and vocational education could be helpful in addressing the skill mismatches, as it often translates into better earnings than pursuing tertiary education (see also Oketch 2014). A comprehensive review of evidence by Adams et al. (2013) reports, for instance, that in Nigeria, technical training raises the chances of being in formal sector employment by 26 percent. While trade-specific formal education is often criticized for lacking the flexibility that the rapidly changing labour market requires (‘transferable skills’), in-company training may offer more relevant training. At the same time, in the absence of proper industry standards and certification schemes, the quality of private training varies, and illegal or predatory traineeships are worryingly widespread (Atchoarena and Esquieu 2002). Developing and upholding skill accreditation and industry certification schemes would help document the newly learnt capabilities of young workers, facilitating job mobility and transitioning towards formal employment (Ng’weno and Porteous 2018).

To sum up, while education and training are valuable activities for personal development as the term NEET implies, these are not enough to solve the structural nature of the employment crisis. That being said, promoting universal education, specifically for girls and young women, remains an issue of paramount importance. Low educational attainment and early entry into the labour market is strongly correlated with poor first job quality, lower wages and higher likelihood of being unemployed at some stage later in life (O’Higgins 2017, 2020).

4.2. Youth micro-entrepreneurship and self-employment offer a panacea

Entrepreneurship programmes have been a central pillar for tackling youth unemployment – in essence, young people are made responsible for creating their own jobs. Africa has the highest entrepreneurship rate in the world, with an average of 22% working-age Africans being self-employed; a percentage that would be even higher if informal sector and smallholder farmers were included (AfDB). According to Langevang and Gough (2012), the shrinking work possibilities in the public sector and the limited opportunities for formal wage employment in the private sector are the main reasons why entrepreneurship has become a cornerstone of youth employment policy in Sub-Saharan Africa (Burchell et al. 2016). There has been a plethora of programmes promoting youth entrepreneurship both nationally (e.g. Youth Revolving Funds in Ethiopia, Uganda and Eswatini, or the USD 10 billion World Bank campaign to support micro and small-scale enterprises, Roy 2010) and locally (see e.g. Fox and Kaul 2018; Flynn et al. 2017). These include two general types of policy interventions: entrepreneurship education (Kamau 2013; DeJaeghere and Baxter 2014) and micro-lending schemes (Omondi and Jagongo 2018; Krause, McCarthy, and Chapman 2016; Ondoro and Omena 2012).

The promotion of entrepreneurship as a development strategy has a long policy tradition (see the seminar writings by Leff 1979) but little success. While some researchers still see entrepreneurship as a panacea also to the youth employment crisis (Abisuga-Oyekunle, Patra, and Muchie 2020; Brixiová, Ncube, and Bicaba 2015), others, like Bateman et al. (2010, 2018), and Roy (2010), argue that micro-entrepreneurship (and microfinance as means to achieve it) has a negative effect on livelihoods and employment. According to Bateman, applying entrepreneurship to near-subsistence contexts results in an over-supply of inefficient microenterprises, leading to market oversaturation, lowering earnings and further endangering informal livelihoods. Di Nunzio (2015) describes entrepreneurship as a ‘last resort’ option for urban youth in Ethiopia, describing how, in most cases, entrepreneurship fails to open up opportunities for social improvement (2015). Kamau (2013) finds very limited effect of the Youth Enterprise Development Fund on livelihoods and empowerment of rural youth in Kenya (see also Kluve 2017; Van Rooyen, Stewart, and de Wet 2012).

There are many reasons for why entrepreneurship-based programmes often fail to deliver on their promises. In an experimental assessment of the Youth Livelihood Programme in Uganda, Bukenya et al. (2019) found that young people tend to spend their first credit endowments on consumptive expenditures to meet basic needs, though coaching programmes might divert them towards investments in health and education. Both, however, can result in over-indebtedness, as microfinance requires regular repayments and fast returns. Compared to adult micro-entrepreneurs, young people have lower social and economic capital which constraints their capacity to manage economic shocks. Grimm, Knorringa, and Lay (2012) draw on the well-known distinction between ‘necessity’ and ‘opportunity’ entrepreneurs, pointing to the structural barriers that constrain successful scale-up of small businesses in Sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, DeJaeghere and Baxter (2014) present a strong critique of applying entrepreneurship as a tool for both: employment creation and poverty alleviation (see also Chigunta 2017). They explain how, through the neoliberal individualization of risk, vulnerable populations are responsibilized to fight poverty the reasons for which are not individual, but systemic/ structural (see also: Aitken 2013).

To sum up, while entrepreneurship and self-employment may work for some, it is unlikely to provide a viable solution to the youth employment crisis. Considering the contextual (in particular, situational and institutional constraints) and personal (individual characteristics and aspirations) factors may help design better entrepreneurship-based programmes for youth but is certainly not a panacea. While the NEET indicator focuses, in part, on getting young people into work, this focus misses critical issues of income, job quality and job security.

4.3 The informal sector is part of the problem and not part of the solution

Informal work has historically been thought of as marginal, characteristic of a transitional stage for growing economies. During the 1970s, informality was expected to decline in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it has instead dramatically expanded. The Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s and 1990s also led to a notable reduction in formal employment, in particular in government jobs. Informality still dominates the contemporary world of work including 80–90% of all workers in Sub-Saharan Africa, comprising family workers, petty traders and self-employed farmers (ILO 2020). The informal economy is so large that most African workers will only ever work informally (Ng’weno and Porteous 2018).

The question of whether the informal sector can provide opportunities for decent and productive work for young people is a point of debate (Chen and Carré 2020). On one hand, informal workers are exposed to greater risks and vulnerabilities, a problem that has been starkly demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Barford 2020). Within the informal sector, young women are at a particular disadvantage, as they tend to work in the least lucrative arenas (WIEGO 2020; Kinyanjui 2014). On the other hand, more young people (a number of them of NEET status) view the informal sector not as a temporary stop while searching for formal employment, but as a preferred destination (Sparks and Barnett 2010). Low barriers of entry are of importance for young people, as well as the sector’s capacity for efficient utilization of scarce resources and stimulating frugal innovation (Chen and Carré 2020). Adams et al. (2017) describe the increasing role of pull factors attracting young people in rural areas to nonfarm informal employment, in particular, higher earnings. They also observe that the age patterns within informality are changing: in Kenya, Nigeria, and Rwanda the proportion of youth in the informal sector is higher than in the formal sector. Skills training and apprenticeships are also more easily available in the informal sector (Breyer 2007) and, in some contexts, the returns to skills within informality are now growing (Adams et al. 2017). Also, the productivity of the informal sector matches or exceeds the productivity of formal enterprises, and provides viable work opportunities (Gelb et al. 2009).

Despite these developments, policy makers routinely disregard the informal sector and very few interventions build on its potential to create jobs. As observed by Onwe, the informal sector has the potential to provide the needed impetus for employment generation though the existing policy responses to growth of the informal sector have not been encouraging (2013, 60; see also Fapohunda 2013). Most ongoing efforts concentrate on the transition towards higher levels of formalization (see e.g. ‘Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy Recommendation’, ILO 2015). This approach is at odds with the diagnosis that ‘while this (informal) sector is unproductive and lacks employee protections, we need to recognize that realistically, it’s where Africa’s youth bulge is going to find their livelihoods’ (Ng’weno and Porteous 2018). In order to harness the job-creating potential of the informal sector, there needs to be a comprehensive and integrated policy strategy that eliminates the negative aspects of informality, while preserving the significant job creation and income-generation potential (ILO 2009) to benefit young people who are out of work.

4.4. Care work equates to inactivity

Care work is widely undervalued and often goes unnoticed, to the extent that many young people are categorized as being NEET despite actively contributing to social reproduction. Policy makers rarely consider the relative absence of care infrastructures in Sub-Saharan Africa as a core labour market entry barrier for young women, assuming that they abstain from paid work by choice. Sections 3.1 and 3.2 already highlighted how women outnumber men amongst young people categorized as NEET, and how young women tend to remain NEET for longer than their male counterparts (O’Higgins 2020). Behind this observation are gendered patterns of access to education, work opportunities, and access to resources; as well as care responsibilities that compound and exacerbate pre-existing gender-based inequalities (Folbre 2014). Globally, women do 3.2 times more domestic and care work than men (ILO 2018). The time spent doing this labour at once prepares the whole household for their days of work and education, but also compromises women’s own labour market prospects due to the time commitment. As social reproductive skills are undervalued, women’s work often goes unrecognized. Women’s vital contributions often translate into lower levels of employment, lower incomes, and higher poverty in female-headed households (Nwosu and Ndinda 2018).

While motherhood and preparation for motherhood is not the sole reason for gender-based disadvantage, it plays a pivotal role. Domestic and care responsibilities sometimes create barriers to accessing better jobs in terms of time, flexibility, and mobility. A study of gender and work in Ghana and Gambia found that girls and young women were more likely to engage in unpaid domestic work, with girls doing a greater range of chores and spending more time on these (Chant and Jones 2005). This research also found that young women sometimes spend more time on paid work too, as a means of contributing to family life, with girls overall doing more paid and unpaid work each day while boys and young men had more time available to focus on their studies (Chant and Jones 2005). In the context of short term, flexible and zero hour contracts (gig work), women also report time shortage and childcare duties as barriers to undertaking paid work (Hunt et al. 2019). While parental responsibilities block options for work, unavoidable work demands also compromise the important role of parenting. Mothers working in the informal economy are often compelled to return to work quickly after childbirth, due to the lack of entitlement to maternity leave and insecurity of their work as well as food insecurity.

Despite the vital importance of care and domestic work, reproductive labour is overlooked, uncounted and addressed by appropriate policy action. By overlooking care and domestic work, terms such as NEET diminish women’s working lives, and care work and housework still evade statistical reporting (Hoskyns and Rai 2007; Chen, Sebstad, and O'connell 1999). This leads us to question what the overrepresentation of young women amongst NEETs means in practice. Many NEET young women seen as excluded from the labour market are likely to be performing essential reproductive labour and need targeted support policies. The reason for SDG Target 8.6 focusing on NEETs then is less to do with the valuable activities carried out by female NEETs, and more to do with its associations with poverty, career trajectories, and longer term economic scarring in a labour market that undervalues the labour, skills and experience involved in caring. For this reason, policy instruments that promote equal sharing of care and domestic duties and investing in accessible and affordable childcare infrastructure need to play a vital role in comprehensive labour policy for youth.

4.5. The agricultural sector has little potential for job creation

Despite the fact that up to 54 percent of Africa's working force relies on agriculture for livelihoods, income and employment, the agricultural sector remains under-explored by researchers and policy makers as a potential source of decent work for youth ( FAO 2018). Fox, Senbet, and Simbanegavi (2016) quote the AfDB/OECD study on Youth Employment (AfDB and OECD 2012) and the McKinsey study on employment and inclusive growth (Fine et al. 2012) as two notable examples where the agricultural sector is not even considered as a viable option for youth employment (see also: Fox and Kaul 2018). The agricultural sector in Africa has faced substantial productivity critique: the transition from labour-intense and subsistence-oriented to commercialized, export-oriented agriculture has been slow, especially in comparison to the earlier Green Revolution in Asia. As a result, Africa's agricultural growth has been driven primarily by expansion of cultivated areas rather than by improved yields. The prevalence of smallholder farms is thought to be the main driver of food insecurity, as the continent remains dependent on an annual food import bill of $35 billion.

At the same time, over the past twenty years, agricultural production has grown more rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa than in any other region of the world; and smallholder farms and family enterprises are the backbone of African economies and the largest employer. While in relative terms the agricultural labour share is in decline, the absolute numbers of workers in agriculture are increasing, and will continue to do so for at least two decades. The agricultural sector has the capacity to absorb labour and is likely to remain the key income source for young people (Betcherman and Khan 2015). According to ILO, farming accounts for over 60% of all youth employment (Losch 2016, 2) and some of the young people classed as NEET are in fact subsistence labourers on their family farms (Brooks et al. 2013). In fact, youth unemployment rates are higher in urban than rural areas, and rural development accounts for 80% of the decline in rural poverty (World Bank 2007). A research paper from Ethiopia by Gutu (2016) challenges the presumption that young people are abandoning agriculture. Whilst young people’s on-farm participation is indeed declining, participation in off-farm agricultural activities is increasing for both men and women (Gutu 2016). This is in line with the research findings by Yeboah et al. (2020), Mabiso and Benfica (2019) and Filmer and Fox (2014).

Nevertheless, recent insights from youth aspirations literature caution about the declining social status of agricultural jobs, observing an increasing gap between these aspirations and rural young people’s expectations about the style of life and level of livelihood that local rural environments and economies can support, making rural employment a choice of ‘last resort’ (Leavy and Smith 2010, 10). Young people in rural areas face multiple forms of exclusion (Kabbani 2019). Infrastructure gaps disconnect them from markets, information and social networks, both physically and virtually (Kabbani 2019). While less likely to be unemployed, rural youth are much more likely to be underemployed as rain-fed smallholder farms do not work full-time year round (Fox, Senbet, and Simbanegavi 2016). Thus, improving infrastructure and investing in off-farm employment should be prioritized for effective labour policy in rural contexts (Betcherman and Khan 2015). While farm productivity is often associated with labour-reducing automation, the strong leverage effects of agriculture reveal the opportunities offered by the rural service economy or of investing in ‘green’ and/or labour-intense climate resilient farming (Christiaensen and Brooks 2018).

Importantly,

when economic opportunities in an area are limited, programs and policies aimed at helping rural youth will generally be ineffective (…). It is not enough to introduce rural youth policies and programs; rather, these policies and programs must function within constrained local opportunity structures and align with a broader rural development agenda. (IFAD 2019)

For this reason, in order to boost the quality of youth employment in rural areas, it is necessary to integrate youth labour policy with wider investments in infrastructure at both national and local levels.

5. The politics of youth employment: SDGs and neoliberalism

Policy processes are inherently shaped by political contexts, at both national and international scales (Gebremariam 2017). For this reason, when discussing the relative underperformance of both the MDGs and the SDGs to date it is necessary to observe that, as policy spaces, they have been infused with the ideology of market fundamentalism. Representing a neoliberal agenda of the World Bank, the IMF and the UN, the Goals were based on the neoliberal growth model that had created many of the problems they seek to address.

In critical development studies literature, these and similar critiques found their expression in the concept of ‘developmentalities’ (Ilcan and Phillips 2010). Developmentalities are a form of governmentality articulated through neoliberal practices: information profiling, responsibilization, and knowledge networks, which in turn shape the perceived capacities of individuals and social groups (Ilcan and Phillips 2010, 844). Both SDGs and MDGs can be construed as policy spaces where developmentalities are performed, through discourses that privilege particular imagined framings and relations. It is through the discursive construction of ‘NEET’ as a social group that the phenomenon of ‘joblessness’ is recast as a capability deficit of young people, leading to reformulated policy solutions (i.e. investment in education and skill training, see Bessant and Watts 2014). As a measurable indicator, ‘NEET’ can also be seen as what Foucault calls a ‘massifying tool’: a statistical construct that purports to represent the past or projected performance of profiled groups, reframing the problem attribution in line with the knowledge–power relationships in development (Merry, Davis, and Kingsbury 2015; see also Jerven 2013).

In a recent article, Sumberg et al. 2020 explain how the so-called ‘youth employment crisis’ is, in fact, a ‘missing jobs crisis’. They point to the growing gap between the employment opportunities and numbers of jobseekers in Sub-Saharan Africa’s labour markets, and explain how stalled structural transformation has affected job seekers of all ages. They conclude that in relatively rare and specific cases … young people face the kind of structural disadvantage or discrimination in the labour market that would warrant a youth-specific framing (Sumberg et al. 2020, 2). Yet, it is this framing that prevails: according to Sukarieh and Tannock (2015), governments control the policy discourse, generating an image of unemployment as a ‘youth problem’ and thereby engineering the burden to young people (see also Abbott and Teti 2017; Gebremariam 2017). Against this background, the five ‘policy myths’ discussed above can be seen as an articulation of a particular political programme that discursively delineates a social group of unemployed young people (or ‘NEETs’). It is the unemployed young people who, supposedly, ‘lack education and skills’ (1) but are also supposed be ‘entrepreneurial’ and create opportunities for themselves (2); who ‘evade’ the rules and regulations of formal employment (3) and ‘choose’ caring for family members over career advancement (4); who migrate to towns because they find no tangible job prospects in the agricultural sector (5). Building on this framing, Sukarieh and Tannock (2015) explain how ‘youth’ is no longer a descriptor, but an ideological construct shaped by the state and global capitalism (see also Côté 2014). Focusing on NEETs as a discursively constructed ‘problematic’ social group may result in ineffective or mis-targeted policies. Not only is the label deceptively homogenizing (while the group of young unemployed is remarkably diverse), it is also used in misleading ways which focus policy responses on the supply side, missing the larger picture of malfunctioning labour markets.

6. Conclusion: agenda for research, agenda for action

In this paper, we have sought to offer an update on the state of youth employment in Sub-Saharan Africa, motivated by the 2020 expiry of the unmet SDG Target 8.6. We have focused upon the persistent challenges facing young people in the region, discussing and dispelling five myths, which have been translated into policies and practices. The dominant approaches to youth employment questioned in this paper are: that education and training systems are not working, that we can rely upon young people solving labour market problems through their own ingenuity and entrepreneurialism, as well as the undervaluing of the work in care, informal economy and agriculture. The first – the criticism of existing education and training systems – implies that the main barriers to youth employment are questions of supply side training, despite a wide recognition that there is a structural deficit of work (e.g. Fox et al. 2020). The second suggests that young people are best positioned to create these missing jobs, and while some may be enterprising entrepreneurs, it is not a viable option for all (Fox et al. 2020). Finally, the unrecognized work (existing and potential) in care, agriculture and the informal sector needs to be acknowledged and supported by both policy and intervention.

This paper contributes a structured literature review spanning development economics, sociology, anthropology and geography. We conclude that while youth employment is a multi-faceted problem, the current focus on the supply side needs to be balanced with serious engagement with demand side interventions Contini, Filandri, and Pacelli (2019), Tamesberger and Bacher (2014) and Yates and Payne (2006) argue that policy makers need to recognize the heterogeneity of unemployed young people beyond the NEET label. It is necessary to look beyond the assumed incapacities of young people and focus on how structural forces such as the political economy shape young people’s lives (Holte, Swart, and Hiilamo 2019, 256; see also: Anyanwu 2013).

Even though youth employment might have gone down the priority ladder because of the current COVID-19 health and socio-economic crisis, it is crucial to think ahead and design appropriate policy responses. Recognizing the important role that research plays in evidence-informed policy, we formulate an agenda for research and action that could fuel potent and inclusive approaches to youth employment crisis, capture the demographic dividend, and bring us closer to meeting Target 8.6:

• (1). The starting point to addressing the employment challenge is reframing the problem. The ‘NEET’ label derives from the deficit policy model, based on the proposition that young job seekers lack the skills and training that economies and employers need. Integrating the macro-economic picture (‘missing jobs crisis’) is as important as including the heterogeneous voices of the public and private sectors, as well as the jobseekers themselves.

• (2). Formal education systems in Sub-Saharan Africa have been developing dynamically and successfully over the past twenty years. However, formal education and training alone is not enough to meet the demands of the fast-changing labour markets. Vocational and technical education, as well as on-the-job training, can boost young people’s performance on the job market. However, without job creation this may just result in shifting the order of who gets a job while not increasing labour market success. More research is needed to develop, monitor and assess vocational training schemes, in particular in the private sector.

• (3). Entrepreneurship, self-employment and micro-credit–based youth activization programmes, while immensely popular, rarely result in stable and sufficient income-generating opportunities. While financial literacy schemes, micro-lending and mentoring programmes can increase success rates of microenterprises, system-level changes are needed to create to create labour market demand (wage jobs) that the majority of young people crave.

• (4). The schism of formal vs. informal sector can be unproductive. The informal sector offers potential for job growth, and policy engagement could steer the quality and quantity of these new jobs. Skills, training and experience gained in the informal economy should be recognized to enable workers to shift between the informal and formal sectors by developing and promoting accreditation and certification schemes. More research is needed to find ways to transition towards formality; in the meantime, informal workers require effective social protection.

• (5). Young women often withdraw from active market participation because of caring and domestic responsibilities but are incorrectly labelled as ‘economically inactive’. Programmes to boost women’s participation in labour markets need to go beyond ensuring equal access to schooling and work opportunities. Accordingly, policy campaigns advocating for equal sharing of care and domestic work, as well as improving childcare infrastructure and affordability, are important considerations for gender-sensitive labour market policy.

• (6). In order to capitalize on the rapidly growing agricultural sector and create job non-agricultural work opportunities in rural areas it is necessary to disincentivize rural-urban migration. Options for this include improving rural infrastructure and providing tangible growth opportunities to young farmers through support services, and increased investment in agricultural technology. Empowering local governments and farmer associations can strengthen existing regional agricultural institutions.

• (7). Engaging young people in research and policy design offers a pathway to addressing their needs through better-informed, context-specific interventions. There is a substantial scope for engaged action research. By facilitating youth empowerment, agency and activism, academics and practitioners may help bridge the gap between problem appraisal and framing, expectations and opportunities and surface discourse versus lived reality.

The youth employment challenge in Sub Saharan Africa is enormous: 10–12 million additional young people entering the labour market each year (Ackah-Baidoo 2016). Without decisive and effective interventions which are sensitively designed to work at scale, demographic trends combined with the increasing pressures of climate change will further exacerbate the severity of this challenge. Given the near ubiquity of informal work and agricultural work, and the absolute necessity for care work, we propose this as a focus for quality job creation moving forwards. The early failure in meeting the 8.6 Target needs to become a turning point for SDG 8, ensuring it is not missed again in 2030, and bringing us closer to Decent Work for All.

Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our thanks to Alex Kent, the International Director of Strategy of the youth-led development agency, Restless Development, for our discussions on SDG Target 8.6. We would also like to express our gratitude to the Restless Development team and their inspiring group of young leaders from developing countries (the ‘Game Changers’) for the many stimulating discussions held at the ‘Getting By: the Youth Employment Agenda’ workshop (Cambridge 2019). We thank Safiya Ahmad and Kate Brockie for their comments on this paper. Katarzyna Cieslik acknowledges the funding from the Philomathia Social Science foundation. Anna Barford acknowledges the funding from Unilever.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal8

2 https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal8

3 Persons not in full-time International Standard Classification of Education System, not in a non-academic learning activity such as vocational training, and not performing any form of work in exchange for money full time or part time, for more than one hour in the reference week of the survey. Source: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/