CENTRE FOR CITIZENS’ PARTICIPATION ON THE AFRICAN UNION
POLICY BACKGROUND PAPER
ON
ACCELERATING YOUTH EMPOWERMENT TO CATALYZE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND PRODUCTIVITY IN AFRICA
“Every generation must rise out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, either fulfil it or betray it.” Franz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
Introduction
The challenge for Africa is clear with about 62 per cent of Africa’s overall population falling below the age of 35 and more than 35 per cent of these between 15 and 35 years old. This is clearly a key focus group but more interestingly and critical is how their lives are defined. More than half of youth survive on less than US$ 2 a day. 6,000 young people are infected with HIV/AIDS everyday all over the world; most of them are young girls in Sub-Saharan Africa. These are not just numbers; they are realities of young people.
The picture above paints issues around youth development, empowerment and leadership. These issues are increasinglyfinding footing around the development agenda of national governments, regional entities and internationaldevelopment organizations. This is in realization that increased investment in youth development yields greater economic growth and social wellbeing for generations to come. Missed investments in young people’s intellectual and human potential are a missed opportunity for generations and also costly to reverse, both for youth and for society. In order to achieve the positive outcomes in the areas of education, employment, health and citizenship, to fight poverty among the youth, a holistic approach to youth development must become an urgent matter that should focus on, not only on young people themselves, but also on all the related factors that help shape their behaviours, such as families, communities, schools, media, the legal environment and different established systems of values and social norms.
The concept of Sustainable development captures the need to view the environment through linking the capacities of natural systems with the social challenges facing humanity. As early as the 1970s "sustainability" as a concept was focused on describing an economy in balance with the ecological support system, thereby marking three constituent parts: environmentalsustainability, economic sustainability and socio-political sustainability.
In 1987, the United Nations released the Brundtland Report, defining sustainable development as 'development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ Therefore Sustainable development is a pattern of resource use that aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come.
Clearly there is a close affinity between sustainable development and economics. There is therefore a demand for the need for change itoday's direction of development and today's ways of economic life and thought. Ingeneral, the new economics should bring a more radical perspective tosustainable development, and implies more far-reaching changes, than mainstream perspectives. It should emphasis the need, as part of the shift to sustainable development, to move:
- Away from a business-centered economic system, towards a more people-centered system, and;
- Away from money-measured growth as the principal economic target and measure of success, towards sustainability in terms of real-life social and environmental and economic variables.
- State of the Youth in Africa:
Africa is the youngest region in the world, according to the African Youth Report. 62 per cent of the population falls below the age of 35 whereas 35 per cent are those between 15 – 35 years.Accounting for the largest segment of the population, the youth are at the centre of societal interactions and transformations. Yet the youth are often placed at the margins of the public sphere and major political, socio-economic, and cultural processes. The challenging situation on the continent today makes young people particularly vulnerable. Many have little or no access to education, employment and livelihoods, healthcare and basic nutrition. Over the past decades, political conflict, armed violence, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic created a crisis of unprecedented proportions for younger generations of Africans.Within this stressful environment, how do young people organize and make sense of their daily lives? How do they negotiate their private and public roles and envision their futures?
The continuing debate on who is a ‘youth’ in Africa has not resolved the confusion surrounding the concept. Not surprisingly, therefore the concept of ‘youth’ has been used differently and by different governments, NGOs and the public in general in many African countries and elsewhere in the world (Mkandawire, 1995). In much of Africa for instance, laws define ‘adulthood’ as commencing from the age of 21, although in recent years there has been an attempt to lower this age to 18 years (Mkandawire 1995). However, for most countries, 21 years still remains the age at which many activities and responsibilities of ‘adulthood’ are assumed legally.
Despite all the difficulties they face, young people in Africa are actively participating in social, economic, and political developments and, in the process, constructing their own identities. They are often viewed simultaneously as creative and destructive forces. Indeed, youth have been at the forefront of major social transformations, whether in politics, economics, religion, popular culture, or community building. Young people often shape and express political aspirations in surprising ways. They are at the frontier of the reconfiguration of geographies of exclusion and inclusion and the categories of public and private. Young people in Africa have the capacity to fracture public space, and reinvent or even bypass it, in the same way they shattered the nationalist projects of the post-independence state. In economic terms, the youth are major players in new informal economies and processes of globalization, as well as in the delineation of alternative local forms of modernity.
Creative and innovative forms of popular culture—theatre, arts, music and dance—are often the exclusive domain of the young as they create, reinvent, and domesticate global trends into local forms. In terms of community building, the youth are important actors in redefining and restructuring existing models of kinship and moral patterns of reciprocity and solidarity. More than anyone else, they are the ones who undergo, express, and provide answers to the crisis of existing communitarian models, structures of authority, gerontocracy, and gender relations. The youth are the focal point of the many changes that characterize the contemporary African scene, afloat between crisis and renewal.
A fundamental paradox one should address is: how can we understand the youth invarious African contexts as both makers and breakers of society, while they are simultaneously being made and broken by that society? How can we situate their lives in the present, grasp the meanings revealed in their shaping of a future, and ground both in an understanding of the past? None of these aspects of young people’s lives can be adequately understood if examined in isolation. This collection of influences reflects the full complexity of the interaction between the youth, the family, the society, and the world. A myriad of factors make the youth a highly heterogeneous category in terms of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and political position, as well as age. These categories intersect in multiple, often unexpected, ways and interact on different planes simultaneously.
As ‘makers’ of society, the youth contribute to the structures, norms, rituals, and directions of society while also being shaped by them. They make themselves, through inventive forms of self-realization and an ingenious politics of identity (DeBoeck 1999), and they make society by acting as a political force, as sources of resistance and resilience, and as ritual or even supernatural agents and generators of morality and healing through masquerade and play (Argenti 2001; Drucker-Brown 1999; Gottlieb 2000; Goldman 1998). On the other hand, they appear as ‘breakers’ in various ways: as risk factors for themselves through suicide, drug use, alcohol, and unsafe sex; by breaking societal norms, conventions, and rules; sometimes by breaking limbs and lives; and sometimes by breaking the chains of oppression, as the role of young people in Tunisia and Egypt so powerfully illustrated early 2011. Young people constantly shake and shape society but are also shaped and shaken by it. Finally, the youth are pushed, pulled, and coerced into various actions by encompassing structures and processes over which they have little or no control: kin, family, community, education, media, technology, the state and its decay, war, religion, tradition and the weight of the past, and the rules of the global market. In the process they are frequently broken, put at risk, and destroyed by unemployment, exploitation, war, famine, rape, physical mutilation, poverty, homelessness, lack of access to education and medical facilities, and HIV/AIDS (Dawes and Honwana, 1996; Honwana 1997; Scheper-Hughes and Sargent, 1998).
In Africa, until recently, forces of rebellion emanating from the youth, as from other
Subaltern groups such as women were structurally embedded in social dynamics by whichRitualized moments of anti-structure channelled these counter-currents and strengthened the social equilibrium through a pleiad of rites of passage and other rituals of initiation or age-grade associations (Richards 1956; Turner 1967). The counter-hegemonic reversal of roles and behaviour associated in the West with adolescence and teenage counter-culture were liberated, socially channelled, and ritually embedded within the overall social system. In this way, rather than threatening society, forces emanating from liminal moments and spaces reinforced and replenished the societal whole. In this respect, one could even say that a social category ‘youth’ or ‘adolescent’ did not exist in the African context. The question which then arises is whether the recent emergence of ‘youth’—with its multiple subcultures expressed in terms of dress, music, specific modes of violence, and the emergence of new cooperative units such as gangs and ‘écuries’ which have replaced more traditional kin-based, ethnic, andmultigenerational associations—is linked to a more general societal crisis in which theprocessual transformations from boy to man and from girl to woman have lost their social significance enhancing a taken-for-granted status.
When and how have young people become a‘problem’ or a ‘lost generation’ in the African scene? When and how have conflict, socialtension, and rebellion become signs of a crisis of youth (Richards 1995) rather than thatage-group’s normal condition, expressed and ordered to reinforce the societal order? What does it mean when disempowered youths force their way to the centre of society and when their subaltern grammar of protest becomes the leading one? In order to understand thesetransformations, we need to reassess the conflict analysis model propagated by Gluckman and the Manchester school (Jabri 1996). We must move beyond Gluckman’s processual framework to a more action-oriented analysis of young people’s individual strategies and aspirations while simultaneously placing individual actors in a broader, diachronic social context. If youth is commonly perceived in the process of becoming rather than being, then youngpeople are in a perfect position to navigate and control the new geographies and chronologies ofglobalization.
As Harvey has pointed out in his germinal work on The Condition ofPostmodernity, globalizing forces are played out in accelerating and intensifying rounds ofspace/time compression. Time becomes spatialized, annihilating place as the site of being(Harvey, 1989, 2000). When the Comaroffs describe young people’s use of the internet as a newform of transnational activism which transforms local places of youth expression into a globalcyberspace, they refer precisely to youths’ ability to tap into globalizing spatial politics as anewly found source of power. But the majority of Africa’s young people are still excluded fromparticipation in this new transnational form of empowerment. For many young people in Africa,the possibilities of becoming seem constantly curtailed by cultural, political, and economicalconstraints that work hegemonically to pin them down to localized place and imprison them in aprecarious and fragile state of being.
- Issues around Youth Empowerment:
There are roughly 800 million young people in Africa. They are entering the different sectors of society in large numbers, putting immense pressures on governments in Africa to wake up and face new challenges. These include the increased need for jobs and livelihoods, and the growing need for health care and education thereby increasing the stress on the environment. Social and economic disparities continue to grow, increasing the number of people living below the poverty line each day. High levels of unemployment and rapidly deteriorating standards of living are resulting in destructive social unrest and dangerous levels of tension. These statistics, so being as they are, reveal little of the heavy toll that unemployment and underemployment takes on young people, their families and communities through economic hardship, human suffering, social exclusion and loss of production.
The population in Africa is becoming more youthful, with youth as a proportion of the total population projected at over 65% by 2015, due to the high fertility rate underlying the demographic momentum. Therefore any serious policy for social, political and economic development in Africa must recognize the importance of young people, especially in promoting social progress, reducing political tension and maximizing economic performance. The pace, depth and scope of any society’s development depend on how well its youth resources are nurtured, deployed and utilised.
Experience shows that when given the opportunity, young people can be intrepid innovators, productive workers, enterprising entrepreneurs, active union members and valued customers. Young people are at the forefront of the information and communication technologies revolution. Young people are societies’ artists and athletes. Young people are invaluable partners for social development bringing creativity, enthusiasm and leadership to the table. Permanent and profound damage is caused when their contributions are excluded.
The challenge for all stakeholders is to generate sufficient opportunities for all young people to use their talents, experience and aspirations – doing so under conditions of freedom, security, equality and human dignity. This challenge is indeed enormous. There are two choices. Take appropriate action now and reap the rewards in terms of productive, stable, secure and inclusive societies; or do little and continue to pay massive human, social and economic costs.
- Mechanisms, Programmes and Initiatives on Youth & Development:
For Africa to rediscover itself, investment on the youth must be made. To give substance and commitment to the development of the African youth, development frameworks have been adopted at the continental, regional and national level. These frameworks act as instruments for addressing the question of development from a youth centric point of view.
The World Plan of Action for the Youth:In 1995, the General Assembly of the UnitedNations adopted the World Programme of Actionfor the Youth (WPAY) as an international strategyfor addressing more effectively the problems ofyoung women and men and to increaseopportunities for their participation in society. Thiswas the international community's response to thechallenges facing youth, recognising that theimagination, ideals and energies of young womenand men are vital for the continuing development ofthe societies in which they live.Through WPAY, governments committed to bemore responsive to the aspirations of youth for abetter world, as well as to the demands of youth tobe part of the solution rather than part of theproblem.The WPAY covered an initial ten priority areas.Subsequently, the United Nations GeneralAssembly in 2003 adopted five additional areas. Ineach of these areas, the WPAY looks in-depth at thenature of the challenges and presents proposals foraction. The priority areas are interrelated andintrinsically linked.The WPAY has been established for governments touse as blueprints in their youth development efforts.
The African Youth Charter: The African Youth Charter provides Governments, the Youth, Civil Society and International Partners, with a continental framework, which, underlines to the rights, duties and freedoms of youth. It also paves the way for the development of national programmes and strategic plans for their empowerment. Key to it is that it calls for constructive involvement of Youth in the development agenda of Africa and their effective participation of in the debates and decision-making processes about the development of the continent. The Charter sets a framework to enable policy makers to mainstream Youth issues in all development policies and programmes. It thus provides a legal basis for ensuring Youth presence and participation in government structures and forums at national, regional and continental levels. The charter also provides important guidelines and responsibilities of Member States for the empowerment of Youth in key strategic areas, namely Education and skills development, Poverty Eradication and Socio-economic Integration of Youth, Sustainable Livelihoods and Youth Employment, Health, Peace and Security, Law Enforcement, Sustainable Development and Protection of the Environment. It is expected that the execution of these guidelines would not only provide the youth with necessary tools for livelihood but also stem the flow of Africa's most important resource to other parts of the world.
The NEPAD Youth Programme: The strategic framework provides policy guidelines for NEPAD to mobilise public and private sector support for youth empowerment. It describes the relationship NEPAD will foster with Regional Economic Communities, the African Member States and continental and regional youth formations with respect to issues affecting young men and women. The framework aims to halt the marginalisation of young people in socio-economic development and encourage the integration of youth issues into decision making processes and structures. Furthermore, the NEPAD youth strategic framework recommends some institutional arrangements that allow young people to add value to the work of the community based organisations and development agencies.