Tag: youth

Managing Africa’s ticking youth time bomb – the case from Kenya

In June 2024 Kenya’s youth, thousands of Gen-Z, did something extraordinary, they had enough. They came out onto the streets demanding the government drop a punitive tax bill, the finance bill, and tackle corruption and waste in government spending instead. In events, that shocked Kenya and the world the police response to the protests was heavy handed and tragic resulting in multiple fatalities, and protestors stormed parliament. Despite calling the out the army, President Ruto had to concede and withdrew the finance bill and later fired his cabinet, but the young protestors have not stopped demanding fundamental changes in the way their government is run.

The events in Kenya are not unique, Africa has seen youth revolts in North Africa (the Arab spring), Nigeria (End SARS) and in South Africa (Fees Must Fall). More importantly, the underlying conditions that led to the protests exist across the continent. A young and growing population, frustrated by economies that offer no jobs, no prospects, run by unresponsive and corrupt governments, with old men in charge. Many of these governments, are heavily indebted, having borrowed irresponsibly when money was cheap, and are now reliant on the IMF and others for support. The conditions of that support require more tax revenue, resulting in punitive taxes that over burden already struggling people.

The Finance Bill in Kenya was the trigger that set off the time bomb of disaffected youth without realistic prospects, who are angry at a government that will not listen and is wastefully corrupt and opulent while they struggle. Where to next, how do we avoid this happening again, in a way those young people don’t loose faith in democracy and turn to more radical and destructive.

Ironically the answer to the ticking time-bomb, lies in the grievances that drove it. African governments need to focus on developing and driving a radical agenda for growth that creates jobs and opportunities. As well as evolving systems of government to be more democratic, more engaging and more accountable.

Radical growth

Africa needs growth and jobs. If we are to ensure that African citizens can have dignified lives, we need to create jobs, livelihoods and incomes. As I wrote in a previous post, with jobs individuals and households have incomes, the ability to pay for housing, healthcare, recreation and invest in the future. In short with jobs come agency and dignity both for people and the nation, and dignity is at the core of any viable definition of development.

African governments must be laser focused on creating the growth and jobs needed if any significant headway is to be made. This means

These are not new ideas, or revolutionary ones. However, doing them well requires African governments to shake off their normal way of doing things which has not worked for the 70 years and focus. Not on what will enrich them as individuals or what will please donors, but what will create jobs and growth.

Engagement – responsive democracy

Our systems of governance are not fit for purpose. Most of them are jerry rigged versions of whatever colonial system had been left to us. Most post-independence leaders were focused on maintaining control of fragile post-colonial states, and thus centralised power. The democratic resurgence of the post-cold war era, focused largely on holding elections, rather than creating democratic systems that engaged with citizens and were responsive to their needs.

It is now critical that Africa create governance systems that engage and involve everyone, especially, young people who feel disenfranchised. At the core of this is three critical things.

  1. African governments must communicate. Not just when they have made decision, but their decision-making process. Tell people what the issue or choice is, the trade offs, and the options. When they intend to do some thing and when it has its impacts. Too much policy and government action on the continent is a surprise. With the rationale a complete mystery and its impacts unexplained. Kenya’s Finance Bill was never properly explained to its populace, the thinking behind it was locked in the heads of the National Treasury’s senior directors. Thus, it is no surprise that Kenyans rejected a bill that was going to make them worse off without it being explained to them why.
  1. African governments must engage with their citizens as a matter of course, in the conception, development and implementation of policy. Thus its time for governments to consider ideas such as participatory budgeting, where people are intimately involved in budget conception and development ensuring that money is spent on citizens priorities.
  1. Strengthening democracy and accountability. It is clear that voting is not enough. That our current systems of democracy, does not properly hold our leaders to account and moreover the incentives inherent in the system are skewed towards people getting into to politics and leadership for the wrong reasons.

A wake-up call

The Gen-z protests in Kenya are both a wake-up call and a reason for hope. A wake up call in that its clear that young African’s do not have unlimited tolerance for hopeless circumstances. African governments must be more engaged and responsive, and most importantly focus on the growth and jobs that our young people desperately want and need.

The protests are also a reason for hope. The young Kenyans who have come out to march and braved police brutality, are not looking to burn the system down. Rather they were looking to make it work, to make it accountable, to reset our governance processes to so that they work to ensure dignity for all rather than wealth for a few.

African governments must be proactive, and respond to their young people, or they may lose patience, and rather than make the system work, choose to tear it all down.

Ending violence against women is critical for development in Africa

“I dedicate this Nobel Prize to women of all countries in the world, harmed by conflict and facing violence every day… To the survivors from all over the world, I would like to tell you that through this prize, the world is listening to you and refusing to remain indifferent. The world refuses to sit idly in the face of your suffering. – 2018 Nobel Peace Prize co-laureate Denis Mukwege (Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad were jointly awarded the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for “their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”)

There is a curse hanging over Africa, it is called gender-based violence. And that curse is holding back the economic, social and cultural development of the continent. Forcing half of Africa to live in fear for their lives, prosperity and sanity. If Africa is to develop, if Africa is to end poverty and provide a decent quality of life to all her peoples it cannot be done when women are regularly brutalised and oppressed.

My conception of development is that it means a life with dignity for all. At the core of dignity is security, the security of individuals, communities and their property. Thus, for Africa to develop we must end violence against women to ensure the security of all, and national policy has a critical role to play. First, we must understand gender-based violence and crucially ensure that women have a visible, and powerful say in how our societies are governed. Secondly, over the short term, policy must provide for properly trained and funded police, courts and prosecutors who can more effectively deter, detect, investigate and prosecute violence against women. Over the medium to long term, policy can be used to educate our children and young men in a way that engages them with positive conceptions of masculinity and femininity.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of the policies that governments could and should pursue to tackle a difficult and painful issue. Rather, it is merely, as always suggestions and thoughts that I hope will contribute to a discourse that will engage with, and help end gender-based violence in Africa.

Facing up to the truth

The first step too solving any problem is acknowledging and understanding it. Thus, the first policy is that governments across the continent must acknowledge that violence against women is a critical problem. It is only when you acknowledge a problem that you can marshal the resources and moral standing to deal with it. This is what was required when the AIDS epidemic swept through the continent, it was only when governments got their heads out of the sand and acknowledged the problem, did we start to slow its devastation. And the evidence, around the continent, shows that violence against women is like aids, a social, cultural and economic disaster.

  • A recent report in Ghana looking at the social and economic consequences of violence against women lays the consequences out in stark detail. The report found that; 43% of women with partners or spouses had experienced abuse in their relationships in the last 12 months. 24% of women reported experiencing workplace violence, and 18% of women have experienced violence in public spaces.
  • In South Africa, the national statistics agency reported in June 2018 that the murder rate for women increased by 117% between 2015 and 2017 and the number of women who experienced sexual offences increased by 53%.
  • The 2014 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (KDHS) reported 45% of women in Kenya have experienced physical violence since the age of 15.
  • A UN report showed that Lesotho has the highest rates of female homicide at 18.9 per 100,000.
  • A study by the ministry of women’s affairs and social development and the United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA) in Nigeria found out that 28% of Nigerian women aged 25-29 have experienced some form of physical violence since age 15, in a country of 194 million people, even this 23% figure translates into millions of women suffering physical and sexual violence.

This is a crisis. Economically, for example, the report from Ghana lays bare the high economic costs violence against women. The report estimates that means the Ghanaian economy loses US$ 286 million (0.4% of GDP) in lost productivity alone. However, gender-based violence doesn’t just affect the economy its impacts are social and intergenerational. Gender violence deepens poverty by forcing many women to spend what little disposable income they have on medical care as a result of violence, or to miss work and the opportunities therein. Millions of school days per year are missed due to children’s exposure to the violence inflicted on their mothers. Violence against women is used to oppress women’s participation in civil, political and cultural spaces, a crucial tool that the parade of bad leaders that pervade the continent use to keep themselves in power.

Our nations, their economies, governance, society, culture and our children suffer. Violence against women is an epidemic that impoverishes all of Africa in multiple ways and needs to be stopped.

So, when we have acknowledged the problem of violence against women, we need to understand what causes it and thus start formulating the policies needed to stop it. That means making women’s voices heard.

Visibility and real power

The first policy we must pursue is engaging women not only through surveys and studies but also ensuring that there are civil, political and social spaces where women’s voices cannot only be heard but have real power, that can actively shape and implement the policy responses to gender-based violence.

This means ensuring that there is engaged public participation. By engaged I mean actively pursuing women’s views rather than just seeking the submission of their thoughts. It means ensuring that on the committees, working groups and teams that end up writing the policies, regulations and laws there is gender equity. It means actively pursuing gender equity in our politics, and that will likely require explicitly reserving seats for women in parliament and government as Rwanda does. I am personally in favour of having gender equity in political representation (that half of all representatives must be women). However, in a continent with as much diversity as ours, there will be no blanket solution that works in each country, society and community, the only way that context can be integrated into the policy responses is through the participation of the people in those communities, particularly women in shaping those responses.

Short term – enforcement

In the short term, policies have to focus on deterring violence against women, enforcing the law and providing the means for victims to heal. This would entail a number of measures but at the forefront is law enforcement. All African states have some form of criminal code, and many have gender equity laws. However, their enforcement has been lacking.

African governments should explore the creation of specialised domestic violence and sexual assault units. It is not an outlandish suggestion most African police have specialised anti-theft, criminal investigation, traffic, riot, anti-terror etc. units. The creation of a police unit that is specifically trained to investigate and prosecute violence against women and sexual harassment. Not only increasing the rate at which perpetrators are caught and jailed for their crimes but also treat the victims with respect making it more likely that women will actually report crimes.

Second, are the courts. Judges and magistrates need to be trained to handle gender violence and sexual assault cases, and not simply dismiss them on account of social or cultural norms.

Third, are prosecutors. Funding public prosecutors who are specifically detailed to prosecute domestic abuse, sexual assault and harassment, workplace harassment, child abuse, and female genital mutilation. Ensuring that court cases don’t get lost in the complexities of the criminal justice system and give the victims a greater chance at justice. These are short term policies, that, if properly implemented could have an immediate impact. Deterring crime and giving women justice.

Long term – education and culture

In the long term, simply improving the ability of law enforcement and the courts to investigate and prosecute these crimes won’t be enough. We must address the aspects of our culture, society and politics that enable violence against women.

Over the long-term education is the key. We can liberate our children, especially boys, from the societal expectations and cultural norms that perpetuate gender-based violence. By integrating gender, positive masculinity and respect into our school curriculums (as they have done in this school in Rwanda). Comprehensive gender education, where young men and women are not only taught how to respect each other but can engage frankly with negative aspects of society and culture that they themselves have encountered will help, over the long term, to get rid of the norms that make people think its alright to hit your wife, for a lecturer to harass his female students, or try and bully a female colleague at work into going out with you. Across the continent, there are a number of countries looking to review and reform their education curriculums to make them more applicable to the fast-evolving global economy and society in which we live. One of the aspects they should be adding to curricula is positive gender education. Once again it is important to reiterate, that local economic, social and cultural content must be integrated into positive gender education, where the causes of gender-based violence in those communities and countries are not only studied but are also specifically integrated into positive gender education curricula.

Conclusion

Violence against women hurts all of us, and in doing so it hinders the development of our continent. Development requires not just growing economies and building new roads but improvement in the lives of all African’s. Part of that is the safety and security of all citizens, for both men and women. Violence against women disempowers half of our citizens. It makes us poorer, politically socially and culturally. It hobbles our economies. And it shackles the next generation, scarring them emotionally, hampering them economically and perpetuating the culture that enables violence against women.

This need not be the case. Our governments must acknowledge that violence against women is a threat to Africa and make sure that Africa’s women are at the forefront of crafting the responses and policy initiatives from the government can make a real difference.

Public Service Reform – Making African Governments Work

A key element in development is effective government. Lots of countries around the continent have policies, plans and blueprints coming out of their ears, many of them fantastic. The problem is actually implementing these policies. Furthermore, governments are not just implementing agencies they also provide a range of public services to their citizens. However actually using these services often means navigating a minefield of corruption, bureaucracy and inefficiency that is both demoralising and dehumanising. Effective service delivery is just as important as effective development policy implementation and at the centre of both is the public service and its failings.

This is not a new problem, and over the last three decades, we have seen multiple efforts (usually donor-funded) around the continent aimed at reforming the public service, to be more efficient, effective, relevant and cost less. The problem with many of these efforts is that they are top-down, often designed externally that do not properly consider the people that they are trying to reform or the people in whose name the reforms are being pursued. To effectively reform the African bureaucracies, we have to rethink how we think about public service reform policy.

What is the point?

As with any policy, public service reform must have a goal at its core. Goals that are understandable to the wider public and local in their origin.

Most public service reform efforts are highly technical focusing on cost driven issues around wages, performance tracking and enhancement and efficiency. These things are important, but they are not visible. And when reforms are not visible, they cannot be seen and felt by the public at large, which means the reforms will run into political and institutional resistance. Most studies of public service reform efforts emphasise the need to depoliticise the public service and get political support for reforms. However, while political support is useful it is not a necessary condition for reform. If the reforms are visible, understood and can be felt by the public then political support can be formed from public support rather than the other way round.

With this in mind, it is crucial to ensure that the goals of public service reform are not purely back office, metrics-based ones but goals that have an impact on citizen-facing services. This ensures that you can bypass political resistance and that the reforms are rooted in local concerns.

Reforming bureaucracy is about people

Often, when public service reform is talked about in terms that dehumanise it. It’s about reforming systems, and structures, the target is a faceless bureaucracy, which no one likes. That’s all good and well until you remember that those bureaucrats are people, with concerns and aspirations of their own, families to support and careers they wish to protect. Too often public service reform is something that is done to people rather than with them. If you want your reforms to stick you need to get the buy-in of the people you are trying to reform. The public sector has decades of experience in appearing to comply with or blocking action. If you want compliance and reform, then it requires that reforms be done with the people in public agencies and departments. They must have a voice, feel that their concerns are taken seriously and have the goals of the reforms explained to them. In short, you cannot do public service reform without the buy-in of a key stakeholder, the public servants themselves.

The second area in which public service reform is about people is culture. All organisations and institutions develop a culture, which informs how people view and do their jobs, and the goals of their organisation. The public service has a culture, an ethos. For sustainable public service reform, you need to change that culture and ethos. The first key to that is making the public service something to be proud of. Explain and emphasising the role that public servants play, and its potential to make a positive impact. Working in the public service shouldn’t be something that causes others to roll their eyes or make jokes, it should be something people can be proud of. In doing so you can start to create a new culture of service and excellence, and that is precisely the culture we want in the public service.

Efficiency is fine, results are key, transparency is a must

As stated earlier, often civil service reform efforts focus on efficiency, which is important, but results are key, particularly results that people can feel and see. I know I have made this point previously, however reforming bureaucracy to be more efficient is useless when citizen facing institutions are services are terrible. Thus, efficiency is fine, but visible results are key.

On top of visible results. Public accountability and transparency are key to reform. If the government remains a black box, reforms will never take. In addition, it discourages bad behaviour by making those actors and agencies accountable to the public and their peers.

The best, the brightest… and the youngest

If public service reform has people at its core, the recruiting the right people is critical and recruitment can take advantage of Africa’s young people who are driven to solve problems and build a better future. Taking advantage of our best and brightest, of talented young professionals and university graduates. Recruiting and integrating them into the public, creating a new generation of motivated, professional and skilled public servants who can form the core of a reformed public service.

A great example of this is Liberia. After fourteen years of civil war by the time, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became president the country was a mess, and the public service was a nearly broken institution. Recognising this, President Johnson started the President’s Young Professionals Program a two-year program “that recruits and places recent Liberian university graduates in important government roles and provides them with training and mentorship as they support the government’s top priorities”. A 2016 report by Princeton University showed that program had been immensely successful, and that “About 90% of the program alumni continue to working government and or are studying abroad on government scholarships. A few fellows have risen to become departmental directors or assistant ministers.” The Liberian example shows that attracting young talent into the public service is not only possible but with the right mentorship and training, they can make a real difference. Around the continent, we produce over 10 million graduates a year, half cannot get a job. While the government cannot employ all of them, the government can hire the best and brightest without nepotism or political consideration but on merit. One feature of public service reform is hiring on the basis of merit, whether it was the introduction of exams in imperial China 2000 years ago or U.S. Civil Service reform in the 1880s. There is no reason we cannot follow suit and recruit the best and brightest of our youth not just to help drive reforms but incubate them for the long-term.

Africanising public service reform

If we want to implement our development programs, we need an effective public service. If we genuinely want public services to be accessible and effective, they do require reform. These reforms must not only cut costs and improve efficiency but improve accountability, transparency, with people, their culture and most importantly results that positively impact the public at its centre. In other words, we need to Africanise public service reform policy itself because after years of trying we have learned that copy-pasting solutions without contextualising them to Africa never works.

Other than a policy aimed at hiring young people, I have tried to stay away from advocating specific policies. This is because while the challenges facing public service reform may be similar in many African countries the local context also makes them wholly different. What’s needed is a policy approach from which solutions can follow. An approach that recognises that public servants are citizens and stakeholders in the process of reform, that the culture of public service needs positive change, that the public needs to see concrete results if they are to support reforms and that transparency is crucial if the reforms are to stick. Despite all the failed attempts at public service reform, I don’t think it’s hopeless, I think we just haven’t tried the right approach yet.

 

Avoiding Demographic Doomsday: Redefining Employment in Africa

One of the central challenges facing much of Africa is unemployment, in particular youth unemployment. The African Development Bank estimates (see figure 1) that of Africa’s approximately 420 million young people (aged between 15-35) only one-sixth (16.6% or 70 million) are in formal employment. One-third are partially or vulnerably employed, and half are not employed at all. That means 140 million young African’s are at risk of losing their job at a moment’s notice and 240 million have no job and little prospect of one.

(fig.1. source African Development Bank)

This is a disaster. Half of Africa’s youth, their potential contributions to society and personal dignity and well being, is wasting away. Is it any wonder that these young men and women are risking life and limb on horrific journeys to try and get Europe for the prospect of a better life?

This though, is only half of the story. Africa’s youth population is expected to double to over 850 million by 2050. If the continent cannot find a way to harness the potential of its youth, then the continents demographic dividend could turn into a demographic doomsday. As young unemployed Africans with no stake in the economy and no prospect of a better life turn to dangerous radicalism, extremism or crime as a way out; migration will be the least of our worries.

Thus, the question becomes how do we avoid this demographic doomsday scenario? One answer is to rapidly grow the formal economy and employment via industrialisation. This is the path that much of the continent is trying to pursue. Investing in infrastructure, ease of business reforms, business incentives and trade expansion, all aimed at spurring economic growth and employment. Frankly, it has not been enough. While growth has been positive it has not been at the rate we need, and not nearly enough jobs have been created.

What is needed is a policy for the biggest non-agricultural employer on the continent, the informal sector. The majority of those in informal business (and many with jobs who have a side hustle) depend on the informal sector for their livelihoods.

Alongside agriculture, the informal sector is the foundation of the African economy and its time our policies and laws caught up to that reality. Doing so would help solidify fragile livelihoods as well help drive growth and opportunity in the economy. We can start by changing our laws to redefine employment to include the informal sector and investing in the skills, knowledge and capabilities  of those in the sector.

The Informal Sector in Africa

The informal sector can be broadly defined as activities or enterprises that produces and sells good or services but are not formally registered and do not pay taxes.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that the informal sector represents 41% of GDP on the continent and 66% of total employment in Sub-Saharan Africa and 52% in North Africa, and that eight in ten (80%) of young workers end up in the informal sector. These figures tell us an important fact about the reality of employment in Africa, that most people earn their livelihoods through their own ingenuity and drive, hustling, and either working for or running small enterprises, they don’t have an employment contract or get a pay check. Thus, the laws, regulations, and protections of labour and employment laws are irrelevant to them. The second key thing that stands out about Africa’s informal sector is its resilience and adaptability. It has survived the ravages of one party States and dictators, near collapse of the economy in the 1990s, endemic rent-seeking and corruption, changes in weather patterns and the cycles of economic booms and busts.

It is time that government policy focused on enabling, harnessing the sector by integrating it into the wider economy, not at the exclusion of wider policy goals such as industrialisation but as part of it.

Redefining Labour and Employment

The first step to integrating the informal sector and the people in it to the wider economy is through legal definition and recognition. Just as labour and employment legislation across the continent recognises, regulates, and protects people in formal employment; similar legislation for informal sector could provide the people and businesses in it with legal protection and a foundation upon which they can build and grow.

Informal sector legislation and policy would not simply be applying the rules of the formal sector to the informal sector (which would be ignored anyway); rather it should be crafted for the needs of the informal sector and would include the following:

  • A valid legal definition of an informal sector business and job with a simple way of registering it. Registering an informal business should be as easy as getting a SIM card or a mobile money account. The goals are not to tax or regulate the sector but for registration to be a gateway to the enabling and protective elements of the laws and policy.
  • Simplified contracts and small claims courts. A constant risk in the informal sector is that you do not have the protection of the law, if you make an agreement with someone to buy or sell something it is based on their word alone. Providing a simple contract template that all can use gives buyers’ and sellers’ basic rights (such as refunds on non-delivery of goods or services). A small claims court to enforce disputes under these specific contracts quickly (rather than the expensive, laborious and slow normal court system) would engender trust and facilitate business.
  • Banking and credit access. Make it possible for informal enterprises to use their registration to open bank accounts, access credit and use their assets (e.g. a motorbike) as security for loans.
  • Provide access to national health, pension and welfare schemes. Most national health, insurance, pension and welfare schemes are based on a (formal) employee contribution model, where a portion of your salary is contributed to various schemes. On a continent where most people are not in formal employment it means that these schemes are underfunded, and many do not include everyone. Providing a way into these schemes for the informal sector like a simple subscription or yearly fee would be a way to both expand them to the wider population as well as boost their funding
  • Allow informal employees and businesses to organise. Allowing the informal sector to form co-operative societies, unions and associations would open new avenues to credit (through the pooling of savings in co-operatives), better working conditions and more powerful voice to advocate for their interests.

Legal definition and recognition opens the door to the protection and progress of the livelihoods that depend on the informal sector. Laws may be boring, but they are crucial.

Capacity Building

Legal recognition is only half the equation, for the informal sector to move from being a source of subsistence for individuals to a source of growth for the economy. Africa needs to give the people in it the tools, skills and knowledge to create, recognise and take advantage of opportunity.

The first aspect of capacity building is coupled with legal recognition. Changing laws is ineffective if the people they are aimed at are not aware of the changes and how to take advantage of them. Thus, the capacity building exercise would be a public education exercise, focused on making people within the sector aware of the changes and how to take advantage of them.

The second is around skills and knowledge training. Putting together programs that train people on key aspects of business administration, opportunity identification and marketing, crucial skills needed if they are to successfully invest and expand beyond subsistence.

The Informal Economy as an Opportunity

Most policies that African governments have come up with around the informal sector are focused on formalisation and extracting taxes and most policy around employment growth is focused on expanding formal employment. While these goals make sense, they ignore the reality of the crucial role that the informal economy plays in livelihoods and the economy of Africa.

Employment in the informal sector is not wrong or inconvenient, it is normal for Africa. And, for Africa’s development to be truly African it must not only be led by Africans but work for the majority of Africans, many of whom are employed in the informal sector.

Few if any of the development initiatives pursued by governments and institutions across the continent are aimed at furthering this sector. This approach ignores and underserves a sector which has been the foundation of the African economy, which has, since independence proven to be resilient, innovative and frankly, African.

Redefining employment in Africa to recognise and support the informal sector will not hamper or stop industrialisation or the growth of formal employment. Rather it is about understanding that the giving the hundreds of millions of Africans whose lives depend on the informal sector a stake in the economy and the opportunity to grow, is not only good for the economy it is good for people, and if that is not what development policy is about it is what it should be about.