African youth and employment employment : the promise of a better tomorrow ?
Candidates for the « demographic dividend » for years, many African countries are betting on the productive potential of young people to boost their economies. The main strategy for these countries has been to seek to compensate for a chronic deficit in human capital by drawing inspiration from the...
محفوظ في:
| الحاوية / القاعدة: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/rdctss, |
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| المؤلف الرئيسي: | |
| التنسيق: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| اللغة: | Anglais |
| منشور في: |
Revue de droit comparé du travail et de la sécurité sociale
2024
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| الموضوعات: | |
| الوصول للمادة أونلاين: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| الملخص: | Candidates for the « demographic dividend » for years, many African countries are betting on the productive potential of young people to boost their economies. The main strategy for these countries has been to seek to compensate for a chronic deficit in human capital by drawing inspiration from the growth trajectories of advanced economies. Despite progress made in education, this strategy has proven limited, with young people remaining overexposed to the most precarious professional situations. The intrinsic fragility of these economies, coupled with recent financial, social, health, and environmental crises, contributes to stalling the process. Combining conceptualization and statistical modeling, our work evaluates the influence of various factors on the professional trajectories of young people in 11 African countries. We highlight the elements that protect against, or conversely, overexpose to professional exclusion and poor-quality employment, while reflecting on the definition of these concepts to contribute to their renewal. We thus propose a contextualized assessment of youth employment in Africa, particularly through the lenses of gender, informality, and qualification mismatch. This work reaffirms the ongoing relevance of these issues, while highlighting their variability across the continent. It thus calls for moving away from the idea of a miracle recipe for development in favor of innovative and tailored policies adapted to the African context. |
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