“Creating jobs for the youth is not enough. Across the planet, youth are not only finding it difficult if not impossible to find jobs, but also they can not find decent jobs….We are facing not only an economic challenge but a security threat of monumental proportions.” Juan Somavia – ILO Director General.

The United Nations Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) which form the basis of UNDP work target mostly the 4 billion people at the “bottom of the pyramid.” The majority of these people are marginalized young people and the concern is how they can be made effective actors in meeting the MDGs, consequently becoming active and positive participants in the personal and national development processes.  Employment happens to be one of these goals but at the rate we are going, we are unlikely to reach the MDGs before 2015.

Young women and men, though the world’s greatest asset for the present and future, also represent a group with serious vulnerabilities.  Increasing global unemployment has hit them the hardest, exposing them to high levels of economic and social uncertainty. Their full potential is not realized because they do not have access to productive and protected jobs.

There are more than 1 billion young people between the ages of 15 and 24 today and 85% of these are living in the developing countries. The ILO Global Employment Trends reports that despite the 4.3 per cent Global GDP growth in 2005, only 14.5 million of the world’s more than 500 million extreme working pool were able to rise above the US1$ per day. Nearly 86 million youth were unemployed in 2004, accounting for 45% of the 191 million unemployed globally. About 52 million young people aged 15-17 were engaged in hazardous work in 2005.Compared to adults, the youth of today are more than three times as likely to be unemployed. 

A colleague of mine recently visited war torn Karamoja in northern Uganda and met a young lady, who being HIV positive, was given support by TASO, a group which supports persons with HIV infections to live positively.  In order to improve her livelihood, she had been trained to sow clothing to sell to her community. The costs would be cheap for her and the clothes would be cheap for her community.  My colleague then went further to analyze her surroundings. 

Apparently, all the youth in that district seemed to wear clothing that had strong Western corporate brands. Questions arose: What’s her market? Is it failure of her training to assist in opening up her immediate market? Was her training on cloth design driven by the market forces or merely an expression of socialization of roles devoid of linkages to  development needs? To what extent are large corporations stifling her market and consequently the sustainability of employment creation for the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ people? What then informs our responses to youth employment? Is there innovation and sustainability in the good and great intentions of development agencies? What is the youth response? 

What this little story did to me, and I hope it will do to you, is to ask us to examine ourselves and our actions in every practical manner.   Entrepreneurship is not an activity that exists in a vacuum. It is shaped and also shapes numerous aspects of our societies and our relations. It demands that we begin to address development in innovative ways and question what it is we are responding to.  When it comes to innovation we look strongly to the youth.  Without novelty and innovation, the youth movement is not providing any solutions to our developmental challenges. 

We need to be more critical in our thinking on the interventions we make on youth entrepreneurship if we are to effectively and sustainably improve the livelihoods of millions of people. While the term entrepreneurship is coined strongly in business terminology and dynamics, it is critical to realize that in most developing countries, the stronger concern is meeting some basic needs like access to water, energy and health. It thus becomes critical for youth entrepreneurship to mould itself in forms of social entrepreneurship. If young people decide to drill a borehole to provide water for a community at affordable prices for example, this goes a long way in improving their standard of living and the livelihood for this community. It would be much cheaper than a water company making this provision and at the same time it improves the livelihood for the youth who have drilled the borehole. Most critical is the importance of water to the basic needs in this community which represents a response to the market. Another example could be the preparation of solar panels for areas that do not have electricity. 

Through social entrepreneurship, young people can provide alternatives to help reach the MGDs. They can start small businesses aimed at providing access to key services to the people at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ such as water, energy and ICT. Having business support such initiatives is invaluable. Business must do more than merely exploiting markets. It must play a role in cultivating these markets to ensure sustainability. This is the ‘Win-Win’ situation that in my view developing countries require. Partnerships which respond to the real needs on the ground can only be possible through the innovation of youth and genuine corporate responsibility.

There is need to have processes that support these kind of initiatives, such as the recently launched Kenya Youth Enterprise fund.  Through the Ministry of Youth and the support of UNDP, the Kenyan government is providing both financial and technical support to unleash the enterprise and innovation potential in young people.  The youth should use such a facility with the innovation it deserves, to understand the societal dynamics and respond to real needs such that in ten years time, such a fund will no longer be required as wealth would have been created and circulating.

Recall the experience of my colleague who visited Karamoja. Ask yourself the questions she asked herself and challenge yourself on the interventions you are making.  It certainly is not enough to comprehend the global dimensions, the development paradigms we use and the flowery branding we develop without bringing the issue of youth entrepreneurship to the ground and respond to our real and pertinent developments needs.