Partnerships: Creating opportunities for youth.

A decent job is an essential marker of a young person's success. It provides financial security for his or her future family and contributes to the economic growth of their country. With more than half of Africa's population under the age of 25, the need for decent jobs is enormous.

'In Africa, youth make up 37% of the working-age population, but 60% of that number is unemployed. The youth demographic is very large compared to the available opportunities in the market,' writes Obiageli Ezekwesili, former World Bank Vice President of the Africa division, in her article 'Youth unemployment: Challenges and Opportunities in Economic Development'.

In Kenya for example, a recent study by the UN Development Programme put the country's unemployment rate at a staggering 39%, the highest in the region, compared to 24% in Tanzania and 18% in Uganda.

The demand for decent jobs is only expected to grow as the Africa Institute for Development Policy estimates that the continent will account for 29% of all people aged 15 to 24 by 2050.

Some organizations have taken on the youth employment challenge through innovative and broad-based public, private and civil society partnerships that have the potential to be more impactful than they could have aspired to working alone.

One example is the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI), a partnership between the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and private sector representatives. Together they create opportunities for African youth by enhancing leadership skills, bolstering entrepreneurship, and connecting young African leaders with one another and innovative leaders in the private, civic, and public sectors. The programme has four regional leadership centres - in Accra, Ghana and Dakar, Senegal to cover West Africa, in Nairobi, Kenya to cover East Africa, and one near Pretoria in South Africa for the sub-region.

Betty Kariuki, YALI's director of partnerships, believes that creating opportunities for youth is achievable if Africa can engage the triple helix of the three sectors -

public, private and civil society - to work together.

She gives an example of the East Africa center which is working in partnership with the MasterCard Foundation and Deloitte East Africa Ltd, the implementing agent, to create training opportunities for African youth. The Southern African center is in partnership with the University of Southern Africa and Dow Chemical Company.

So far, more than 13,000 young Africans have...