AfDB Lends Ear to Young Tunisians on Solving Youth Unemployment Problem
On 12 November 2011, the African Development Bank’s (AfDB)’s Human Development Department organized a meeting with members of the Association of African Students and Trainees in Tunisia to listen to their views on the Joint AU/ILO/UNECA/AfDB’s Initiative on Youth Employment in Africa.
The joint initiative will be formally endorsed by African heads of state and governments at the AU Summit in Addis Ababa, scheduled to take place in January 2012.
The initiative received a warm welcome by the young people at the event, c culminating in a collective decision to organize a Youth Summit in Tunis. The summit will bring together gathering around 500 to 2,000 participants, from the worlds of the private sector, young entrepreneurs, donors, policy-makers and civil society.
The group requested a web platform and a blog where they could exchange views and collectively decide on how best to bring this new initiative into operation.
Questions such as “what are the themes that should be identified to begin to tackle the problem of youth employment in Africa?”; “which methodology should we use to implement the initiative at country level?”; “which platform should we adopt to reach youth all across Africa given the pockets of non-connectivity in Africa?” will be addressed through the online platform.
"How best is to be in a partnership business form in Africa"
"Being together is an option to avoid debt financing"
"having completed secondary or some form of tertiary education substantially
reduces the probability of being unemployed"
"The key role of PPP (Public Private Partnership) in youth employment"
"Agriculture Promotion could help youth employment"
The Methodology to implement the initiative at a country level is to promote new entrepreneurs through Human Capacity building and by creating a special fund to support new entrepreneurs at a lower interest rate less to 5%.
Platform of new entrepreneurs by giving subsidies to allow them to create their own website for at least 10 years.
Another way to reach youth all across africa is to create a special business facebook for africa or to passby the private intercommunication entreprises through SMS.
I hope that my modest contribution will be useful for new generation in Africa.
The world is in a spin, 220 million unemployed undergraduates, not to speak of those who do not have even the possibility to get to this level.This means we have to provide at this moment appr 1.million jobs every months for the next 2 decades to solve the backlog.That's why we have to go and create NEW Enterprises.I have in cooperation with Universities developed a programme that will advise & help youngsters by using their own thought processes.
New Zealand, Hong Kong and Malaysia will start the programme at the beginning of next year and I am happy to discuss this with any of the participants and/or Government organisations.
There are no dumb ideas or concepts and certainly NO dumb people, because mostly we do not acknowledge them.
With kind regards