AFRICA: THE MENACE OF UNEMPLOYMENT AND ITS SOLUTIONS

      

   “If properly managed, Africa’s wealth is enough

        to place the continent among top players in the world.” – M.T. Olawoyin, 2018.

Unemployment is one of the menaces with global recognition. This is primarily because no continent is safe from it. It is virtually present in all the countries of the world, except that the percentage varies.

 However, in Africa, with a population of 1.2 billion, the percentage keeps increasing exponentially. This is despite the abundance of both human and natural resources.

The continent has the richest deposit of natural resources such as oil, copper, diamond, bauxite lithium,gold among other bounties. The increase in the percentage of unemployment in Africa can, therefore, be effectively attributed to corruption and mismanagement of the available resources.

How then can governments in African solve the problem of unemployment or reduce it to the barest minimum?

One of the causes of unemployment in Africa is obviously the lack of robust support from the government to the informal sector. The sector has largely been neglected to survive on its own with little or no input from the government.  It can be said that the informal sector over the years has been the largest employer of labor in the continent.

Instead of the governments making policies that would ensure the sector thrives, they rather pretend to create employment out of the white-collar sector that is nearly non-existent.  

Therefore to address the problem of unemployment, every government in Africa must adopt the followings:

1.       The government should support small and medium scale entrepreneurs by making policies that would ensure that there is ease in doing business in the country. This may take the form of tax reduction or exemption for entrepreneurs who are just stepping into the market.

Also, resources could be provided for unemployed people who are interested in certain industries.

2.      Loans should be made available, affordable, and accessible to small business owners. One of the factors preventing some young people from venturing into entrepreneurship is the unaffordability of loan facility.

This is majorly because the interest rate on loan facility across banks is unnecessarily high. If loans are made affordable to entrepreneurs with minimal interest rate, the continent would experience a rise in business owners and an exponential decrease in unemployment.

3.       Different platforms should be created by the government to allow students at all levels acquire varieties of practical skills which in the long run would be beneficial as a source of income generation to them.

4.      Students should be encouraged to learn certain employable or soft skills before their graduation from higher institution. This will prepare them for the huge task ahead outside the four walls of the school. It has been observed that a chunk of the graduates produced by higher institutions in Nigeria are unemployable.

Therefore, the African government should abandon their inefficient policies and patterns so as to invest in the informal sector. This is because the sector, unlike the formal and white collar sector, has the capacity to employ as many people as available.