The basic challenges faced by Africa’s youth have been getting them first to believe in themselves and to imbibe positive aspects of their respective cultures and traditions. By extension, minimizing the craze for the indiscriminate adoption of alien cultures, many aspects of which are not conducive to their orderly growth and development.

Without doubt, the spectre of unemployment and idling constitute real threats to the survival of the youth and their capacity to contribute effectively to national development.

Every year, thousands of young people graduate from the continent’s tertiary institutions. The overwhelming majority of these young people troop to the public sector seeking employment.

With a massive backlog of others unable to secure jobs in the previous years, the numbers keep growing year by year – a trend that is detrimental to the continent’s development.

This situation is exacerbated by the multitude of unskilled and semi-educated youth entering the work force, having only gone through primary years of education, often as a result of poverty. They are primarily manual and domestic labourers. Their lack of skill and minimal education predisposes them to minimal wages and virtually no career development.

The youth constitute a very important resource whose effective mobilization or lack of it has a serious impact on the socio-economic development of society. They are the most agile, dynamic, energetic and innovative segment of society and their abundant energy and talents, when properly tapped, harnessed and channeled, can contribute immensely to the positive transformation of the fortunes of communities.

On the other hand, if left unattended to or neglected and abandoned to their fate, they could become such a destructive force as would derail or undermine progress. They could, by their sheer numbers, misplaced utilization of energies and anti-social orientation, pose serious challenges to the enforcement of law and order and pose a veritable threat to social order.

The aim should be to properly instill positive values and ethics, so that young Africans mature to assume leadership roles and become useful to themselves and society as a whole.

It is estimated that in the next ten years, 500 million youth will be seeking employment in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. In this regard, ASCENT seeks to collaborate with established institutions to create a youth empowerment and entrepreneurship programme that builds the capacity of youth through training in life skills, entrepreneurship and management skills, internship programmes and more.

Emphasis will be placed on the creation of jobs in production, knowledge and skills-based areas of the economy—which are, in truth, the most viable, promising and sustainable.