 Good morning. It is a pleasure to be here. And I would like to thank Rick Bardet and Anna Hausen for inviting me to deliver this introductory keynote and join the Urban Age Conference family. I would like also to state that the views and opinions expressed in this presentation are my own and do not reflect the official policy opposition of the United Nations. Africa is the youngest region in the world with a population of 420 million aged between 15 and 35 in 2015 and estimated to rise to 830 million by 2050. It is also the continent with the fastest urbanization rate. Experts estimate that African urban population will increase threefold over the next 50 years. African cities are disproportionately young with a median age of African city dwellers estimated to be 20 in 2012. This youthfulness makes Africans' urban landscape unique as the young navigate, interpret, and negotiate their space in the city. But the transitions of young Africans to adulthood have become increasingly uncertain. A growing number of young women and men, both educated and non-educated, find themselves unemployed or underemployed and must improvise livelihoods in the margins of dominant social and economic urban frameworks. In this presentation, I'll develop four main arguments. First, the vast majority of young people in African cities are living in what I refer to as weighthood, a prolonged, difficult, and dynamic transition into adulthood. I'll discuss weighthood and the ways in which it is manifested in African cities. Second, young people are responding to the pressures of weighthood in multiple ways. Central here is that young lack basic opportunities to thrive. The realities of their daily lives expose the gap between the promise of fairness and prosperity and their existence of marginalization and lack of opportunities. But young Africans are not simply waiting for better days. They are creatively fashioning new ways of being and surviving in the cities. Third, the young are not indifferent to what is happening around them. They have been moving from dispersed and unstructured interventions into more organized political and social protests. While some of these protests have been able to overthrow long-standing leaders, systemic transformation takes time, and major challenges arise as young activists struggle to translate the social and political grievances of the protest movement into a broader political agenda. Fourth, but not least, I argue that young Africans are increasingly engaging themselves in the development and governments of their cities as entrepreneurs, workers, and activists. But the critical question is how to harness the energy and the creativity of the youth to advance the new urban agenda for Africa. I'll start with weighthood. Weighthood is a portmanteau of the word weight and the suffix hood, meaning waiting for adulthood. It constitutes a liminal space in which young people are largely excluded from major socioeconomic institutions and political processes. Whatever their class background, many youths have no secure jobs and cannot afford to establish families and set up their own households. Lige, which means in wall-off, the most widely spoken language in Senegal, means work, is celebrated as an important marker of adulthood. The ability to work and provide for themselves and others defines a person's self-worth and position in the family and the community. Yet, the majority of young people in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa are unable to attend the sense of dignity embedded in the notion of Lige. Joel, a young Mozambican man, shared the following with me. Before our fathers went to work in the mines in South Africa and came home with enough money to pay Lobolo or bride wealth for a girl, build a house, and start a family, end of quote. Indeed, as Joel points out, becoming a labor migrant in South Africa constituted the right of passage into adulthood, as jobs in the mines helped young Mozambican men to become husbands, fathers, and providers for their families, and in turn, allowed young women to become wives, mothers, and homemakers. Today, however, African societies no longer offer reliable pathways into adulthood. Traditional ones have broken down, and new models are yet to be developed. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, for example, the term youth man describes the large number of unemployed 35-year-olds and older who are still struggling to attain social adulthood. The experience of weighthood among young people differs by gender, class, and level of education. Although young women are becoming better educated and have always engaged in productive labor alongside household chores, in many contexts, marriage and motherhood are still important markers of adulthood. Middle-class youths with stronger socioeconomic connections and political connections may experience weighthood differently. And also, we have graduate unemployment and underemployment, which is a very strong problem in the continent. Many young people see weighthood as stemming from national and global policies that have failed to reduce poverty and promote broadly distributed economic growth. Despite the difficulties, young Africans are not merely sitting and waiting for their situation to change of its own accord. Weighthood is propelling them to be creative and to improvise livelihoods outside of dominant economic and familial frameworks. From interviews with young people, in my book, The Time of Youth, I describe the extemporaneous and precarious nature of their lives in weighthood. Young Mozambicans use the Portuguese expression desenrascara vida, or to hick out a living. Young Senegalese and Tunisians use the French word de brouillage, making do. And young South Africans said, we are just getting by. The idea of desenrascara vida, de brouillage, or just getting by situates the weighthood experience in the realm of improvisation, of making it up as you go along and entails a conscious effort to assess challenges and possibilities. Young Africans in weighthood are creating new dynamic sides for inventiveness and survival in the margins of society. This is the experience of many young women and men who engage in street vending, cross-border trading, and smuggling, those who migrate illegally within the continent or to Europe. And those who end up in criminal networks as swindlers, traffickers, gangsters, and fighters. Young women and men often see little option but to also use their sexuality as means of gaining a livelihood. They engage in intimate and often exploitative relationships with wealthy and powerful men and women, commonly known as sugar deadies and sugar mamas, for money, gifts, and access to fashionable goods. Some young people become entrepreneurs in the informal economy by taking up activities such as repairing electronic devices, making and marketing clothes and jewelry, and doing hair and nails. Others are creating new artistic forms and musical performance, making graffiti, painting murals, writing blogs, and becoming savvy internet users. But weighthood also represents a period of political marginalization, which deprives young people from the space of political engagement, liberty of expression, and other civil liberties. Young people often complain about political repression and social injustice, humiliation and loss of freedom and dignity. Youth have always been involved in processes of social change by fashioning the spaces within which they try to get by and assert their rights. Assef Bayat calls these dispersed actions as non-movements, described as quiet and an assuming daily struggles outside formal institutional channels in which ordinary activities blend with political activism. Indeed, in everyday life, young women and men engage in civil society associations, in popular culture, in debates through cyber-social networks, and in political demonstrations. If we pay careful attention to the lyrics of their songs, the verses of their poems, the scripts of their plays, and the discourses and images on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Twitter, we will uncover a very strong social critique. However, over the past few years, young people have been moving from this moderate encroachment on public space to an open and more vociferous takeover of the national political stage, questioning their weight-weight status and demanding better lives. In Tunisia and Egypt, for example, in 2011, young people took to the streets to articulate grievances ranging from unemployment, corruption, and denial of civil liberty. In Dakar, rallying around the Yan Amar movement, Senegalese youth voted massively to remove Abdulai Wad in the 2012 elections. Similarly, in Burkina Faso, in 2015, Le Balais citoyen, or the citizen's broom, led thousands of young Burkinabi in street demonstrations against the government, driving Blaise Kampaori out after 27 years in power. Also in 2015, South Africa University students protested against fee increases and for the decolonization and transformation of the educational system. Youth protests took place in many other countries in the continent and continue to be a common occurrence in our political and social lives. Yet, despite the successful protests, young Africans have not seen fundamental changes in their socioeconomic and political conditions. For example, young Egyptians and Tunisians are deeply dissatisfied with the post-protest status quo. Many activists all over the continent realize that translating a protest movement into an ongoing political presence that can shape public policies and effect transformational change constitutes an immense challenge. Notwithstanding, young people continue to engage in civil society associations and other platforms for collective action at various levels, both in the real and cyber worlds. The linguistic creativity of the youth is shaping African cities today as they adopt fluid, homegrown language to express ideas and experiences specific to their emerging urban culture. These new linguistic forms provide young with images and conceptions of themselves, both individually and collectively, and of the realities that surround them. And I give an example. For example, in Maputo, all the drug dealers neighborhoods are commonly known amongst young people as Colombia, for example. Social movements by young urbanites articulate discursively and in political practice the anguish of spatial marginality with concerns of social inequality, racism, and quest for justice. Their location and relationship to cityscapes both lived and imagined becomes a strategic terrain for contestation and political protest, highlighting contemporary geographies of exclusion, segregation, and poverty. The young are also expressing themselves and transforming urban landscapes using graffiti and other forms of street art. Young Africans are already redefining the new urban agenda or the new urban space as entrepreneurs, workers, and activists in areas as diverse as the environment, ICTs, public health, human rights, and the like. They are beginning to use their voices and energy to engage in the formulation of public policies and programs that directly impact on their lives. In Zimbabwe, the Girl Child Network is a volunteer youth organization established by young women and provides much needed psychosocial support to child marriage victims, teenage mothers, and sexually abused girls. In Cote d'Ivoire, a network of youth civil society leaders has been engaging the parliament to discuss youth needs and youth policies. In Nigeria, youth activists have lobbied senators to support HIV, AIDS, stigma builds, and there are many other examples, but I'd like to finish with three fundamental questions. How can these positive experiences be mainstreamed and replicated? How to engage youth at various levels in meaningful participatory governance and budgeting for policies and programs that matter to them? How to strengthen youth contributions towards the new urban agenda for Africa and the creation of a new urban, African urbanity? And I thank you very much.