 I hope you appreciate the irony that I'm the agronomist on the panel and I'm not gonna talk about agriculture or food, so there you go. So Africa youth and employment. Well, I think I should probably, I might be expected to follow our moderator in presenting you a series of colorful and alarming graphics illustrating the fact that every year and for many years to come, a very large number of young Africans will enter Africa's labor markets seeking employment. This is, of course, a consequence of the slow demographic transition. I should then show you a slide illustrating the dismal record of African economies in creating new employment opportunities. However, I'm gonna skip the graphics. You've already seen them. Suffice it to say that in much of sub-Saharan Africa, we see labor markets where the supply of labor far outstrips the demand for it. And reflecting this mismatch between supply and demand, today many people, including many young people, have to settle for informal employment that is most often poorly remunerated and insecure and too often seasonal and dangerous. Or they find themselves in work that does not make use of their education or they migrate nationally or internationally hoping to find better opportunities. I think there can be no question that there is in fact a problem. Some would call it a significant challenge. Others would say a full-blown crisis. But what exactly is the nature of the crisis? A review of the policy, research, and practitioner literatures reveals two ways that the crisis is framed. The first, and I would suggest the dominant framing, presents it primarily as a youth employment crisis. That is, it's all about the young people. Their lack of technical and soft skills, the mismatch between the skills they have and those required by employers, their aspirations, expectations and frustrations, their inappropriate mindsets, and how they exercise their individual and collective agency. This framing suggests that the crisis is very much youth specific. And the logic points directly to youth specific and youth targeted interventions. The second and much less common framing presents the crisis primarily as a missing jobs crisis. Here, it's all about the economy and the forces and factors that constrain job creation, an unfriendly business environment, over-regulated labor markets, a need for structural transformation, corruption, civil unrest, and perhaps Africa's place in the global economy. In contrast to the first framing, here the challenge faced by young people is presented as part of a broader economic, political and social picture. Consequently, there is much less that is youth specific in this framing, and this logic points toward an entirely different set of interventions. It is of course the case that the crisis itself or manifests itself differently in different contexts. For example, in urban or rural areas, in different sectors, agriculture, manufacturing, services, in different settings, peaceful or conflict affected, and finally, for different social groups, men or women, well-educated or not. As such, it most often reflects elements of both the youth employment and missing jobs framings. But as we know, perhaps too well, policy discourse and intervention strategies just don't deal very well with nuance and complexity, and reflecting this, advocates and their positions in relation to youth employment in Africa tend to veer exclusively to one of these framings or the other. This matters because as I indicated earlier, each of these two framings or starting points leads to quite a different set of policy propositions and intervention strategies. The youth employment framing has been used for many years now to justify investment in training and skills development programs, and more recently, programs to enhance so-called soft skills or employability skills, but also and sometimes combined with training and entrepreneurship and access to microcredit and mentoring. Unfortunately, despite the long-term commitment on the part of governments, international agencies and development partners to the training and skills agenda, a growing series of evidence reviews suggest that these kinds of programs are not particularly effective. In contrast, the missing jobs framing is used to promote strategies and interventions to stimulate economic growth and employment creation, either generally or in selected sectors that are considered job-rich or labor-intensive and thus having greater potential for job creation. These interventions include things like business environment reform and the liberalization of labor markets as well as investment in infrastructure, the development of corridors and the like. Again, the evidence on the effect of these intervention is very mixed, but perhaps it should not be too surprising that there is no single, simple or proven strategy for stimulating the creation of quality jobs. We can begin to appreciate the underpinnings of these different framings and their associated suites of interventions reflecting on four questions. The first question is, what really concerns you? Is it the purported relationship between youth employment and civil unrest that Danielle has alluded to? Or perhaps it's the aging farm population and the implications for future food security. Perhaps you're interested in controlling international migration or maybe you're concerned by the waste of human potential associated with the underdevelopment or the underemployment of young people. The second question is, who's in your mind's eye when you think of Africa as youth? So in this slide, I'm using the completion of senior secondary school as a divide between what I'm gonna call good and poor education. So are you focused on the 64% of young people in sub-Saharan Africa who live in rural areas or the 56% in rural areas who have poor education? Or perhaps you're focused on the 35% living in urban areas or the 15% who live in urban areas and have a good education? The third question is, what is your timeframe? There it is. Do you want to address the needs of today's under and unemployed young people? Or are you thinking five, 10, 15 or perhaps more years into the future and with the challenge being to address the needs of future generations? And finally, how do you understand the role of the state? Should it be primarily a market enabler? Or how seriously must it take its role as a duty bearer in relation to citizens' rights, including young people's right to work? Now, I'm not suggesting that particular combinations of answers to these questions will read neatly across from one framing to the other. Rather, I'm arguing that these questions help reveal some of the most common assumptions, beliefs and points of reference that inform and are used to justify different framings and approaches to the youth employment crisis in Africa. We should also recognize that these two alternative framing serve both organizational and political purposes. The youth employment framing, for example, may be particularly attractive to those who seek to push youth and youth employment higher up the development agenda or who have a specific interest in or mandate to focus on youth. It is of course more difficult to hold a focus on youth if it is acknowledged that there are significant commonalities between the challenges they face and those faced by the broader population. In other words, youth specific policies and interventions that emerge from the youth employment framing do not sit at all well alongside an analysis that highlights the deeper structural issues within the economy. I would like now to return to the four questions that we looked at earlier, to see if by linking some of them together we can move towards a somewhat more nuanced approach. The first question, what really concerns you is another way of asking, why invest in youth? In this slide, we see the reasons for investing in African youth that are most commonly cited in the policy and development literatures. So on the left hand side of the figure depicts a number of essentially instrumental justifications with reaping the extra economic growth known as the demographic dividend being the most widely cited. Those who approach the youth employment crisis from an agricultural or rural perspective often cite an aging farm population and the consequent necessity of bringing young people into the agricultural sector in order to assure food security. And they use the often repeated claim that because young people are particularly innovative and adept at technology, they are best placed to transform and modernize the agricultural sector. Other more politically oriented reasons given for investing in youth are associated with the claim that there is a causal link between youth unemployment on the one hand and youth violence and radicalization on the other as well as the claim that a lack of employment opportunities drives young people's international migration. The awkward fact is that despite their prominence in both policy and public discourse, neither of these claims are well supported by the available evidence. There is another justification for investing in youth and that is simply because as human beings they have a right to work as clearly laid out in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1976 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The call for decent work for all is also integral to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. I would argue that this justification for investing in youth is of a different order than those noted above and may indeed be the only one that really matters. Linking this justification to the fourth question, how do you understand the role of the state? I think it is simply not sustainable to suggest that young people's right to work, to say nothing of decent work, can be assured in the absence of an engaged and active state. The ongoing transformations of labor relations globally from casualization and the growth of the gig economy, including gig economy platforms where the power really rests with the clients and the logarithms to robotics illustrates the magnitude of the challenge and the necessity of intelligent and sustained action by the state. Now let's return to the second and third questions. Who's in your mind's eye when you think of African youth and what is your timeframe? A few moments ago we saw a little slide showing the distribution of African young people in relation to location and education. Now let's look at two contrasting countries, Ghana and Mozambique. The contrast I think is pretty stark. While just over a quarter of Ghana's young people are in urban areas and have a good education, only 4% of young people in Mozambique are in this similar position. On the other hand, 68% of young people in Mozambique are in rural areas and have a poor education, compared with only 34% in Ghana. I think this slide illustrates three really important points. First, both within these countries and indeed within any and every country, young people transition into the labor market and the world of work from very different positions. This simple fact must be the bedrock of both policy and intervention. What may be relevant or helpful to today's well-educated urban youth is unlikely to be relevant to a poor educated rural youth. And remember that in this slide we have not even begun to consider factors like gender, social norms, or the quality of education. To be meaningful, national youth employment policy and associated programs must acknowledge and take account of this diversity. Second, I think we cannot help but be struck by the contrast between Ghana and Mozambique. While I selected these two because they are at opposite ends of the distribution, they nevertheless serve to highlight the fundamental problem with one size fits all, regional, or indeed continental strategies to address youth employment. Third, this contrast provides us with a way of looking into the future and here the question of the timeframe comes to center stage. With continued investment in education and continued urbanization, it is reasonable, I think, to expect the future picture in Mozambique to look like what we see in Ghana today. That is an increasing proportion of young people in the urban good education box and a decreasing portion in the rural poor education box. If this is correct, then it would appear that we have very important implications for forward-looking policy. Well, what are some of these implications? Different responses to the youth employment crisis articulate around an unresolved tension while formal employment relations are more likely to be associated with work that is remunerative, secure, safe, and dignified, and to meet the rising aspirations of a better educated class of young people, the vast majority of young people in Africa continue to work in the informal sector. This latter fact, reflecting the relatively small size of the formal manufacturing and service sectors and their poor record in job creation, leads many to the conclusion that the youth employment crisis must be addressed through the informal economy. Self-employment and entrepreneurship. But does this view not sell short Africa's young people's futures also the benefit of formal employment and the potential of visionary policymaking? I would argue that what we might think of as the youth employment urban, or youth education urban formal employment nexus is in fact highly relevant for both economic and social progress. The combination of education and formal employment has been seen over decades and throughout sub-Saharan Africa as the key driver of social and economic mobility. And formal employment, a proper job, remains an aspiration of millions and millions of school leavers and graduates. Is it not a serious mistake to frame the policy choice as between a pragmatic short-term focus on informal employment, self-employment, and entrepreneurship and an idealistic read unrealistic, longer-term focus on more and better formal employment. I'll finish him just a second. The more productive framing I would suggest would recognize that Africa's missing jobs challenge should be seen as part of a long-term process of social and economic transformation. Explicit acknowledgement of first state's historic commitment to the right to work and second, the importance of workers' rights must be the foundation of this transformation along with the acceptance that formal employment relations are the best and perhaps the only way to ensure these rights. For all the obvious reasons, formal employment in sub-Saharan Africa is presently concentrated in urban areas. And as we have seen, these areas also host a disproportionate share of better educated young people. It would seem logical then to build on this space with an explicit strategy to concentrate efforts over a generation or two to grow formal employment and strengthen the governance of labor markets in urban areas. The evolution of the urban labor market along these lines may also stimulate positive change to rural labor markets. I'm gonna just end by saying, of course, movement along these lines and should go without saying that the prerequisite for the desired step change in the growth of formal employment and the associated improvements in labor market governance is political and social stability. Without this, the long-term planning and investment, both from the private and public sectors, required to support the creation of millions of quality formal jobs is most unlikely. Thank you very much.