Creating Programs for Africa's Urban Youth : The Challenge of Marginalization

Urban youth constitute the vanguard of Africa’s twinned demographic transformations. Sub-Saharan Africa’s youth population growth rate is the highest of any world region (North Africa’s rate is also high). In addition, Africa’s urban growth rate is the world’s highest. Taken together, the need to provide adequate, effective support for urban youth is critical to fostering Africa’s development – and its political, social and economic stability. This article is designed to help address this need in two ways. First, it focuses attention on those comprising the overwhelming majority of this population, urban youth who are poor and marginalized. Second, drawing largely on the author’s extensive professional experience with African urban youth, the article reviews the major challenges this population faces; considers the programming context for Africa’s urban youth; reviews six principles for developing programs for them; provides field-based insights on improving the assessment, monitoring and evaluation of urban youth programming; and suggest ways to enhance the inclusion of female youth in programs. The article concludes with a consideration of the particular challenge of marginalization in meeting the needs of Africa’s huge urban youth population, and a call to respond to this challenge with youth-centered policy reforms and investments. We are living in the age of youth. There are more young people in today’s world than ever before in human history. This is the case in terms of the proportion of the overall population (Barker 2005, p.11) as well as sheer numbers, which are staggering. One and a half billion of the world’s population are ages 12-24, 1.3 billion of which reside in developing countries. (World Bank 2006, p.4) Almost half of the world’s population is under age twentyfive. (Barker 2005, p.11) While North Africa’s youth population growth rate is significant, Sub-Saharan Africa’s rate is the highest of any world region (the youth population there has quadrupled since 1950) (World Bank 2006, p.33). Africa’s urban growth rate is also the world’s highest (United Nations 2004, p.7), and both of these rates are estimated to remain ahead of all other world regions into the foreseeable future. (World Bank 2006; United Nations 2004) Urban youth constitute the vanguard of Africa’s twinned transformations because youth are the unquestioned vanguard of Africa’s gathering urbanization that features the migration of male youth (Hope 1998, p.352) but includes increasing numbers of female youth. (Gugler