The joblessness numbers released by Statistics South Africa recently make for sad reading, bringing the country’s unemployment scourge into sharp focus, but the key takeaway is that it is young people who are bearing the brunt. The situation is quite scary: a whopping 46.3% of those aged between 15 and 34 – or nearly one in two – were without a job in the first quarter of this year.

I know it is cold comfort, but failure to create adequate employment opportunities, especially for young people, is not an exclusively South African phenomenon; many countries on the continent are sailing in the same boat as us.

Recently, I read of young Nigerians who have been fortunate enough to secure scholarships to European universities opting to register for degree programme after degree programme to prolong their stay in those climes instead of returning home, where chances of landing a decent job are next to zilch.

One of the students, 28-year-old Modupe Osunkoya, told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) this month that the prospects of a jobless future back home – on completing her studies in Belgium – nudged her towards applying for her third postgraduate degree since leaving home in 2017.

Now she has registered for a doctoral degree in Estonia, which is running concurrently with her second master’s degree in Belgium. She will be receiving a stipend while completing her thesis – on Future Smart Cities – at Estonia’s Tallinn University of Technology. At the end of the four-year research, she will be eligible to apply for permanent residence in the Northern European country.

Osunkoya told the BBC: “The studies are a means to an end, and if God says the end is permanent residence, why not?”

It’s not too difficult to understand why she has opted to turn her back on her native country: according to official statistics, one in three young Nigerians is without work.

Osunkoya is one of scores of young Nigerians who would rather take a chance in foreign lands than endure the poor living conditions that come with being unemployed in their home country. According to ICEF Monitor, which focuses on international student mobility, about 100 000 young people from the West African country travelled abroad to study in 2020 alone.

Of Africa’s nearly 420-million-strong 15- to 35-year-old cohort, one-third are either unemployed or discouraged from seeking work, with another third being vulnerably employed, while only one in six is in wage employment, if the African Development Bank’s calculations are anything to go by.

“Youth face roughly double the unemployment rate of adults, with significant variation by country. The problem is not just unemployment, but underemployment, which peaks at just over half of the youth in the labour force in low-income countries,” the continental lender states.

The consequences of this situation are well documented: poor living conditions, migration out of Africa (as exemplified by the 100 000-odd young Nigerians who headed to foreign universities last year) and the fuelling of conflict. Just next door – in Mozambique – the ongoing Islamist insurgency in the north of the country is partly being stoked up by a lack of economic opportunities, especially jobs.

Unless aggressive interventions are implemented, it’s unlikely there will be a significant improvement any time soon. A report published last month by the Brookings Institution, of the US, makes this quite clear. It estimates that 20-million jobs need to be created every year to meet the demand for employment, yet the job-creation capacity of African economies is only about half of what it should be.

Those who lead us should put their thinking caps on and figure out how to accommodate our young people in the job market. It’s time Africa converted its demographic dividend – its youthful population – into an economic dividend.