Time to act on Kenya's youth unemployment is now

The Japanese call them freeters, which a journalist for the United Kingdom’s Independent newspaper recently reported is an amalgamation of ‘freelance’ and arbeiter, the German word for workers. In Tunisia, where the Arab Spring was set off by one of them setting themselves ablaze in frustration, they are hittistes, Arabic slang for “people who lean against walls”. The British call theirs NEETs (youth not in education, employment or training).

In Kenya, though, we know them simply as ‘ma-sufferers’, a growing and increasingly hopeless army of unemployed youth. Thanks to a period of jobless growth, the world faces a growing number of young people that have the potential to cause significant social disruption if their needs are not met. The problem is particularly acute in developing countries like Kenya, where our investigations have revealed there are as many as ten million unemployed youth. This army grows by the hundreds of thousands each year. Of these, as many as 60,000 are university graduates who, unfortunately are not much more likely to get a job than their less educated peers. Indeed, the frustrations of being in the same boat are harder borne by the educated whose hopes are crushed by years of failure.

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