Youth employment programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa: A synthesis of country studies

This chapter provides a synthesis of the nine African country studies in this book. The authors reiterate the main argument of the book and proceed to draw insights on youth policies, drawing similarities and differences with experiences in other parts of the world. The chapter argues that a major contribution of the nine country studies is that they provide at least some basic descriptive statistics obtained from interviews with key informants and from focus groups of programme participants and nonparticipants. These statistics allow a rough estimate of: (i) the size of Youth Employment Programmes (YEPs) in each country, either as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) or as share of the labour force; (ii) the extent of knowledge that youth have about employment programmes; (iii) the extent to which programmes properly target vulnerable groups; and (iv) the extent of political clientelism in the allocation of resources.