Africa is the youngest and fastest-growing continent in the world; by 2030, there will be 375 million young people in its job market. However, there is a significant lack of employment opportunities that young people deem dignified and fulfilling; youth unemployment rates are as high as 65% in South Africa, and 80% in Djibouti.
A new initiative led by the Pan-African Collective for Evidence (PACE) with the support of the Mastercard Foundation, aims to address this emerging crisis. The Youth Employment Evidence and Insights Hub (YEEIH) aims to provide the best available and contextually-relevant evidence to inform decisions and investments on the continent. The evidence will be generated by six African organisations with existing and nascent track records in generating evidence and advising governments on the basis of evidence.
The collaboration will help the Mastercard Foundation to deliver their ambitious Young Africa Works Strategy, using the best possible evidence. The strategy sets out an ambitious goal of enabling 30 million young people in Africa, especially young women, to secure employment that they see as dignified and fulfilling.
YEEIH will produce 15 rapid evidence reviews over the next year on a range of thematic areas of youth unemployment, including entrepreneurship, agriculture, digital economy, finance, health, and education. Each review will include both indigenous and local forms of evidence, to make sure the evidence is relevant and context-appropriate for large scale programming on the African continent.
“Nothing about us without us”
Central to the project is the notion that actionable solutions targeting youth unemployment must include the voices, insights and lived experiences of the young people of Africa. For this reason, the Hub is harnessing and amplifying youth voices at every stage of the process, from inclusion in the governance of the partnership itself as well as the creation of a Youth Panel that reviews the evidence being generated.
Our communication approach
CommsConsult’s role is twofold. First, to make sure the partnership is communicating the evidence effectively, both to the client and more broadly to other decision makers and actors across Africa who can act on it. We will develop a simple Communication Strategy to capture the vision of what we want to do and how we plan to do it; work with designers across the continent to create a compelling brand and design templates for the products; provide editorial oversight on the rapid reviews; and help the project secretariat to keep all partners spread across Africa feel connected, informed and engaged in the delivery throughout the 12 months’ duration.
Our second role, that informs everything that we do (including how we carry out our primary role) is to support and grow the capacity of the project partners to be effective and strategic communicators – both of the project and of their own institutions. In effect, to do ourselves out of a job after the first year. We always learn as much as we contribute in these collaborations, and we are excited to be part of this groundbreaking initiative.
Link to the partners
