“We need African solutions to African problems”

“We need African solutions to African problems”

Nigeria’s Finance Minister & Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala was recently interviewed by CNN Marketplace Africa.

Interesting articles I came across this week

1. Why Africa needs it’s own Ivy League institution from Think Africa Press twitter feed

2.  “Letter to a young social entrepreneur: the poor are not the raw material for your salvation” from the Pioneer Post via AidWatch twitter feed

3. Entrepreneurship becoming a more respectable career in Africa

4. African students who invented an anti-malaria soap

5. A report on linkages between Higher Education Institutions in Africa and the productive sector

6. Africa needs new breed of leaders

Who is developing who really?

Simply mindblowing…

Comment on African Economists vs. Western Economists

Justin Sandefur over at the Center or Global Development shed light on what seems to be  a very interesting pattern in development economics/African development. He looked at the papers from the recent Center for Study of African Economies conference (presentations – first graph and submissions -2nd graph). He rightly points out than African are disproportionately interested in jobs while Non-Africans are most interested in institutions. My inclination would be to believe that this finding is not non-trivial. That was my exact thinking when I posted this. What I wonder though is why? Why is it that Africans seems to be focused on labor, agriculture, poverty while Non-Africans are focused on political economy and institutional factors? I don’t really have an answer to this but I would like to think that logically African researchers are likely to be closer to local issues (whether physically when they are studying the issues from Africa or mentally because they grew up close to the issues at hand).

It’s really great that an army of devout development economists and policymakers are dedicating their life’s work to the cause of the well-being of Africans, but the implications red flags such as the one Sandefur is raising in these graphs are important to discuss. I would be thrilled to listen to a debate about African development between experts who work in Africa for Africa (regardless of origin) and those who work outside of Africa for Africa (regardless of origin). And no, flying over for a couple of days or weeks of fieldwork does not count as working in Africa. It belongs to the latter category.

African Economists vs. Western Economists part 2

Graph from Justin Sandefur @ the Center for Global Development; includes all papers submitted

African Economists vs. Western Economists part 1

Graph from Justin Sandefur @ Center for Global Development based on 264 papers presented at a conference on African development at Oxford

A little fun with international development

A little fun with international development

So during  a recent browsing adventure, I found out that The Guardian has a treasure trove of interactive games that can help you learn A LOT about not only world geography but also international development general and current issues. My favorite is the geography game which includes a section where you can try guessing countries GDP per capita!.I hope they will do something similar for human development indicators. Pretty cool way to learrn! I recommend it to anyone interested in international development!

Telling the African Story by Komla Dumor

This is a refreshing and rather eloquent articulation of how I feel (and I am sure many other Africans) feel about the coverage of African issues in the media. By far the best 20 mins I have spent on Youtube lately!

“international community” (some) vs. africans

I borrowed this word cloud from a friend’s page on Facebook. Rather accurate reflection (in my view/experience) of the discrepancies between language used within international community and language used by African youth, entrepreneurs, and members of the Diaspora

Thoughts welcome!

McKinsey “Education to Employment” Report – Commentary

Hello World!

First of all, apologies to those of you who actually read the blog description and had been expecting another post within a couple of weeks or a month. My life took an interesting turn towards the middle of December 2012, which explains my silence of the past two months. I will not get into details but I promise to henceforth try my hardest to post at a consistent rate, even if I am simply sharing materials borrowed from other places. That being said, part of the reason for my silence is also the fact that I had been pondering on the topic I wanted to cover next. I could not settle on anything, given the plethora of information I digest and the wide range of issues I am interested in within international development. So, today I am just going to provide a quick commentary on a report I came across some days ago.

In a recent study, Education to Employment  The Center for Government at McKinsey and Company attempted to answer interesting questions about youth employment around the world: How can a country successfully move its young people from education to employment? What are the problems? Which interventions work? How can these be scaled up? The authors essentially conducted 25 case studies of “education to employment” programs and surveyed 8,000 stakeholders across eight countries (Brazil, Germany, India, Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States) on various aspects of the employment challenges faced by young people around the world. What they generally find is that young people, educators and employers live in “parallel worlds.” That is to say educators and students’ perceptions of the skills acquired do not typically match up with employers’ expectations. For example, while 72% of educators believed that their graduates are ready for work, only 42% of employers, and 45% of youth themselves did. Another interesting finding is only about half of youth believes that post-secondary education improves their employment opportunities.

This report provides some insightful information on a very important topic that is at the center of development issues. However, I deplore something in this study. It is hardly representative of the world we live in. Yes, read the list of countries selected again: not a single one of them is located in Sub-Saharan Africa. I find that particularly troublesome as in a previous article, a McKinsey contributor was specifically pointing out that 62% of people in the sub-region are under 25 years of age. Africans know this reality too well: the future of the continent literally lies in the hands of its young people. But this reality is especially salient for Sub-Saharan Africa. I am dumbfounded to say the least that not a single country of the sub-region would be included in a study of this caliber.

Another issue with this study I would say is that it seems to be focused on secondary education and lower levels of post-secondary education whereas a case could be made for the quasi-necessity of higher levels of post-secondary education in this day and age. I mean, even developed countries incessantly remind their young people that a high school degree no longer suffice to make a good living. In fact, I believe that a great challenge for many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in the next few decades is effectively harnessing their higher education sector. In many cases, African higher education systems were originally designed for immediate post-colonial administrative needs. The problem now is that political and economic landscapes have evolved on the continent but many have not adapted curriculums accordingly. Thus, higher education institutions are serving a very different type of students that they did in the post-independence years.

To return to the original question asked in this report: “how can a country successfully move its young people from education to employment?” I say: recognizing the crucial role of higher education and doing something about it.