Judith Rodin and Eme Essien Lore

Youth Opportunity:
Rethinking the Next Generation

For at least the last 100 años, each generation has come of age in the face of unique
challenges and opportunities that have ultimately defined it. In the early 1900s, él
was the emergence of industry, which enabled young people to rise above their
economic circumstances in ways their parents could not. Generations raised in
times of war developed much different values and worldviews than those raised in
more peaceful eras.

For the current generation of young people, the defining characteristic may be
the rampant unemployment that has spread across the globe. True, el 2008 finan-
cial collapse created employment struggles for all generations, but none more so
than youth. According to The Economist, nearly a quarter of the world’s youth are
currently unemployed and not in school or training.1 In Africa, young people make
up more than 80 percent of the unemployed population; in Greece and Spain,
unemployment among people age 25-24 surpassed 50 por ciento en 2013;2 and in the
United States, the youth unemployment rate is more than twice the national aver-
age.3

While the issue of youth unemployment is universal, the drivers of this trend
are unique to each region. En los Estados Unidos, six million young people are unable
to find jobs, whether a high school student who cannot find afterschool work or a
college graduate who must settle for an unpaid internship. In Africa, the problem
takes on a much different texture: the continent’s bulging youth population has
outpaced job creation, and longer life expectancy means workers are remaining in
the workforce much longer than before, resulting in fewer opportunities for youth
to enter the workforce. Despite economic gains in South Asia, nearly one in three
young person is out of work, due to gender inequities, cultural norms, and a com-

Judith Rodin is President of The Rockefeller Foundation, one of the world’s leading
philanthropic organizations. Since joining the Foundation in 2005, Dr. Rodin has
recalibrated its focus to meet the challenges of the 21st century, and today the
Foundation supports and shapes innovations to strengthen resilience to risks and
ensure more equitable growth around the world.

Eme Essien Lore is Senior Associate Director of The Rockefeller Foundation. EM.
Essien Lore supports the development and execution of several Foundation initia-
tives, including the Foundation’s Digital Jobs Africa initiative which is aimed at cre-
ating employment opportunities for disadvantaged but high-potential youth in the
information technology industry.

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Judith Rodin and Eme Essien Lore

plex web of laws and regulations that tend to keep young people out of jobs in the
formal economy.4

To change the dynamic, nosotros
must change our mindset,
from viewing the youth bulge
as a challenge to be solved to
seeing it as an opportunity
we must harness.

No part of the world has been immune to the youth unemployment crisis, y
both the immediate and long-term implications could be severe. Young people
who are not on track to secure employment are often stuck in a self-perpetuating
cycle of poverty and instability.
Their future earning potential is
stilted, and they are likely to settle
for part-time jobs or temporary
trabajar. As a result, today’s youth,
many of whom are concentrated
in urban areas, face high levels of
social exclusion and lack clear
access to the safety nets that
employment can provide: salud
benefits, retirement accounts, y
pensions. As the United Nations
Human Settlements Program has
noted, “urban youth life tends to take place in worlds that are largely separate from
the rest of society,” and as more young people resort to crime and other illegal
activities to generate their livelihoods, the danger can be extreme.

Long-term youth unemployment also has a dramatic impact on the economy
at large. In Canada, jobless youth are estimated to miss out on $10.7 billion in wages;5 in the United States that number could be as high as $18 billion.6 The eco-
nomic and social consequences will likely weaken the next generation’s ability to
be resilient as they face their own shocks and disruptions—natural, climate driven,
and man-made—which will only increase in frequency, escala, and impact over the
coming decades.

Many already have termed the current crop of young people a lost generation,
but with the right approaches and the will to act, the global community can find
new opportunities that not only create jobs and boost incomes but also improve
livelihoods and business practices.

REGIONAL APPROACHES

The Rockefeller Foundation’s mission, unchanged since its founding in 1913, is to
promote the well-being of humanity. Youth unemployment is among the most
detrimental threats to human well-being around the world, in terms of both the
immediate economic impact on individual livelihoods and how it can affect entire
sistemas, particularly in cities. Tal como, for the last several years, the foundation has
explored new solutions to the challenge both in the United States and across
África, where the youth population is set to double by 2030.7

En los Estados Unidos, we see the greatest opportunity in helping put those six
million youth who are out of work and not in school on a pathway to sustainable

innovaciones / Youth and Economic Opportunities

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Youth Opportunity: Rethinking the Next Generation

employment. The foundation was pleased to support creation of the Leadership
Council for the Aspen Forum for Community Solutions, an evolution of the White
House Council for Community Solutions, to which I was appointed by President
Barack Obama and served on for two years. The Council found that here in the
United States the capacity for innovation and creativity is often greatest within
communities, rather than at the federal level. Communities often can implement
more effective and cost-efficient solutions than federal programs can provide,
thereby creating scalable models that others can replicate.

OPPORTUNITY YOUTH IN AFRICA

The unemployment gap in Africa’s more than 50 countries requires much different
but equally complex solutions than those in the U.S. We see opportunity at the
apex where three enduring trends meet: the rapid urbanization, digitization, y
globalization of our world.

Urbanization, Globalización, and Digitization

Hoy, half of the world’s population lives in cities, and that number is growing. Él
is expected that three-fourths of the world’s people will call cities home by 2050.
That fact is most pronounced in the developing world, with both Asia and Africa
experiencing massive population growth.8

For the first time in history, more young people live in urban than rural areas.
Por 2030, young people under the age of 18 are expected to make up 60 por ciento de
the world’s urban population, which will put them in ever greater competition for
a finite number of jobs.9 Urban youth are often likely to live in slums or other
unplanned settlements, making them vulnerable to poverty. Sin embargo, with young
people flocking to cities in search of new opportunities and economic mobility,
urbanization can be a driver of innovation and economic growth.

The increase in digitization also has enormous implications for the African
continent. Más que 2.5 quintillion bytes of data exist in the world today, 90 por-
cent of which have been created in the last two years,10 but we certainly are not
close to reaching a data peak anytime soon. Businesses and organizations of all
sizes and types—universities, libraries, governments—need workers who can
curate and manage that data, from people who transcribe printed books into digi-
tal formats to those who create databases to mine insights from consumer data. En
África, with an increasing demand for e-government services and the exponential
growth of a consumer base with improved access to technology, the digitization
needs are particularly pressing.

Y, finalmente, globalization means these jobs can be done from anywhere in the

world, not just at company headquarters or in government offices.

A Booming ICT Sector

The combination of these three trends has led to leapfrog advancements in Africa’s
information communications technology (ICT) sector. Countries such as Ghana,
Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt are implementing key policies and incentives to

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Judith Rodin and Eme Essien Lore

support and grow their ICT sectors as vehicles for job creation.11 Government sup-
port for laying fiber optic cables to enhance ICT capacity has led to an exponential
increase in Internet connectivity.

Además, African corporations are emerging as major players alongside
multinational corporations, which are expanding and will continue to expand to
África, further increasing demand for a skilled labor force and business process
outsourcing (BPO) services. It is no coincidence that Nigeria, home to nearly half
of Africa’s multinationals, also has the largest ICT sector.12 The expansion of multi-
nationals into Africa and the creation of homegrown African corporations togeth-
er will create opportunities for ICT-enabled employment. The global BPO and
information technology outsourcing sectors together are expected to reach $574 billion by 2015,13 and a study from the World Economic Forum notes that, por 2020, an estimated 150 million new jobs could be created in the ICT sector for young Africans.14 Faced with these staggering numbers, the Rockefeller Foundation posed a question: How can we leverage this explosion in the ICT and BPO sectors to employ more disadvantaged but high-potential youth? Part of the answer was to promote broader adoption of socially minded hiring practices across business and government through a field we call “impact sourcing”. This kind of innovation cre- ates more opportunities for large multinationals and growing African corporations to employ youth in digital jobs in emerging industries, such as banking, insurance, health care, and mobile technology. For the last several years, the Rockefeller Foundation has worked to build up the impact sourcing sector in Africa, which seeks to promote equitable growth by employing low-income youth and young people from other marginalized commu- nities in information and communications processing centers. The arrangement has been a win-win: businesses and governments have seen costs decrease by 40 por ciento, while employees have seen their incomes rise as much as 200 por ciento. DIGITAL JOBS AFRICA The Rockefeller Foundation’s nearly $100 million initiative Digital Jobs Africa aims
to build on this foundation to eventually impact one million lives through the cre-
ation of digital jobs, skills training, and a sustaining ecosystem in which to grow
future digital job opportunities.

Creating Sustainable Employment Opportunities

Digital Jobs Africa is working to create new jobs in three ways. The primary path-
way for job creation is by continuing to catalyze the impact sourcing sector. Nosotros
also will leverage the rising demand for skilled workers from African-based com-
empresas, gobiernos, and multinational corporations to create sustainable employ-
ment opportunities. One particularly intriguing opportunity is the movement of
African governments toward e-government systems, which are implementing ICT
practices to improve their efficiency, efficacy, y transparencia.

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Youth Opportunity: Rethinking the Next Generation

In Ghana, Por ejemplo, we see the potential to create a significant number of
jobs by digitizing the immense backlog of government data. Sin embargo, the real
power in creating digital jobs is that it also has a secondary impact: businesses that
use this accessible and easy-to-understand government data will be able to provide
information and services to the public, thereby creating a cascading series of addi-
tional jobs and improved communities. Además, we aren’t starting from
scratch: IT Enabled Services Secretariat Ghana has already had great success in
training young workers to do these jobs. The young employees who participated in
the program have shown not only an 80 percent improvement in skills but a 250
percent increase in incomes.15

Digital Jobs Africa is exploring additional opportunities to create new digital
jobs, whether through the next big development in mobile health or a new busi-
ness innovation that will require thousands of digitally trained workers. We do not
know what these jobs will be, but the characteristics of the ICT space suggest that
they will appear and increase in number rapidly. Por ejemplo, M-PESA Kenya, a
pilot project in 2007, now employs over 25,000 agents and has given nearly 20 mil-
lion Kenyans access to the formal financial system.

Skills Development

To help young people develop the digital skills that will let them land these kinds
of jobs, we are working with nongovernmental organizations and other groups to
build training programs that will connect disenfranchised populations with
income-generating opportunities. By supporting skills development, such as com-
putational thinking, funcionamiento cognitivo, and digital media literacy and training
for young people, we will help prepare them for digital jobs. We also will support
training programs for skills such as transcribing, edición, and app development, a
name just a few, that are driven by existing needs and opportunities in the private
sector.

Sin embargo, Digital Jobs Africa is not just an initiative to help young people
develop skills for skills’ sake; it aims to address the skills gap that is directly linked
to Africa’s growing digital economy and to stimulate the growth of that sector in
order to employ more young people. Tal como, an important lever for ensuring that
disadvantaged youth are employed in ICT jobs is to establish partnerships with
employers to guarantee that our workforce training meets their needs. As demon-
strated by the recently launched Global Business Coalition for Education, hay
an emerging global movement to involve business in education and training that
will, among other things, identify good business practices and strengthen the
impact of corporate efforts to improve access to education and strengthen learning
resultados.

Por ejemplo, Kenya’s Nairobits training center partners poor youth with
employers for practical training in website design and publishing. Ninety percent
of these students find employment through Nairobits, while others start their own
business or look for other opportunities.16 As employers continue to face a massive
shortage of qualified youth to fill important positions in their rapidly growing

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Judith Rodin and Eme Essien Lore

negocios, there will be great incentive to create innovative partnerships to
address a problem that exists across the public and private sector.

Fostering an Enabling Environment

Finalmente, Digital Jobs Africa is working to create an environment that will ensure
that digital jobs can be created and maintained over the long term. This will
require more effective coordination among businesses, training providers, gobernar-
mentos, and nonprofits long after philanthropy exits the space. Por último, our goal
is to work ourselves out of a job and leave behind an environment in which phil-
anthropic intervention is no longer needed.

Measuring Success

The creation of digital jobs not only will benefit the workers who will be employed
by the ICT and related sectors, it also has the potential to generate additional
income and opportunities for their families, communities, and entire countries.

On the individual level, digital job training will teach young people skills they
will be able to apply to a range of jobs over a lifetime, making them more resilient
in a dynamic labor force—which is a key reason we have focused on digital jobs.
As a result of gaining a secure livelihood, youth employed in digital jobs will pro-
vide their family members with economic and social benefits. The young people
can use the income from their digital jobs to invest in household and other expens-
es, such as rent, health care, and school fees. On a community level, this boost to
incomes will inject much-needed capital into local economies, thus creating addi-
tional job opportunities, such as small-scale food vendors, housekeeping services,
construction, and transport.

CHANGING THE MINDSET

While we are focused on six countries in Africa—Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco,
Nigeria, and South Africa—based on their potential and their interest in building
their BPO and ICT sectors, we believe this model will be replicable and scalable in
other parts of Africa and can serve as a model for other interventions worldwide.
But to change the dynamic, we must first change our mindset, from viewing
the youth bulge as a challenge to be solved to seeing it as an opportunity we must
harness. Unlocking the talents and ingenuity inherent in today’s generation of
young people may well create the very innovations that will help solve humanity’s
most pressing concerns.

No matter the outcome, the moral imperative to act is clear. As Rockefeller
Foundation founder John D. Rockefeller Sr. dicho, “I believe in the dignity of labor,
whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes
every man an opportunity to make a living.” One hundred years later, those words
ring just as true; it is up to us to answer the call.

1. “The Lost Generation,” Economist.com, Puede 1, 2013, available at

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Youth Opportunity: Rethinking the Next Generation

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/05/global-youth-unemployment.

2. Derek Thompson, “Europe’s Record Youth Unemployment: The Scariest Graph in the World

Just Got Scarier,” The Atlantic, Puede 31, 2013, available at
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/europes-record-youth-unemployment-
the-scariest-graph-in-the-world-just-got-scarier/276423/.

3. Sarah Ayres, “The High Cost of Unemployment,” Center for American Progress, Abril 5, 2013,
available at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/report/2013/04/05/59428/the-high-
cost-of-youth-unemployment/.

4. Mabruk Kabir, “Getting to Work: Tackling Youth Unemployment in South Asia,” End Poverty in
South Asia, South Asia Region of
Julio 2, 2013,
http://blogs.worldbank.org/endpovertyinsouthasia/getting-work-tackling-youth-unemployment-
south-asia.

the World Bank Group,

5. Dana Flavelle, “Jobless Youth Costs $10.7 Billion in Lost Wages: TD Report,” The Star, Enero 29, 2013, available at http://www.thestar.com/business/2013/01/29/jobless_youth_costs_107_bil- lion_in_lost_wages_td_report.html. 6. Gary Reber, Puede 20, 2013, “America’s youth Unemployment Problem Could Cost $18 Billion

Over The Next Decade,” For Economic Justice, Julio 2, 2013,
http://foreconomicjustice.org/8165/americas-youth-unemployment-problem-could-cost-18-bil-
lion-over-the-next-decade-analysis/.

7. John Rowley, Junio 28, 2007, “City numbers in Africa and Asia set to double by 2030,”
People&Planet.net, Julio 2, 2013, http://www.peopleandplanet.net/?lid=28570&topic=23&segundo-
tion=33.

8. John Vidal, “UN report: World’s biggest cities merging into ‘mega-regions’,” The Guardian, Marzo
22, 2010, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/22/un-cities-mega-regions.
9. David E. Bloom and Tarun Khanna, “The Urban Revolution,” Finance and Development 44.3
(2007): 8-14. available at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2007/09/pdf/bloom.pdf.
10. IBM, IBM Big Data Success Stories, (EE.UU: IBM Corporation, 2011), accessed July 2, 2013,

http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/data/sw-library/big-data/ibm-big-data-success.pdf.

11. Avansant, Incentivos & Opportunities for Scaling the “Impact Sourcing” Sector (The Rockefeller
Base, Septiembre 2011), available at http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/media/down-
load/ad92d524-14ba-4452-899c-b55498303d85; Bas Vlugt, Julio 19, 2011, “South Africa, Nigeria
and Kenya key players in the African ICT sector,” Bas Vlugt’s Blog, Julio 2, 2013,
http://ictafrica.ning.com/profiles/blogs/south-africa-nigeria-and-kenya.

12. Initiative for Global Development and Dahlberg Global Development Advisors, Pioneers on the
Frontier: Sub-Saharan Africa’s Multinational Corporations (Initiative for Global Development
and Dahlberg Global Development Advisors , 2011), available at http://dalberg.com/sites/dal-
berg.com/files/IGD-Dalberg_Pioneers-on-the-Frontier_0.pdf.
“Why Nigeria: The Nigerian Experience,” Outsourcing Development Initiative of Nigeria, last
modified 2009, available at
http://www.odin.org.ng/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=18.

13. Sateen Sheth, Enero 22, 2013, “Special Series (Parte 2): BPO for the BoP – the need for (y

promise of) Impact Sourcing,” Next Billion, Julio 2, 2013,
http://www.nextbillion.net/blogpost.aspx?blogid=3113.

14. World Economic Forum on Africa (2012). World Economic Forum on Africa: Shaping Africa’s

Transformation, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 9-11 Puede 2012. Disponible en:
www3.weforum.org/docs/AF12/WEF_AF12_Report.pdf

15. Sarah Troup, Junio 17, 2013, “Outsourcing Sector Key to Digital Job Creation in Ghana,"
RockBlog, Julio 2, 2013, http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/blog/outsourcing-sector-key-dig-
ital-job.

16. “About Nairobits,” Nairobits, last modified 2012, available at http://www.nairobits.com/about-us.

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