Does International Development Work for Youth?
What inspired me to write "The Outcast Majority: War, Development, and Youth in Africa"? The increasing clarity that current development approaches to youth in Africa and far beyond are insufficient. Even large programs that target youth only reach perhaps one thousandth of one percent of all young people in a country. Like ships passing in the night, African youth head into cities and informal economic markets while international development agencies tend to focus on the opposite: rural agriculture and formal economic markets.
Today’s overwhelming focus on quantitative data and analysis has led to an approach to development that tends to be technocratic, apolitical, and low on context. Boiling down many poverty challenges into a series of practical inputs like bed nets, vaccinations, and other specific kinds of programs can lead to worthy and verifiable outputs. Yet despite evidence of success, these approaches give the impression that you can do good development without knowing much about your target group, their countries’ governance, or their culture.
The Sea of Exclusion
The setting for The Outcast Majority is this: development work in Africa takes place in a sea of youth exclusion. This context emerges from the irony that, while African youth are demographically dominant, most see themselves as members of an outcast minority. Africa’s population is unprecedentedly youthful, yet most youth consider themselves outliers. This fact alone raises questions about hallowed development concepts: What constitutes a community if many do not view themselves as members? Do mainstream civil society and youth leaders understand and represent outcast youth majorities?
For youth themselves, the world of separation is ever-present; it is virtually impossible for most female and male youth in Africa to attend secondary school, meet culturally specific adulthood requirements, or access a youth program.
Elites in Youth Programs?
To share a sense of what this reality can look like on the ground, let us turn to a story from post-war Kenema in Sierra Leone. While carrying out field research there a few years ago, I interviewed many youth who were desperate to get into an employment training program. They knew about one program in particular: a community-based youth employment initiative set up by an international agency. As it turned out, Kenema’s Chiefs selected their supporters to be in the program. Elite Sierra Leoneans who supervised the program saw no problem with this -- the Chief cannot pay his supporters, so he gets them into programs. This is how development is done in Sierra Leone, they explained.
For youth not in the program, this was a blatant demonstration of nepotism. Moreover, it suggested that foreigners supported corrupt government officials. If the well-connected elites in the program were well–trained and later successfully employed, this scenario could unintentionally prompt serious negative results. As a successful program for the fortunate few, it simultaneously could fuel anger, frustration, and fatalism among many who could not get into the program.
My research with young people, donor officials, implementing agency officials, and youth, development and evaluation experts for The Outcast Majority revealed a second force that enforces pronounced elite favoritism: There is often heavy pressure on donor and implementing agencies to produce upbeat results – often as early as the first program quarter. Reportedly, quietly inserting elite, favored youth (usually males) into a program is one way to accelerate the generation of positive results.
Government nepotism, in short, can align with institutional expedience. This result may be unintentional, but it is truly unfortunate, nonetheless; without meaning to, these programs can demonstrate favoritism and inequality, and support systems and governments that promote exclusion.
A Framework for Change
Working in the context of expansive and profound youth exclusion is not easy. It’s why The Outcast Majority concludes with a detailed framework for reforming development work in youth-dominated societies in war-affected Africa and very far beyond. One issue which the framework highlights is the need to create a learning environment for all development work.
To initiate thinking about this, here are three sets of questions to think about:
- If you can only reach a tiny proportion of enormous youth populations, and if most youth are excluded and see themselves as outcasts:
- Will you employ strategic targeting?
- If you do, how will you decide who gets into your program and who is left out?
- Can you aim for excluded youth or will internal pressures tragically force you to target elite youth?
- How can you demonstrate inclusion in contexts where most youth are excluded?
- How will you address the potential for negative impact on youth who can’t access your program?
International development in today’s youth-dominated world is failing most youth and inadvertently fueling further exclusion. My framework in The Outcast Majority sets out a comprehensive way to reverse this trend by counteracting forces that exclude young people and collaborating with outcast youth to address their priorities.
Dr. Marc Sommers has worked on youth, gender, conflict, education, and development issues in more than 20 war-affected countries over the past 2+ decades. He has carried out research and evaluations for, and provided technical advice to, NGOs, research foundations, policy institutes, and donor and UN agencies. His books include Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood which received Honorable Mention for the 2013 Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize, and Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania which received the 2003 Margaret Mead Award. This blog is derived from his eighth book, The Outcast Majority: War, Development, and Youth in Africa, which was released December 2015.
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