Creating Paths for Education and Employment is a Make or Break Issue for Africa

Many young people are getting access to secondary education and an increasing number also university education. An increasing share of youth in Africa are university students, 9% in 2018. In today’s knowledge economy, university students carry a key role in development. They are therefore an important group to study and understand better. In Ghana, a country of 31 million inhabitants, 57% of the population is under 25. In 2019, 17% were enrolled in university compared to only 9% 10 years earlier. But local scholarship opportunities are few and increasingly individuals carry the costs of tuition. Nearly a third of 15-29-year-olds are not in education, employment or training. Many young people across the continent with higher education degrees are more likely to consider migration than the adult population as a whole. Ghana is typical of many African countries on this front. Its number of internationally mobile students is the closest to the African average of 5.8%.

SOURCE: THE CONVERSATION