112 \ Global Youth Development Index and Report 2016 Youth: A Wonderful Resource for Africa Dr Mo Ibrahim Founder and Chair, Mo Ibrahim Foundation for Good Governance in Africa Africa is a continent of young people; our demography is completely different from the rest of the world. Within three generations, 41 per cent of the world’s youth will be Africans. By 2030, Africa’s labour force will be larger than China’s; by 2035 it will be larger than India’s. match the job market. We need to develop the skills required by business and our national development plans. Currently we produce the lowest number of engineers in the world, less than 2 per cent of our youth is studying agriculture. This simply will not do. This is a wonderful resource for our continent if this resource is skilled and employed. In Africa, we mostly mismanage our natural resources – and then the blessing of our abundant natural resources somehow turns into a curse. We need to overhaul our education system, to focus on education for employment. Education must I hope we do better with our abundant human resource, and avoid a potential curse. and 2015. This implies that inequalities between countries in youth development, especially in the Health and Well-being domain, are narrowing, though at a very slow pace. Of the 46 countries in the region, five – Kenya, South Africa, Niger, Togo and Malawi – registered an improvement of more than 15 per cent in their YDI scores between 2010 and 2015. And at least one-half of the countries in the region improved their scores by more than 5 per cent. Given the high proportion (28 per cent) of young people in Sub-Saharan Africa and the estimated increase in their share of the total population of Africa in the coming decades, these findings bode well for young people in the region and the world at large. • While there has been progress in all the five youth development domains of the YDI, the most significant progress has been made in the Civic Participation and Political Participation domains. Given that the Civic Participation domain measures the extent to which youth interact positively with their communities, the large improvement in the domain globally is heartening, not least because it disproves a widespread stereotype that portrays young people as more apathetic or self-centred than other age groups. Although the Political Participation domain doesn’t directly reflect young people’s participation in political processes, the significant gains in YDI scores in this domain nevertheless indicate that there has been a remarkable improvement in the environment in which youth participation takes place. • Of the five YDI domains, Education has the highest average score, indicating the significant improvement in young people’s access to education, especially since the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000. Gender gaps in education have narrowed and, in fact, education levels for young females and males is on par in most high YDI countries. On the flip side of the scorecard, the YDI also highlights some serious shortcomings in youth development at the global and national levels, most visible in the levels of inequality and deprivation that blight the lives of so many young people around the world. The findings that should attract particular attention from policymakers include: • Despite narrowing of gaps, glaring inequalities in levels of youth development persist within and among countries. Nearly three-quarters of the world’s youth population is living in countries with a low or medium level of youth development. In other words, the socio-economic and political contexts in which the lives of an overwhelming majority of the world’s young people – including almost the entire youth population of SubSaharan Africa and South Asia – are being shaped are still far from conducive to their well-being. • Gaps between low and very high YDI countries are most pronounced in the access that young people have to education, health services, financial inclusion and digital technology, indicating that these should be the top priority areas for policy focus in countries falling in the low and medium