Turning Africas Youth Bulge into a Demographic Dividend

On November 29th, European and African countries will come together, as happens every three years, for a heads of government summit. This years event in Abidjan, under the auspices of the European and African Unions, comes at a moment of enormous flux and tension in relations between the two regions. The formal agenda, Harnessing the Demographic Dividend Through Investments in Youth, touches on many of these tensions.

Africas youth population is huge and growing there are 200 million Africans between the ages of 15 and 24 and half of all the worlds population growth between now and mi-century will be in the region. African and European countries can probably agree on the importance of youth, but often for different reasons. Handled well, this youth bulge, at a time when other parts of the world are ageing, shrinking, or both, could be an economic boon. But for many African governments, the more immediate concern is about stability: in a region where youth unemployment and rapid urbanisation are in lock-step, demography poses an increasing challenge to the political status quo.

For the EU, the interest in youth at this years summit is overwhelmingly tied up with the desire to curb migration. Nine of the top ten sending countries on the central Mediterranean route to Europe this year were African, and most of those migrants are young, underemployed young men. With European governments increasingly being punished at the polls for a perceived loss of control over borders, the domestic pressure to act is intense.

Last year, the EU launched its migration partnership framework, while the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa is spending 1.6 billion euros, most of it on combating trafficking and irregular migration. Increasingly, bilateral aid from European countries is being tied to conditions on migration, with the danger that sectors and countries that are less relevant to the issue lose out. And the growing outsourcing of border controls to transit countries, especially Libya and Sudan, threatens to trap migrants in desperate conditions.

This matters not only because aid is increasingly being used in ways that have questionable impact on poverty, and because the EUs talk of fundamental rights rings increasingly hollow. The current fixation on migration prevention also risks a huge missed opportunity to invest in Africas demographic dividend. Education is critical to seizing this opportunity, yet it is largely missing from the summit agenda, beyond an anticipated 40 million euro project on youth entrepreneurship and training. In a region where a third of lower-secondary aged children are out of school, and where only 5 percent graduate to post-secondary, theres an urgent need to increase access to education. And in a region where, as this years World Bank flagship annual report shows, learning outcomes for children who are in school are often dire, raising the quality of education is a critical necessity.

Next February, the Senegalese government will partner with the French on the replenishment conference for the Global Partnership for Education, in Dakar. The GPE has a key role to play in leveraging domestic political and budgetary commitment to education, not least in Africa. By spending $3 billion of aid between 2018 and 2020, it can help secure the tripling of education financing globally thats needed to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal on Learning.

This week, the EU should use the occasion of the Abidjan Summit to signal its commitment to this agenda, and put education, not migration, at the heart of the discussion about Africas youth.