Engaging Africa’s Youth Employment Generating Social Safety-nets and Community Harmony

The famines of the past few decades are indeed a cruel test to Africans. While the outpouring sympathy and generous response of the international community to human distress have been phe­nomenal, the actions of “the firemen of international disasters” had brought to light some serious doubts about the ability of these interventions to reduce peoples' vulnerability to famines triggered by incompetent leadership recurrently. Indeed, states in Africa have greatly expanded in the last few decades, especially in terms of the number of public employees and the share of public consumption in the government budget. But this growth has not usually been accompanied by a concomitant im­provement in the capacity of its leaders to provide the vision and the ability of the state to extend authority throughout the territory to deliver public services. Hence, we assert that, the widespread incidence of poverty, diseases, and human under-development and displacement in the poor world is directly attributable to basic weaknesses of social and political leadership, rules of the game and political institutions. With few exceptions, nations have failed to win popular legitimacy - possessing relatively few authentic, social organizations that can articulate and aggregate social interests and civic education remain generally non-existent or at best, weak or underdeveloped.

The main objectives of EGSN are to serve as under-employment cushions; while assisting the development of public works schemes. They avail communities the opportunity of working in their own develop­ment as the resources required for managing survival (elements of indigenous famine survival- strat­egies of the  last  resort - include austerity and reduced consump­tion, temporary mi­gration, di­vestment, and crisis migration) are rendered unnecessary by the resources generated by these safety nets. Indeed, there is no more compelling raison d'être nor a mission-objective so utterly entrenched in the preservation and, even advancement of human-kind, than good governance and leadership that can lead a social league to relate cogently to an epidemic of ignorance that has spun out of control.

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