University degrees are not the answer for Africa’s unemployed youth

As a child, my friend Fola was good at math and excelled in the sciences and he wanted to be an engineer. But losing both his parents before the age of 15 changed everything. He was forced to adapt to a new and limited scope of opportunities available to him, both academically and financially. As he did, he learned how to deal with the trauma, adversity and setbacks and he built a high level of resilience.There are so many people like Fola who are bright and motivated, but due to challenging circumstances may not have a typical CV or resumé listing the universities they attended and the financial firms where they’ve worked.What if their CVs could instead focus on the things they learned from their actual “course of life”?For Fola, his CV would show how he had learned to deal with hardship at an early age; how he’d developed higher level of emotional intelligence from sharing a new home with a dozen cousins run by a no-nonsense great aunt; and how he developed a remarkable level of drive and motivation towards his goals. Those are all skills that would serve him well in the workplace.There are many people like Fola seeking work across Africa. In 2015, 226 million youth aged 15-24 lived on the continent, and that rate is expected to double by 2055. In many Sub-Saharan African countries, half of the population is under age 18. Youth unemployment is so pervasive that attendees of the recent annual meeting of the African Development Bank in late May made it a policy priority.While only about 7% of the youth population across Africa gets into university, most job vacancy postings block out anyone without a university degree, no matter what other marketable skills they possess. In countries like Nigeria, the education system is so broken, and failing to deliver on its promise of developing basic literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking skills, that employers place an even higher premium on a “good education” and what that must mean about someone’s ability to learn and succeed on the job.This kind of screening process not only negatively affects many potential employees but also employers. According to a 2014 National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) survey, the skills employers most want when they are deciding which new college graduates to hire are the ability to work well in a team, to make decisions and to solve problems.