Despite their numerical majority, young people in Africa are still confronted with significant obstacles to participating in economic, social and political circles. The challenges of getting an education, earning a productive and sustainable livelihood, and having a healthy lifestyle continue to draw back progress towards tapping the potential of Africa’s youth for the continent’s development in the face of low life expectancy, weak infrastructure, and poor economic development in the region.

Yet, Africa’s youth are the key to the continent’s renaissance and will remain players in and advocates of social transformation and development in many spheres. The enormous benefits that youth can contribute can only be realised when investment is made in their education, employment, health care, empowerment and effective civic participation.

Changing the situation of Africa’s youth will require high levels of commitment both within the nations of Africa and the rich countries of the world. Fortunately, across Africa, there is growing recognition of the centrality of youth issues in the development agenda, and how improving the situation of Africa’s youth will make them part of the solution to Africa’s development challenges. Likewise, within the development community, recognition of the importance of investing in young people in Africa has grown rapidly as a number of bilateral and multilateral donors, as well as foundations and other global institutions have published policies and strategies, commissioned research and analysis, and launched a range of programmes and initiatives targeting Africa’s youth.

This is rightly so because young people constitute the majority of the population on the continent. With little education, diminishing chances of earning a livelihood, and blurred prospects of a meaningful future, youth in Africa may become a breeding pit that may fuel migration, radicalisation and instability. Thus, considering Africa’s youth as a demographic cohort, rather than merely as the sum of individuals with different needs (of employment, health, education, etc.) is recognition of youth as a collective actor, capable of influencing society’s direction and pace through their actions.

This donor momentum has obviously increased the profile of Africa’s youth across all domains of global development discourse. However, more needs to be done to ensure that donor policies and strategies are matched by an increase in funding and specific programming to effectively and efficiently meet youth needs on the continent in 2015 and beyond.

Across Africa, as part of a division of labour between donors and partner governments, several donors have moved towards greater sectoral concentration, both at an overall regional level and in specific countries. This has in most cases led to a diminishing focus on youth development as a sector in its own right; either because it is considered as cross-sectoral or because it has been dropped in favour of other key sectors such as education, health or economic growth.

The aid effectiveness agenda has also led to most donors increasingly shifting from the old ‘project’ modality towards larger-scale programmatic sector-wide approaches. This shift has increasingly resulted in multi-donor programmes in which the national government or a UN agency is the main in-country partner. While this may achieve better alignment of aid, it also reduces the scope for donors to fund smaller catalytic projects such as those which work with youth at a community level. At the same time, the move towards alignment with partner country priorities has created the opportunity to achieve greater impact in key sectors but has reduced opportunities to work in other key sectors that the government might not prioritise – such as youth. In several African countries for example, for a variety of reasons, governments only pay lip service to youth issues, and, as a result, youth development programmes do not receive significant funding.

To improve the investment architecture for Africa’s youth in 2015 and beyond, donors should work to delineate ‘youth’ (or ‘children and youth’) as a sector on its own and then invest in gathering youth-specific funding data both at individual donor level and as part of a donor community. Further steps should be taken to invest in age-disaggregated data gathering in African countries through support to national statistics bureaus and other national data collection organisations as well as ensuring the collection of disaggregated data and analysis in programme design, monitoring and evaluation. Developing a system to enable specific monitoring of commitments and expenditure on youth will ensure that policy commitments are matched by programming commitments and funding.

For more efficiency and coordination, donors should also create specific youth units with advisors that have responsibility for driving policy and programming on youth. The youth units and their advisors could provide more explicit guidance to different country and sectoral programmes on why, when and how to focus on youth with examples of best practice for analysis, programming, monitoring and evaluation. In the absence of this, youth issues risk being de-prioritised.

Donors should also give more overall priority to youth development in Africa. For Africa’s youth to receive the much needed programming and funding they deserve, there needs to be a more systematic approach to analysing their situation, and when appropriate, including more explicit objectives related to youth development in key donor policies, strategies and programmes.

Undoubtedly, more funding is needed to demonstrate donors’ recognition of the importance of investing in youth for Africa’s development. Both large and small programmes are encouraged. But in particular, smaller, catalytic projects on youth development in African countries can be critical to supporting the piloting of new approaches particularly at community level. Large-scale programmes can be executed through multi-donor pool-funding mechanisms, while small projects can be funded through mechanisms like challenge funds and small grants initiatives managed by third parties.

In order to provide a fuller picture to form the basis for investments in Africa’s youth, further research is required to provide context-specific analysis of the situation of youth in each African country. Such research should explore the specific risks and challenges faced by different groups of youth and the opportunities that exist for engaging with them to meet their needs and enhance their role in peace building and development.

Finally, regular systematic review of experience and good-practice in implementing youth programmes is required with a view to understanding how best to address youth issues across programming in general and in Africa in particular. This can draw on various comparative scenarios including mainstreaming youth development in other sectors such as education in order to draw best practices, targeting specific youth groups such as those with disability for particular interventions, supporting youth ministries and youth-led organisations and individual youth as part of efforts to strengthen the youth sector, or a hybrid approach that combines mainstreaming youth in some sectors and targeting youth development as a sector in its own right.

* Emmanuel Edudzie is Executive Director of Youth Empowerment Synergy based in Ghana. For 12 years he has been at the forefront of youth development policy, practice and research at all levels.

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