A Growing Young Generation may be the Secret to Africa’s Success
By Varda Berenstein
Listen to any political speech in Europe and the West, and you'll hear over and over again, repeated to the point of cliché: "Our children are the future." Young people are held up as the great hope for social, cultural, political, and economic development. They will ‘save the planet’. Their energy and motivation will ‘invigorate our public arena’. Their grasp of technologies that the older generations have long abandoned hope of keeping up with will see them ‘innovating in ways we cannot yet conceive’. Yet when it comes to the children of Africa, suddenly the language changes. They are a demographic challenge. A bulge. A burden. A problem to be resolved.
Africa has the world’s youngest population by a distance, with a median age of just 18 and over 40 percent of its ...