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Youth juggle jobs to survive - study

Cape Town – Most young people were juggling a lot of different income streams to survive financially, a study presented on Thursday at the first Young Africa Works Summit showed.

This appeared to be the way disadvantaged young people in rural Africa work towards creating a more sustainable future. They subsist by creating incomes by combining odd jobs, working with their families (for instance in agriculture) and having some form of entrepreneurial activity.

The use of different income streams was a deliberate strategy of the young people in rural areas to minimise risk and maximise income, the study showed.

The summit, hosted by the MasterCard Foundation, aimed at finding practical ways to create sustainable jobs for young people on the continent. Agriculture was the first sector of focus.

According to the research, there had been only limited success with the current approaches to transform the lives of millions of marginalised low-income youth on the continent. What was needed were large-scale solutions that would reach millions rather than thousands.

The Youth Livelihoods Diaries research project aimed at finding empirical data about youth employment and entrepreneurship in Africa, tracked the working behaviours of a number of young people aged between 18 and 24 years, living in rural areas - mainly in Ghana and Uganda - and who were largely dependent on agriculture for an income.

The preliminary findings of the research project showed that young people were actively pursuing a variety of income streams, which focused on business activities and agriculture. The participants in the study also indicated that they regularly save their income despite it being of a limited nature.

Most participants indicated that their greatest need was for information about jobs and obtaining skills. About two thirds said they would rather own their own business than be employed by someone else.

Another trend the research highlighted was that often young people aged about 15 would snub agriculture as an income stream, but as they discover how difficult it was to find work elsewhere, they would put a bigger focus on agriculture again, like their parents before them.

The study also found that especially young women were being disadvantaged because of having children at a very early age. This then affected their ability to obtain or create work.

The MasterCard Foundation said it would publish a comprehensive report on the project and its findings in 2016.


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