# **2.1. Skills**

A low level of marketable skills among youth is widely recognized as a major barrier to youth employment in Africa today. After completing primary or even secondary school, youth lack the foundational and technical skills that employers need. According to the World Bank Enterprise Survey, 18.2% percent<sup>9</sup> of firms in the region identify an inadequately educated workforce as a major constraint to operations (World Bank, 2016). The literacy rate among youth (ages 15-24) in Sub-Saharan Africa was 65.8 percent and 76.3 percent in 2010 for women and men, respectively, amid global literacy rates of 88.5 percent and 92.5 percent (World Bank, 2015). Young women attain less education on average than young men (Figure 5), putting them at a further disadvantage. In the ILO SWTS carried out across eight

**Figure 5: Women attain less education on average than men.**

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1.2<br>1<br>0.8<br>0.6<br>0.4<br>0.2<br>0<br>Source: World Bank Databank (Barro and Lee, 2010)<br>Average Total Years of<br>Schooling (Female)/Average  Total Years of Schooling (All)<br><!-- End of picture text -->

countries (see footnote 3), young men and women cite economic reasons as the main reasons for having no schooling. However, 28.5 percent of young women cite parental refusal compared to 17.2 percent of young men, and 2.1 percent of young women cite marriage compared to 0.4 percent of young men (Elder and Kone, 2014).

As a result of these constraints to formal education, youth enter the labor market without three types of critical skills. The first type is foundational skills, including basic literacy, numeracy, and soft skills, which improve employability directly and also prepare youth for subsequent skill acquisition. Soft skills, also called life skills or socio-emotional skills, are defined by the International Youth Foundation (2014) as “a comprehensive set of universal cognitive and non-cognitive skills and abilities, connecting behavior, attitudes, and knowledge.” They include workplace readiness, emotional regulation, and interpersonal skills and have been shown to be strongly correlated with labor market outcomes (Heckman et al., 2006; Heckman and Kautz, 2012). One systematic review (Lippman et al., 2015) identified five critical skills most likely to increase workplace success for the 15 to 29 age group: social skills, communication, higher-order thinking skills (e.g. problem solving and decision making), selfcontrol (e.g. directing and focusing attention, managing emotions and behavior), and positive selfconcept. Many of these skills are best developed starting in early childhood, but adolescence remains a crucial window of opportunity, as many of these skills are still malleable through young adulthood but are much harder to develop at later ages (Borghans et al., 2008). The optimal ages for soft skill acquisition

> 9 Based on data collected for different countries from 2006 to 2015. Values range from 3.1 percent in Namibia to 11.9 percent in Malawi to 29.7 percent in Kenya to 40.8 percent in Tanzania. According to a 2010 Gallup World Survey of unemployed and discouraged youth, 26 percent of those with primary schooling and 24 percent of those with secondary schooling reported “lacking employers’ requirements” as the main reason they were not working (AfDB, OECD., & UNDP 2012).

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