PIM Brown Bags: Youth Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa

The first PIM’s Brown Bag seminar in 2014 took place on February 27 at IFPRI and was dedicated to the topic of Youth Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa (with a presentation of the recently issued World Bank report on the topic). The session showed great interest among our colleagues working in the area of agricultural and food policies. We were excited to have more than 40 people attending the event in person and virtually, and made a mental note to book a bigger room next time.

Presenters included Louise Fox, co-author of the resent World Bank report on the topic, former World Bank Lead Economist and now Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley; Karen Brooks, the report’s contributor and PIM Director; and Frank Byamugisha, author of the book on land rights in Africa “Securing Africa's Land for Shared Prosperity: A Program to Scale Up Reforms and Investments”. With such distinguished panel of experts and participants who came well prepared, the 90 minutes of the seminar flew unnoticed filled with a lively discussion and great comments and questions from the audience.

Some of those questions are still to be answered. The seminar’s participants agreed to form an interest group dedicated to the issues of the youth employment in Sub-Saharan Africa to share materials and ideas on the topic and to discuss potential work that could be included in the PIM’s research portfolio for 2015-2016 (which is being planned at the moment). The group is open for interested parties, if you would like to be included, please write to Crp-pim@cgiar.org. As a first step, we are happy to share here the presentations that our speakers used during the seminar on February 27.

Presentation of Louise Fox: Overview of the report findings

Presentation of Karen Brooks: Good Jobs in Agriculture for Africa’s Young People

Presentation of Frank Byamugisha: Youth Employment in Africa - Access to Land