Taking a chance on Chance
We needed Rwandan coffee and Wi-Fi this morning and so we headed to a Kigali coffee shop. We were served by a bright young man named Chance. While he was taking our order we got chatting about his story and I asked him
“How many young people in Rwanda are under 24 years old?”
Without missing a beat he told me “60% and 7% have never been to school”
How many young people serving in coffee shops in any country could tell you their national youth stats just like that?
So while he was getting the coffee I checked him out….and he was absolutely right!! 60%
Chance’s story is the story of Sub Saharan Africa. Approximately 60% of the continent is under 24 years old and many of the countries youth are under 14 years old (In Rwanda its 41.3% under 14; In Uganda its over 48% under 14 years)
Chance’s story is the same in other ways. He is bright and has finished school. But there are no jobs. He wants to be an engineer. He wants to go to University but he doesn't have the money (It would cost him about £7500 a year for 3 years)….so he is saving up by serving us coffee!
And the problem is getting worse by the day. In the next 33 years the global population will rise by 2.2 billion and guess where 59% of these youth will be born? Sub Saharan Africa.
What do you call it when a burning platform and a no brainer solution collide?
We have to teach every young person in this and each generation to lead themselves out of poverty.
We asked Chance about young people and getting jobs
“They are asleep” he said ”they have no self confidence to even think they could do anything about the problem”.
We have to wake them up to their potential and then invest in changed mindsets.
Without mindset change the story will stay the same for every generation. And then we need to give them first level skills so they can get started in changing their stories.
There is an Africa Proverb that says
“It takes a village to raise a child”.
That's true also for youth becoming people who lead themselves out of poverty.
It takes everyone – the parents, the teachers, the youth leaders, the local businesses – to create generations of young people leading themselves out of poverty.