‘Youth are the future, the leaders of tomorrow’, ‘young people must step up’, ‘youth empowerment’. These are common refrains peppering political rhetoric, policies and strategies for Africa’s youth, penned by their respective governments, the African Union, and international development practitioners alike. They have had a runway for a number of years, but absent actual progress towards realising them, they increasingly come across as empty rhetoric, obfuscating the concrete paths to prosperity for a demographic that constitutes the majority population across the continent.
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