BLOGS

As one of East Africa’s rising economic stars, Kenya continues to serve as a model for development progress. But with one in six young people in Kenya currently jobless, development partners have very rightly begun to factor youth empowerment into projects in nearly every sector.

On Tuesdays, my colleagues and I take a break from assessing health and education challenges to strategize on the soccer field instead. We’re very good at strategizing, but we’re awful at scoring goals. Soccer, of course, is a sport that requires thoughtful strategy, but a game plan is not very useful without clear communication to execute it, the stamina to run across the field toward the goal, or the skills to kick the ball on target. If we’re going to score, win games and fulfill our goal of making the playoffs, we need that whole package.

In the past decade, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of American student-loan borrowers leaving college with high debt and low earnings. The resulting unsustainable debt burdens impose substantial costs on students and on federal taxpayers.

Youth unemployment is a huge issue in the developing world. According to the International Labour Organization, 71 million youth were estimated to be unemployed in 2016 and 37 percent of working youth live in poverty, suggesting underemployment. Yet, this doesn’t necessarily mean that jobs don’t exist — often, a mismatch between the market’s labor needs and the skills of unemployed youth prevents young people from finding work.