Over the next 10 years, Africa will have created about 122 million new jobs, says the World Bank Youth Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa Report. Although this is a very exciting forecast, mass job availability alone won’t be enough to address the unemployment issues in Africa, especially when the new jobs are not proportional to the influx of unemployed youth. Furthermore, the pace at which these jobs are being created falls short of the rate of youth entering the job market per year. During the next ten years that it takes for Africa to finally create the new jobs, eleven million youth will have been entering the labor market each year.
The following post is a part of a series that discusses 'mind and culture,' the theme of the World Bank’s upcoming World Development Report 2015.
For one night, the Cirque du Soleil closes all its shows in Las Vegas. Instead, more than 100 artists come together to create one magnificent show in support of One Drop to give out a simple, yet very powerful message: water, for today and forever. For One Drop, awareness is as essential as economic development to drive change to make water accessible to all. The non-profit organization uses social arts to connect, communicate, and convince communities to adopt sound water management practices that ensure sustainability in the long run. The Let’s Talk team caught up with Jacques Rajotte, Chief Operating and Innovation Officer, and Danielle Valiquette, Chief International Programs Officer, One Drop, on their visit to the World Bank last week to know more about operationalizing social arts as an impactful tool for social transformation.
Changes to the supply and demand of data are restructuring privileged hierarchies of knowledge, with amateur hackers and machine-readable technology becoming a central part of its analysis. Traditional experts may be hoping for a gradual evolution, but a parallel revolution led by practitioners in the private sector may already be underway. Prasanna Lal Das argues that partnerships will need to incorporate these new practitioners because for them, the data revolution is already a fact of life.
This isn’t the first age of revolution, but this one feels like it might not last 100 years. Our world is transmogrifying in front of our eyes – sometimes more forcefully than others – and the traditionally dry world of data, dominated by dons and ‘experts’, hasn’t been immune to changes either. It might even be the spark for at least some revolutionary fervour, especially since the report of the high level panel of eminent persons on the post-2015 development agenda called for a ‘data revolution’ to ‘strengthen data and statistics for accountability and decision-making purposes’. The official data revolution has however unfolded slowly, sometimes making one wonder if it’s going to be a revolution of the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats, and for the bureaucrats. Or if it will be a revolution that truly changes how we measure our world, what we measure in it, and who does the measurements.
During her primary contest with Barack Obama for the nomination of the Democratic Party, Hilary Clinton once remarked that one only needed to look at the two of them (a woman and an African American) to recognize that both represented change. One could say the same about India’s newest political party – the Aam Aadmi or Common Man Party, barely a year and half old, but being seen as a potentially transformational political force. Its members – unassuming middle class housewives, small time lawyers, IT professionals, college professors, journalists, and community organizers -- stand out in sharp contrast to the seasoned political operatives from established parties.
In fact, in an environment where opaque campaign financing, political lineage, and the politics of identity are accepted avenues to the corridors of governance, the Common Man Party has literally risen from the streets, taking on corruption at all levels, appealing to ethics and citizenship rather than caste or religious affiliation, and proving its independent credentials by making its funding (primarily small donations) transparent on its website.
These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.
Digital technology means development is now happening outside the system
The Guardian
I recently spent an evening at the University of Sussex talking to students interested in a career in the international development and non-profit sectors. That might not sound particularly interesting at first, except that I've never had a job in either. There's a general assumption – and not an unreasonable one – that if you want a career helping solve some of the bigger challenges facing people and the planet that you reach out and volunteer, intern and work at some of the largest institutions taking on those problems. But there is another way. A few decades ago, if you wanted a career in development you'd have to be a teacher, doctor or build dams. The spread of the internet and the march of the mobile phone have changed all that. Now, anyone with a computer and internet connection can build an app in their bedroom that helps to improve the lives of millions of people around the world, or develop an idea which goes viral. And I speak from experience, developing text messaging platform FrontlineSMS a few years ago with little funding or resources, which now is driving thousands of social change projects in more than 170 countries.
Studies Show: People Want Democracy to Deliver the Goods
Foreign Policy
Does the average person consider governance when they think about the things that affect their everyday lives? In a new Overseas Development Institute (ODI) paper that assesses views on governance based on survey data from around the world, we find that they do. But governance has many aspects, and there are some that are more important to people than others. In general, people seem to be concerned first and foremost about state performance and the ability of governments to deliver on key needs and expectations in areas including economic management, growth stimulation, job creation, health, education, or a more equitable distribution of goods and services. Corruption is a central part of this story, since it has such a big impact on people's satisfaction with their governments and their perceptions of its performance overall.
World Bank Lead Economist, Eric Le Borgne discusses the focus of new support for Jordan.
Inequality is back in the news. In his 2014 State of the Union address, U. S. President Obama lamented that, “after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better. But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled.” At the global scale, Oxfam is making the same point, noting in a recent report that the richest 85 people in the world own the same amount of wealth as the 3.5 billion bottom half of the Earth's population. Perhaps more surprising, the rich and powerful CEOs jetting to Davos earlier this year seemed to finally get it: capitalism cannot survive if income and wealth become concentrated in too few hands. Fighting inequality would therefore not only be the morally correct thing to do, it would also be smart economics. And this is what a recent Staff Discussion Note from the IMF suggests: “inequality can undermine progress in health and education, cause investment-reducing political and economic instability, and undercut the social consensus required in the face of shocks, and thus tends to reduce the pace and durability of growth.”
“It is not what you know that matters, it is who you know” is how the old adage goes, and so I have observed from my conversations with family and friends during my recent visit back to my hometown in East Jerusalem when I asked what they thought of the often heard complaint among Arab youth that “wasta” is all that matters in landing a decent job nowadays.
Neil Fantom, Manager, Development Data Group, Nicole Klingen, Sector Manager,Health, Nutrition and Population, and Aleem Walji, Director, Innovation Labs at the World Bank guest blogged on Google's Blog space today to explain how the World Bank's data is being showcased on Google's new Maps Gallery. Read the full blog post.
