The Youth Employment Evidence and Insights Hub (YEEIH) is a new initiative led by the Pan-African Collective for Evidence (PACE) with the support of the Mastercard Foundation. Its aim is to provide the best available and relevant evidence, to be delivered with – and not merely for – decision-makers in Africa.

The partnership is supporting the delivery of the Mastercard Foundation’s Young Africa Works Strategy, which focuses on youth employment across the thematic areas of entrepreneurship, agriculture, digital economy, finance, health, and education. The strategy is ambitious, amining to help 30 million young people in Africa, especially young women, to secure dignified and fulfilling employment in Africa.

Youth unemployment is an increasing issue across Africa. It has a profound impact on young people and their ability to contribute to economic growth, development, and personal fulfilment. More than one in four young people in Africa – around 72 million – are not in employment, education or training: two-thirds of them are young women. Andile Madonsela, Gender and Evidence Lead for PACE and coordinator of African Evidence Youth League (AEYL) sums up the consequences of this dynamic: “The young people in Africa hold the key to its development, but their capacity to come up with creative solutions remains untapped due to the high levels of unemployment.”

The Hub is supporting the Mastercard Foundation by delivering research that integrates living evidence and Indigenous ways of knowing, to ensure that evidence-informed decisions truly benefit the African youth. This provides an opportunity to generate meaningful solutions that address real contexts in real time. Providing a lesser-known but equally necessary perspective, Indigenous ways of knowing must be accredited and respected when mapping the known evidence on a particular subject. Indigenous knowledge systems in Africa, such as traditional medicine, are sidelined in favour of the scientific method – and especially by Western institutions – because it is not necessarily backed up by scientific evidence despite the fact that, as Andile pointed out, “it works for us, and we know what works for us”. 

The partnership is harnessing the drive of young people to be a part of this social transformation, championing their voices at every stage of the collaboration with Mastercard Foundation – from generating the evidence, all the way to communicating it back to the community. The YEEIH has set up a Youth Reference Group (YRG), who are consulted for guidance and feedback on matters such as branding, and how we can communicate our evidence in a way that is useful and appealing to young people, one of our key stakeholders. 

The idea that the research is being done ‘by Africans, for Africans’ means we respect the individuals we are trying to help by understanding their contexts and what it is they need.

To find out more about the partners working together in the Hub, visit the links below:

Link to the partners

• ACRES
• AEN
• eBASE Africa
• CommsConsult
• EPHI
• LARTES-IFAN
• PACE
• PACKS Africa