When I was 18 years old, full of ambition, zeal and energy, I graduated from high school in Kampala, Uganda, with good grades and a great command of the English language. With my gap year at hand, I combed the streets of Uganda’s capital, looking for a job. After being turned down several times for …
It was Pope Francis that called youth unemployment one of “…the most serious of the evils that afflicts the world these days…” Many believe that extremist groups such as Boko Haram, Al Shabab and IS take advantage of unemployed youths who feel marginalised from the mainstream economy. It is this sense of disenfranchisement that makes …
What separates developed from less developed countries is not a gap in resources but a gap in knowledge, according to Joseph Stiglitz, the ex-President of the World Bank. It therefore follows that in order to bridge the gap between Africa and the developed world, we must embrace knowledge. We must embrace it whether ever we …
In 2012, just before Fatou Bensouda began her tenure as the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, she addressed a large forum of African activists and academics in Cape Town. As she spoke to a room packed with highly educated skeptics — many of whom claimed that the I.C.C. appeared to have “an imperialist agenda” toward …
Yesterday we honoured Youth Day in South Africa, a day when we remember the hundreds of young people who were massacred in 1976 by the apartheid regime for their peaceful protests against a state education system that sought to forever keep them as economic slaves. It took the courage of children to bring the apartheid …