Youth Share of Intergenerational Poverty Transfer across the Sub-Saharan Africa Landscape

Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the topmost regions in the world with an extreme increase in poverty, youth unemployment, malaria, high crime rate, and other negative social economic phenomenon. “Intergenerational Poverty Transfer is the passing of private and public, key deficit and liabilities, from one generation to another, in terms of physical, and financial assets, public policy, public and private expenditure which affect future generation human and Social capital”. Intergenerational Poverty Transfer is the process of eating the seeds and the harvest of the future generation by the past generation and also providing, future generations with huge loads of deficits, liabilities, crises, and many more social-economic problems that will sufficiently limit the possibility of experiencing good economic outcomes by the future generations.

The root causes of Intergenerational Poverty Transfer had mostly been limited to family and households influences in Sub-Saharan Africa; however, such analysis lacks the potency to offer a lasting solution for the problem of Intergenerational Poverty Transfer among youth in general, seeing other external factors are capable of sponsoring the transfer of Intergenerational Poverty among the generation. Parental influences, connection, background, and education will always be significant and deterministic factors in Intergenerational Poverty Transfer among youth. Parents with good social influences, political connections, and an affluent heritage will often pave way for their children in almost all areas of life such as schooling and employment transition, leaving children from economic disadvantage families on the losing edge in their journeys through life.

Parental unemployment has been found to often limit the educational possibilities of black children and further, spearhead the increasing social vices in the most community across the Sub-Saharan Africa region. Youth in the Sub-Saharan Africa region, tend to turn out, to seek alternatives for living in drugs usage, early pregnancy without an economic capacity to raise a child, and kidnapping, bringing huge personal and social costs to their respective countries. “Poorer parent-youth relationship and lower parental monitoring also help to sponsor the increased usage of alcohol, binge drinking, and marijuana, use onset.” Since parenting is on side of Africa, most lack the resources to train their children in the current harsh environmental and economic situation at present in Africa.

African governments had also been pegged with high levels of corruption, bribery, and nepotism, therefore had failed to make available basic and common access to sustainable living, even for children from economically disadvantaged homes, Failure to ensure cultural barriers are lifted on female children, and failure in ending child labor had been the common characteristic and the practices of governances across the Sub-Saharan Africa region. Governmental failure will always limit the ability of society to fight against economic shock, environmental warming, and social crime, and the resultant effect will be increased poverty, out-of-school children, unemployment, teenage pregnancy, and child labor, and by such increases the possibility of continuous Intergenerational Poverty Transfer across the Sub-Saharan Africa region.

The best way forward to end the continuous increase of Youth share in Intergenerational Poverty Transfer is to also understand that parental influence in terms of background, wealth, and affluence is only valid to the degree of their economic advantage in the Labor market. So, parents with assets and property will have a good share of influence in the labor market than economic disadvantages parents. Hence, controlling and modifying the share of parents, households, youth, and other stakeholders influences toward labor market participation will dramatically reduce Intergenerational Poverty Transfer as people will be equipped with the capacity to engage the labor force directly irrespective of their backgrounds and gender.

Therefore embracing skills demands, skills competency, and reducing skills gaps will be the perfect solution to ending youth share of Intergenerational Poverty Transfer across the Sub-Saharan Africa region as skills demand is the major deterministic factor in Labor market participation. Investing heavily in skills acquisitions, skills value, and skills development across this region, will increase youth share of labor market participation and also helps to take advantage of the growing opportunity in the labor market mobility through digitalization.

“Labor market is the arena that determines the consequences of skills gaps among individuals in terms of income and standard of living.” In the Sub-Saharan Africa region, the ability to address skills gap issues through policy options will be the only way to significantly reduce the continuous share of Intergenerational Poverty Transfer among youths in Africans.