Employing Educated Africans A Problem

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30939, 21 December 1965, Page 22

Employing Educated Africans A Problem

Unemployment among educated youth is one of the big problems facing all the new African countries, according to Dr. A. C. Gallaway, a former Christchurch man, who has spent the last six years in Nigeria advising its Government on economic matters.

Nigeria, the biggest country in Africa (population 56m, about a quarter of the whole population of the African continent) has a rapidly-rising human survival rate, said Dr. Callaway. Hundreds of thousands of young people with primary education flocked into the cities—they rode jam-packed in “mammy waggons”—with the consequent problem of what work they could find to do? “This is one of the big topics of Africa which doesn’t hit the overseas headlines,” said Dr. Callaway. Dr. Callaway Mid his work in Nigeria was to identify this problem, and then to devise suitable economic programmes to provide paid Jobs for young people. 3m Schoolchildren Of the 3m schoolchildren in Nigeria, 90 per cent could not get more than a primary education, said Dr. Callaway. But even this gave them the notion of self-improvement, and the hope of a life better than their parents i* 1 the villages. Dr. Callaway makes his initial surveys in the villages as well as the back streets of towns and cities. “The young people are looking for something to do which is better than what their fathers and mothers are doing. But they cannot

find it,” he said. “Therefore, the cities of Nigeria are full of young people hopefully looking for paid jobs.” All the African countries, from Senegal to Tanzania, had this same problem, Dr. Callaway said. The Union of South Africa and Rhodesia also had it “but the migration of young Africans to the cities is there restricted, and the problem is not allowed to express itself,” he said. As an adviser on this problem of African youth, Dr. Callaway has a wide background of economic experience. He graduated M.Com. from Canterbury University College after service in,the Middle East with the 2nd N.Z.E.F., and then after a short lectureship at Massey Agricultural College was for nine years at Cambridge and Oxford universities, at the latter a tutor in economics at Balliol College. In 1957, he went to the United States, and took his Ph.D. degree at Harvard University. In 1959, he went to Nigeria as a member of the Centre for International Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In Nigeria, Dr. Callaway found that economic develop-

ment had to come “from below:” hence his travel to remote villages and close studies of African families and farming life. ModerniMtion and industrialisation were the current cries in Africa, said Dr. Calloway “but the employment absorption of largescale industrial schemes is low,” he said. It was necessary, therefore, to improve the performances of the smaller economic enterprises wherever they were, whether on farm or in back street, he Mid. President Nkrumah, of Ghana, had attempted to solve this problem by the creation of labour camps for youth, known as “builders’ brigades,” but they had failed on economic grounds in that the young Africans felt that Incentive was lacking. They wanted to use their new education to rise by their own merit

A symposium of 17 African nations, organised by Dr. Callaway at Dar-es-Salmm in 1962, had regarded these labour camps as tending to a forced system, and therefore unMtisfactory to solve the urgent problem of youth employment.