ブックタイトル佐藤栄作　受賞論文集

概要

佐藤栄作　受賞論文集

The promise of youth entrepreneurshipEmerging youth entrepreneurship is a result of the realities of the contemporarylabour situation in many African cities. Humans always display resilience in the faceof adversity and the experience of poverty forces young people to find new ways ofcoping with their situation. Moreover, they regularly have an intimate understandingof the way things work on the ground, which no economist or development expertcould rival. A large informal economy has long being part of the reality of modernAfrica, but as a study commissioned by the ILO has shown, in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa unemployed youth are increasingly learning to improvise in theinformal sector, by establishing petty trading schemes and micro-enterprises amonggroups of young people who share similar circumstances. Numerous cases whereyoung people have proven adept at developing small-scale enterprises based aroundinformation technology and mobile phones offer encouragement in this respect(Chigunta et al. 2005: 21). The ILO study also notes however, that the negativelabelling of such young people by the government as socially‘undesirable’actuallyundermines any opportunity for such ingenuity to develop into more widespreadand effective forms of entrepreneurship. Without gaining any social respect, youthremain in a kind of‘liminal stage’, unable to receive the social and cultural validationnecessary to progress to adulthood. This in turn has a variety of detrimentalconsequences for the whole of the community (Chigunta et al. 2005: 11). Just as a lackof political engagement can get in the way of a sense of social meaning and belonging,so can a lack of fulfilling economic activity.The Youth Employment Network, which is coordinated through the UN SecretaryGeneral’s office, has already made some moves towards helping to support a culture712