Critical Examination of the Implications of Youth Unemployment in Zimbabwe

The chapter examines youth unemployment and its dimensions and characteristics in relation to overall unemployment. Youth unemployment has become increasingly recognized as one of the more serious social problems confronting Africa. There are many reasons why the government of Zimbabwe and society feel increasingly concerned about this problem. At the human level, failure to secure satisfactory employment upon completion of schooling and training can cause intense frustration, despair and alienation. It may also be associated with such social ills as drunkenness, drug-taking, violence, robbery and prostitution. From a material point of view, youth unemployment represents a tragic waste of skills and talents, resulting in lower production, increase in dependency burden on the rest of the society, and in the longer run, a gradual deterioration in the quality of national human resources. The potential consequences of high levels of youth unemployment at personal, social and national levels are thus serious and warrant sustained efforts to find solutions to these problems.