Youth Employment Preferences in Rwanda and Sierra Leone: A Constrained Comparative Secondary Analysis

Area of Science:

• Socioeconomic studies
• Labour economics
• Development studies

Background:

• Youth in Sub-Saharan Africa aspire to secure wage employment but face high rates of informality and underemployment.
• Structural constraints significantly influence employment preferences and entrepreneurial drive among young individuals.

Purpose of the Study:

• To clarify how structural constraints shape employment preferences and entrepreneurial orientation among youth in Rwanda and Sierra Leone.
• To analyze the interplay between aspirations, institutional trust, and public goods provision in shaping youth entrepreneurship.

Main Methods:

• Constrained comparative secondary analysis using Afrobarometer Round 9 microdata for Sierra Leone.
• Triangulation of Sierra Leone findings with national labour-market and policy indicators for Rwanda.
• Bounded-evidence strategy to address asymmetric data availability.

Main Results:

• Sierra Leonean youth exhibit a cautious economic outlook, with a preference for self-employment often driven by necessity rather than opportunity.
• Moderate institutional trust and public goods provision correlate with necessity-driven entrepreneurship.
• Rwanda's high labour-absorption pressure and informality suggest widening aspiration gaps when formal job creation lags behind education.

Conclusions:

• Youth entrepreneurship initiatives must be coupled with investments in inclusive growth, public goods, and digital governance to avoid shifting labor market failures onto young people.
• An "institutionally conditioned planned-behaviour" framework is proposed, integrating existing theories to explain youth employment choices.
• Methodological contributions include demonstrating rigorous comparative inference with asymmetric evidence and outlining a pathway for future symmetric modeling.