This study examines the factors that contribute to the successful government engagement with its youth population and the consequent implications for state legitimacy and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Through a case study analysis of Kenya’s relationship with its young constituents, particularly in the context of recent youth-led (“Gen Z”) protests and the government’s “bottom-up” economic transformation agenda, this paper investigates elements of the critical intersection of youth unemployment, political participation, and state sustainability. The analysis focuses specifically on the agricultural sector, given its centrality to Kenya’s bottom-up transformation agenda and its significance for Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) investors. The findings suggest that states must fundamentally reconceptualize their relationship with youth populations, transitioning from top-down policy formulation to collaborative co-creation models, while simultaneously addressing structural economic barriers and creating genuine pathways for economic advancement.

The Youth Are a Geopolitical and Economic Force

Africa’s demographic trajectory represents one of the most significant global trends of the twenty-first century. The continent’s population of 1.4 billion inhabitants includes the world’s largest youth cohort, which is projected to double to over 830 million by 2050.[1] Meanwhile, by 2030, Sub-Saharan Africa alone will be responsible for half of all new entrants into the global workforce.[2] To keep pace, the region will need to produce up to fifteen million new jobs every year.

These demographic realities could either present a remarkable opportunity—since so many countries around the world are battling aging populations and labor shortages—or an overwhelming threat. If young people’s economic futures are not secured, their frustrations will spill over into the political realm. There is growing evidence all over the world that young people in aggregate constitute a powerful geopolitical and economic force. By extension, youth unemployment is a political economy issue of enormous proportions, one that will not be contained to any single country or region if it goes unchecked.

The Imperative for Redefined State-Youth Relations

Above all else, individuals and institutions alike must reinvest in their social contract with young people. In an era of seemingly perpetual and multifaceted crises—from climate change to the potential threat of AI as a substitute for human labor—the priority should be to safeguard succeeding generations.

In this regard, the state has a disproportionate share of the burden as the primary custodian of socioeconomic welfare at scale and, thus, serves as the focal point of this paper. As youth disenfranchisement intensifies, political engagement increasingly manifests through extra-institutional channels, encompassing boycotts, social movements, protests, and demonstrations. While such activities may represent accessible forms of political participation when institutional channels prove inadequate or absent, their dominance as the primary mode of political action signals a potential systemic crisis. Consequently, governments must reconsider their relationships with young constituents as fundamental to preserving state legitimacy and sustainability.

Kenya as a Case Study

On the youngest continent in the world, Kenya presents a topical and illuminating microcosm of the evolving relationship between the state and youth, with lessons for not only policymakers but also foreign investors, who cannot afford to ignore these dynamics when making decisions about how to direct their investments.

For the Kenyan government, which has been grappling with the aptly dubbed “Gen Z protests” for the last two years, this is an opportune moment to truly interrogate how it can engage productively with young people by answering certain crucial questions.

Firstly, how should governments effectively communicate with young people to sensitize, build consensus, and generate buy-in? This is particularly relevant, given that Gen Z and subsequent “digital native” generations that are accustomed to social media are far more likely to expect communication to be a two-way process, unlike previous generations that were used to more one-directional modes, such as radio, television, and newspapers.

Secondly, beyond simply winning hearts and minds, how can states leverage young people—their ideas, skills, and talents—to support sound policymaking and improve governance?

Foreign investors, too, need a more nuanced understanding of how young people navigate—and contest—the Kenyan political economy for three reasons. Firstly, it is difficult to invest effectively in Kenya and comparable African economies without understanding key underlying structural challenges, among which youth unemployment ranks prominently. Secondly, young people constitute a vital demographic regardless of investment focus, as consumers, influencers, innovators, employees, suppliers, and service providers. Finally, investors need to understand markets in the context of political economies, or else they will only ever see half the picture.

The Link Between Youth-Led Protests and Limited Economic Prospects 

Young people are dissatisfied. From Kenya to Serbia to Indonesia, young people are emerging en masse to demand more from their leaders. However, despite sensationalized media coverage suggesting widespread instability, research indicates that the majority of youth-led protests remain peaceful.3 Furthermore, youth-led movements globally have generally resulted in less polarization and greater unity across diverse social groups and classes.

A high concentration of young people in urban areas is a powerful indicator of the likelihood of protests.4 However, the desire to protest does not exist in a vacuum. Young people under the age of 25 are two and a half times more likely to be unemployed than their older counterparts in the labor force and have less disposable income compared to previous young generations.6 Additionally, youth in general would rather engage in extra-institutional activities than participate in conventional institutions and structures.7 This reality extends to Kenya specifically, where party affiliation among youth has declined.8 Therefore, states have a dual challenge to contend with: addressing the underlying cause of disgruntlement—typically a lack of quality economic prospects—and determining appropriate responses to more disruptive forms of “extra-institutional political action.”9

At the heart of Kenya’s protests—whether last year’s demonstrations against the 2024 finance bill or this year’s “Saba Saba” (seven-seven) protests commemorating the anniversary of the protests of 7 July 1990, which launched Kenya’s bid for multi-party democracy—is the issue of economic opportunity. This concern is driving other youth demonstrations around the world, including most recently in Nepal and Madagascar. However, what is notable in Kenya is that its youth protests were precipitated by a material shift in the relationship between the state and its young constituents, which itself is a direct result of how the current administration came into power.

The premise of Kenya’s current administration’s political platform was economic justice fueled by “anti-establishment populism” aimed at unemployed and under-employed young people.10 With the promise of a “bottom-up” economic transformation, one that elevates the lower socioeconomic strata (popularly referred to as the “hustlers”), President Ruto’s election campaign had three powerful consequences: it resulted in policy-based (rather than predominantly identity-based) voting; it led to “unprecedented levels of public interest in economic policymaking”; and it elevated economic justice as a unifying goal for a diverse group of (young) people from across the country.11

There is no putting this proverbial genie back in the bottle. The Kenyan government must confront the evolving relationship it has with its young constituents, a metamorphosis it set in motion by showing young people that the status quo can be challenged. In particular, the government needs to think critically and holistically about how to fulfill its campaign promise: economic justice for the unemployed and underemployed via a bottom-up transformation.

Kenya’s Efforts to Address Youth Economic Exclusion

The Kenya Jobs & Economic Transformation (KJET) project aims to boost the productivity of select MSME (Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise) clusters in priority value chains to create jobs for 45,000 Kenyans.12 The National Youth Opportunity Towards Advancement (NYOTA) initiative seeks to empower vulnerable youth, specifically to improve their employability and self-employment prospects. Climate Worx Mtaani is yet another program designed to promote youth employment through environmental restoration and community development.

Despite the proliferation of such youth-focused initiatives, significant policy-implementation disconnects persist. The widely publicized Hustler Fund (or Financial Inclusion Fund) is one example. The Fund was initially conceived of as a graduation mechanism from informality to formality by providing access to credit for people not qualified for bank loans, but it has encountered numerous challenges since its launch. This is partially because a substantial portion of disbursed loans has been used for daily expenses rather than income-generating activities.13

Gaps in implementation are typically the result of a combination of factors, including unintended consequences, lack of access, limited awareness, and corruption. Moreover, the government does not appear to be listening and responding to the demands, ambitions, and ideas of young people when crafting policies and programs that are intended to benefit them.

You Reap What You Sow: Aligning Agriculture Development with Youth Aspirations 

In addition to being capable of articulating their own needs and aspirations, young people globally have proven themselves to be a “rich source of anticipatory insights and futures thinking.”14 This could be invaluable for effective and prescient policy formulation and programming if nurtured and harnessed strategically.

The agriculture sector exemplifies the need for a more reciprocal relationship between the state and youth. Agriculture in Kenya—and the continent at large—is constrained by a tricky paradox. On the one hand, it remains crucial for food security, economic prosperity, and employment. Agriculture employs over forty percent of Kenya’s total population15 and over seventy percent of the rural population16 (for context, seventy percent of Kenyans still live in rural areas17). Investing in Kenya’s agricultural potential is also a focal area for foreign investors, especially in places like the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), whose governments are increasingly looking to Africa as part of their food security strategies.

Yet, despite its undeniable importance as a potentially rich repository of livelihood opportunities, there appears to be a pervasive (perceived) lack of interest in agriculture as a viable career path for Kenyan youth. This is seemingly corroborated by the generally accepted statistic that the average age of Kenyan farmers is sixty to sixty-one years old.18

However, the story is not quite so clear-cut. Despite the perception issue plaguing agriculture, a significant number of young Kenyans are involved in the country’s food system “as producers and traders of food, as workers, innovators, and entrepreneurs, and as policy actors.”19 Many rural youths are also employed in agriculture, although informally. The barriers to formality are manifold, including a lack of access to land, credit, information, market linkages, and critical infrastructure. In addition to these, there is another issue at play: the government seems not to have understood young people and what they want at some fundamental level.

A 2021 study20 exploring the aspirations of Kenyan youth demonstrates how nuanced young people’s visioning of their futures is when provided with the right options. Although aspects of the research confirmed that young people expressed limited interest in farming, the responses changed dramatically when their available options were not presented as a dichotomous choice between either farming or not farming. Notably, most surveyed youth stated that they would want to pursue mixed livelihood options, combining income streams from both on-farm and off-farm sources.

The limited understanding of young people’s professional desires points to the need for a fundamental reconfiguration in how the government relates to the youth. Currently, “[young people’s] representation during policy formulation and engagement processes is often tokenized and not representative of their participation in Kenya’s food systems.”21 If the youth’s goals and motivations were better understood and integrated into job creation initiatives from the outset, agriculture would correspondingly become an easier “sell” for the government.

The Limits of Bottom-Up: Attracting and Retaining Youth in Agriculture

Creating better feedback loops with young constituents will ultimately prove to be mutually beneficial, enabling the development of more fit-for-purpose policies while offering an avenue to extend the government’s own capacity to tackle these weighty tasks. Taiwan offers an instructive example.

Taiwan is home to a civic technology community, called g0v, which began as a grassroots movement in 2012 using open-source technology and data to promote online collaboration between civil society and the public sector. One of its products is vTaiwan,22 a “decentralized open consultation process […] bringing together Taiwan’s citizens and government to deliberate on national issues.” As a new model for “People-Public-Private Partnerships”, vTaiwan has supported the development and codification of various policies and legislations. Overall, g0v has functioned as an important vehicle for fostering partnerships between Taiwan’s government, the civic tech community, and international organizations, demonstrating the immense value that can be generated when a state engages with its citizenry as collaborators and co-creators.

Beyond rethinking feedback loops between the state and youth for more effective policy development, the government needs to make structural shifts in its approach toward modernizing agriculture into a sector that will attract and retain young people. Specifically, the state needs to simultaneously augment existing markets and forecast and create new markets.

Much of the government’s efforts are concentrated in the former. The government has identified several critical value chains within the agriculture sector, such as coffee, tea, and dairy, to bolster through various tactics, including value addition, improved livelihoods, capacity building, job creation, and innovative applications of digital tools and solutions.

However, one of the arguably most consequential blind spots in the state’s existing strategy is the (over)emphasis on microentrepreneurship. Although microentrepreneurship helps address an immediate need by equipping young people with some form of livelihood, it does not offer a sustainable pathway for growth. For one, the empirical consensus is that older founders are likelier to build successful enterprises, even though young people may play a more prominent role in new firm creation.23

Moreover, a fragmented economic landscape dominated by micro-entrepreneurs will not achieve the kind of aggregation required to unlock economies of scale that will fuel mass job creation. The economy needs a mix of large, well-established anchor firms, combined with a steady injection of young, dynamic enterprises that can generate new jobs.24 Notably, young does not necessarily mean small, as small firms “often lack the capacity to create stable and long-lasting jobs and are not more likely to grow.”25 The state, therefore, cannot deploy (micro) entrepreneurship as a blanket panacea to its job creation problem. Young people need genuine optionality when it comes to their futures, including the possibility of secure and dignified employment.

The government must also anticipate future opportunities by either imagining new markets or thinking differently about existing ones. This will require transitioning from correcting market failures and inefficiencies to proactively channeling necessary resources to nascent and growing industries. Within agriculture, the essential oils industry presents a potential launchpad for market making. While essential oils constitute an industry in and of themselves, they feed directly into the Flavors and Fragrances (F&F) industry. The F&F industry is a lynchpin for a larger value chain linking essential oils to pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals, food and beverages, and beauty and cosmetics. It does so by transforming individual oils into flavor and fragrance compounds that serve as key ingredients in these three major industries.

From a job creation standpoint, establishing an F&F hub could provide employment to farmers, manufacturers, scientists, brands, and retailers, with varied livelihood options across the value chain for young people. The key is to identify the right value chains, prioritizing high-value specialty oils that do not occupy much land and do not lend themselves easily to synthetic substitutes. There is also potential to develop flavors and fragrances that are unique to Kenya, given the large amount of indigenous flora that exists here and across Africa—much of which is yet to be mapped.

In such a scenario, the state’s role must be multifaceted: supporting cutting-edge research; brokering strategic partnerships between various ecosystem players; building the right infrastructure and incentives to attract requisite capital and know-how; and establishing appropriate targets to make sure high-priority communities, like youth, women, and smallholder farmers, can contribute to and benefit from these new opportunities.

The agriculture sector, thus, presents numerous lessons that can be extrapolated to the larger question of the Kenyan government’s relationship with its young constituents.

Firstly, microentrepreneurship is a short-term fix at best. Young people need genuine optionality and a sense that there is a real future in the choices that are available to them.

Secondly, to get ahead of youth unemployment, the government needs to not only augment existing markets but also forecast future opportunities and create markets that would capture these.

Finally, the state needs to reorient young people away from being targets of policy formulation to ideators, innovators, and co-creators. In doing so, the government will boost its own ability to take on increasingly complex challenges while building consensus and trust among the public. This will likely go a long way in strengthening the state’s legitimacy and longevity.

Youth Unemployment and State Sustainability 

Given the magnitude of Kenya’s—and Africa’s—youth unemployment challenge, it is unrealistic to expect that the government will create all required jobs on its own every year. This is a behemoth undertaking, one that necessitates participation from all major nodes of the political economy, operating in concert under the state’s overarching leadership.

Considering this, the government needs to approach young people not as a problem to be solved or a demographic to be passively informed, but rather as a valuable reservoir of human capital, one that can feed back into the government apparatus to buttress its ability to devise smart policies and implement these effectively.

This will require appropriate investments in education at all levels. It will also require the government to develop and participate in platforms where informed citizens can “aggressively battle in the domain of ideas” to construct a broader base of diverse proposals on how to engineer sustained, job-based growth.26

In addition to supporting productive policy discourse, this will engender more public trust in general while “building a constituency to support specific reforms.”26 Ideally, such channels and mechanisms should be co-created with young people as a way to “engage with non-institutionalized youth activism and recognize its important contribution to the political discourse.”27

Implications for Foreign Investors

Meanwhile, for foreign investors, the lesson is twofold. To begin with, sociopolitical upheavals sparked by young people need to be appropriately contextualized. Not every mass extra-institutional event is an indicator of imminent economic catastrophe, nor the harbinger of regime change akin to what recently transpired in Nepal and Madagascar. While structural similarities (including young populations, economic inequality, and a disconnect between the youth and leadership) are apparent in Kenya, it is more likely that Kenya will continue to experience sporadic, youth-led protests, whose effect will be short-term disturbances rather than tectonic shifts that yield lasting change leading up to the 2027 elections.

Though the possibility of radical transformation cannot be ruled out definitively—given the unpredictability of spontaneous social movements—the status quo will likely hold for two reasons. Firstly, Kenya’s high degree of institutionalization (and institutional inertia) will help absorb temporary shocks (a case in point—the Nairobi Stock Exchange reached a 3-year high in June this year, despite ongoing protests28). Secondly, although Kenya’s political economy is a mixed bag, the state has managed to stabilize certain aspects of the macroeconomy, such as inflation and the currency, while maintaining a modest GDP growth rate. This should ideally provide the government with some political and social buffer to address urgent economic issues, including youth unemployment and a mounting fiscal crisis.

This is not to suggest that investors and other key stakeholders should ignore the Gen Z protests and the underlying sources of their discontent. On the contrary, young people from Kenya to Nepal have demonstrated that they are a formidable force. Therefore, the second lesson is that, like the state, investors must engage meaningfully with young people in markets such as Kenya, where the largest portion of the population is below the age of thirty-five. Legitimacy with the state does not guarantee buy-in from the populace. Young Kenyans have demonstrated repeatedly that they are highly attuned to the machinations of the country’s political economy and are willing and able to hold their government and foreign investors accountable.29

For foreign investors, the implication should be clear: deal-making needs to expand beyond the government and politicians to include meaningful relationship-building at the business-to-business and people-to-people levels. This will help ensure greater follow-through, continuity, and higher rates of conversion from contracts to actual implementation.

Conclusion: The Kids Aren’t Alright, but They Can Be

Youth unemployment is a problem to be solved, but young people are not. This should be the point of departure for both states and investors, who share a collective responsibility to protect and uplift the younger generations in their respective spheres of influence. If the kids are alright, everyone else will be, too.

[1] Nardos Bekele-Thomas and Snorre Westgaard, “Unlocking the Potential of Africa’s Youth,” United Nations, Africa Renewal, October 4, 2024, https://tinyurl.com/mu79ykvh.

[2] Athene Laws, Faten Saliba, Can Sever, and Luc Tucker, “The Clock is Ticking on Sub-Saharan Africa’s Urgent Job Creation Challenge,” IMF, November 12, 2024, https://tinyurl.com/y3c6vxzp.

3 “Youth Protests and the Polycrisis,” UNICEF Innocenti – Global office of Research and Foresight, March 2024, https://tinyurl.com/mpzv3m9k.

4 Ibid.

6 “Governance for Youth, Trust and Intergenerational Justice: Fit for All Generations?” OECD Public Governance Reviews, OECD Publishing, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1787/c3e5cb8a-en.

7 “Youth Protests and the Polycrisis.”

8 Daniel Ibiri and Mercy Kaburu, “AD954: Kenyans value multiparty democracy, but fewer feel close to a political party,” Afrobarometer, March 12, 2025, https://tinyurl.com/bdhj6h6r.

9 Ken Opalo, “What Kenyan protests tell us about economic management and the politics of reforms in African states,” An Africanist Perspective, July 30, 2024, https://tinyurl.com/24xrjru5.

10 Ken Opalo, “Kenyan Protests, Part One: The political education of President William Ruto,” An Africanist Perspective, July 2, 2024, https://tinyurl.com/4e73tk35.

11 Ibid.

12 “Kenya Jobs and Economic Transformation (KJET) Project,” https://msea.go.ke/kjetproject/.

13 Eric Magale, “Kenya’s Hustler Fund is a flop. Why president Ruto’s plan to loan money to entrepreneurs hasn’t worked,” The Conversation, November 12, 2024, https://tinyurl.com/y5crvbc4.

14 “Youth Protests and the Polycrisis.”

15 “Economic Survey 2025,” Kenya Bureau of Statistics, 2025, https://tinyurl.com/424tt5h9.

16 “Agriculture Sector Survey of January 2024,” Central Bank of Kenya, https://tinyurl.com/mr2wmpmh.

17 “Rural Population (% of total population),” World Bank, https://tinyurl.com/yjw6wahf.

18 “Making Markets Work Better for Smallholder Farmers,” Farm to Market Alliance, December 2022, https://tinyurl.com/4kmmfvzj.

19 Victor Mugo and Ivy Kinyua, “Youth Engagement in Agriculture and Food Systems Transformation in Kenya,” International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) p. Chapter 14, 357-377 p. ISBN: 9780896294561, 2023, https://tinyurl.com/5n92yrkn.

20 Katie LaRue, Thomas Daum, Kai Mausch and Dave Harris, “Who Wants to Farm? Answers Depend on How You Ask: A Case Study on Youth Aspirations in Kenya,” The European Journal of Development Research, January 12, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3txuu3mn.

21 Victor Mugo and Ivy Kinyua, “Youth Engagement in Agriculture and Food Systems Transformation in Kenya.”

22 “Where do we go as a society?,” vTaiwan, https://info.vtaiwan.tw/.

23 Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda, “Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), April 2019, https://tinyurl.com/32as39d4.

24 Johannes Van Biesebroeck, “Firm Size Matters: Growth and Productivity Growth in African Manufacturing,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 53, no. 3 (April 2005): pp. 545-583, The University of Chicago Press Journals.

25 Arti Grover, “Which Firms Create More Jobs?” International Finance Corporation (IFC), August 2025, https://tinyurl.com/2a2xnzcd.

26 Ken Opalo, “What Kenyan protests tell us about economic management and the politics of reforms in African states,” An Africanist Perspective, July 30, 2024, https://tinyurl.com/24xrjru5.

26 Ken Opalo, “Reelecting William Samoei Ruto,” An Africanist Perspective, July 1, 2025, https://tinyurl.com/56vma7ax.

27 “Governance for Youth, Trust and Intergenerational Justice: Fit for All Generations?,” OECD Public Governance Reviews, OECD Publishing, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1787/c3e5cb8a-en.

28 Harry Njuguna, “NSE Hits 3-Year High as Investor Confidence Defies Unrest,” The Kenyan Wall Street, June 26, 2025, https://tinyurl.com/47nd8mun.

29 Esther Kahumbi, “The student who blew whistle on Kenya airport controversy,” BBC, December 20, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8rjvvz0mzmo.