Liberia’s youth crisis is often described with the wrong number. The youth unemployment rate is put at about 2.3 percent (World Bank/ILO). On paper, this looks like a triumph, but in reality, it means the opposite. On the streets of Monrovia, Buchanan, Gbarnga, kakata, Ganta and Harper, it tells a very different story.
By Nuwoe Kellen – Thought Leader. Institution Builder. Human Development Enthusiast.
At least nine in ten working Liberian youth earn their living in the informal economy – selling in the traffic, washing cars in the streets, selling pepper cala and roasted corn, riding pen-pen and keh keh, hauling goods, farming small plots, hustling day to day, and doing whatever keeps them alive. They are working. But too many are working without contracts, insurance, protections, or a realistic path to better, secured jobs.
Those still searching for stable and commensurate work spend an average of six years in that search (ILO School-to-Work Transition Survey). The honest metrics to measure against are informal, insecure jobs and underutilization, and by those measures the great majority of young Liberians are working hard, but have no real path out of poverty.
The 2.3 percent only tells us that they are doing something, it does not tell us whether what they are doing is worthwhile, productive or sufficient to build a dignified life. If we just read 2.3 percent unemployment, and then move on, we will keep misdiagnosing the real problem of our largest population, and a wrong diagnosis always produces the wrong treatment.
The stakes could not be higher, and the latest data show the scale of the problem. Three of every four Liberians are under 35 (2022 National Population and Housing Census), and the median age sits near 19 (UN Population Division). Whether this becomes a dividend or a liability depends on capacity, and here the evidence is sobering. Barely half of Liberians aged 15 to 24 can read and write (UNESCO), and net primary enrolment runs as low as 37 percent, even while gross enrolment approaches 94 percent. This means that children enter school late, repeat grades, and drop out or remain in, but beyond the recommended age.
The digital economy we speak of so often reaches few of these young people. Liberia had about 1.73 million internet users at the end of 2025, representing only 30 percent of a population whose median age is 19 (DataReportal). About 45 percent of Liberians live in rural areas, where access and affordability remain much harder.
Training thousands of young people for an internet most of them cannot afford or access is preparation without a destination. We cannot tell a young person to compete in a digital economy when the tools for entering that economy remain beyond his reach.
Then, there is the crisis we see in every street corner. A 2023 study found that one in five Liberian youths uses narcotics (UNFPA). The spread of kush moved the President to declare a national drug emergency in 2025.
This is a human development problem to which the response has not actually matched the declaration. Government has appropriated more than three million dollars for rehabilitation, yet investigative reporting shows little of it reaching actual users (FrontPage Africa/New Narratives).
The flagship rehabilitation center at Bentol remains unfinished, and between September 2025 and June 2026 the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency recorded 1,167 trafficking arrests against just eight convictions (LDEA figures reported by Al Jazeera). Liberia has confronted a generation in crisis before.
After the civil war, we disarmed, rehabilitated, and reintegrated tens of thousands of ex-combatants because we understood that abandoning them would cost the nation the peace we had fought so hard to recover. Drug-affected youth deserve the same national and international attention. They are not a nuisance to be swept from the streets. They are citizens to be recovered, reintegrated and made productive to serve the state.
Money is not the missing piece here. The 2026 national budget of $ 1.211 billion carries visible increases across youth-related lines, including a proposed rise in national football support from 550,000 to over one million dollars, a three million dollar youth empowerment program, and the rehabilitation allocation already named (FY2026 National Budget).
Partners add more. UNDP backs a $ 7.8 million livelihood and employment project that funds the National Youth Service Program, the Liberia Maritime Authority commits to contribute half a million dollars to youth and sports development, the UN Peacebuilding Fund financed nationwide youth policy dialogues, and the Liberia Telecommunications Authority is self-financing digital skills hubs in all fifteen counties.
Many pipes are flowing, fewer meters are running. The LTA reported training 12,000 young people in digital skills in 2024, exceeding the President’s own pledge of 10,000. Yet, two years later, no public evidence tells us how many found work, started enterprises, or earned income from those skills. Two national technology summits have since produced proclamations and renewed commitments. We are yet to harness program outcomes of the first edition, which would trigger investment in, and the resumption of the second.
None of this diminishes the current Minister of Youth and Sports, who took office early this year, and moved quickly where predecessors hesitated. Vacation employment for at least 3,000 young people, quarterly digital training for 750 youth annually, and WASSCE tutorial support for over 2,200 students are genuine quick fixes that deserve credit.
She has also diagnosed the deeper problem better than her critics. At her confirmation she described the pathway from learning to skills to livelihood as broken, urged a shift from isolated programs to “architecture,” and introduced a Youth Outcome Compact to coordinate ministries and agencies whose mandates touch young people. The Compact is the right idea. The task now is to make it the operating system of national youth investment rather than another signed document.
Four steps would begin that work immediately, and none requires a huge amount money. First, publish a consolidated youth investment map with each fiscal year’s budget, listing every public and partner-funded youth program above 50,000 dollars, its objectives, targets, and actual spend, anchored in the Compact and laid before the Legislature. Second, ask the legislature and development partners to make results reporting a condition for appropriation, so that any youth program funded in one budget year must table baseline data and outcomes before receiving the next tranche of funds.
Third, commission an independent sample tracer survey of the 12,000 digital trainees. Such a survey costs thousands of dollars, not millions, and would convert Liberia’s largest recent youth investment from an unknown into evidence that guides every program after it. Fourth, task the Joint Technical Working Group already created under the Youth and Labour Ministries’ agreement to run an annual employer demand survey, and work with the Ministry of Education and the Agricultural and Industrial Training Bureau to require every TVET and digital curriculum to answer it, so training finally connects to the jobs the economy actually contains or will need in the not too distant future.
The drug crisis demands its own response framework, built on the DDRR logic Liberia already knows. Work with national and international stakeholders to finish Bentol Rehab Center and collaborate with Ministry of Health and LDEA to license private rehabilitation centers against minimum care standards, so that families pay for treatments that actually treat.
Screen recovering young people directly into the pipelines government already funds, including the cadet program, vacation employment, TVET institutions, and the county digital hubs, so that rehabilitation ends in livelihood rather than relapse. Engage community and traditional structures in reception and follow-up, exactly as reintegration once did, and place sustained prevention education in schools before addiction rather than after it. Fund all of this by reprogramming the existing rehabilitation appropriation, and publish quarterly disbursement reports. There exists some resources to do these, and so should the accounting.
Liberia will soon host the ECOWAS Youth and Sports Development Center, a regional recognition that raises the standard we must meet at home. Liberia’s young people are not waiting. They have engineered a Youth Legislative Caucus and presented a national Youth Manifesto to the President. What they need from the state is not another launch ceremony but a government that counts what it spends, measures what it changes, and closes what does not work. Seventy-five percent of this nation is watching. The leaders of tomorrow are already here. Our duty is to stop wasting their today. They need a country that connects their education to skills, skills to work, work to income, and income to a life of dignity.
