The data noted above as well as that from Ethiopia, Tanzania and Sierra Leone (unrecorded here) indicates that, unemployment is a high priority problem and that 70–80% of the unemployed are between 15–24 years old. When one takes into additional account the attendant social welfare problems of unemployment and the fact that youth are never an obvious concern of ministries of economic planning, it is clear that youth departments ought to develop competence in employment planning. One way of doing this within existing frameworks is to bias youth programmes so that their long term goals for youth are closely related to existing or potential economic opportunities for sustained self employment.