ABSTRACT
Two of the contemporary challenges that sub-Saharan Africa faces today are increased levels of unemployment, coupled with high levels of unmanageable poverty that have taken place amid increased deterioration in the African economy and unstable institutional and policy frameworks (Page and Shimeles, 2015). It has been argued, for example, that a large proportion of the population in Africa today lives in absolute poverty and that a significant number of this population has no stable source of income and livelihoods (Page, 2015). What is even more intriguing is that both unemployment and poverty in Africa are increasingly becoming urban phenomena as those in the rural areas migrate to cities (Shimeles, 2015). Recent analyses have shown that urban unemployment and poverty are not only growing rapidly, but have tended to be underestimated (Page and Soderbom, 2014). Binns et al. (2012) and Simatele and Etambakonga (2015) observe that the central characteristic of the urban crisis in Africa is not the scale of population growth, but the weakness of both national and local government institutions in the face of rapid urban change.
