The State and the Start-up: Rethinking Government Support for Youth Entrepreneurship in The Gambia

Abstract

Youth entrepreneurship occupies a central place in the development strategies of low-income economies, yet the institutional conditions under which state support translates into viable enterprise remain poorly understood. Nowhere is this question more urgent than in The Gambia, a small West African economy in which the young are not a constituency but the country itself: the 2024 Population and Housing Census recorded a population of 2,422,712, of whom 40.8 per cent are under fifteen years of age. Each year the labour market must absorb a swelling cohort of school-leavers and graduates that neither the state, which remains the principal formal employer, nor an underdeveloped private sector can employ. The consequences are visible in persistent youth unemployment, in an informal economy that now accounts for more than four in five jobs, and in the continued willingness of young Gambians to risk the irregular migration route to Europe known locally as the “backway”. Successive governments have responded with an expanding portfolio of entrepreneurship policies, funds and training programmes, delivered with substantial donor support. The research from which this article is drawn asked a deliberately critical question of that portfolio: what role does government actually perform in supporting youth entrepreneurship in a developing economy, and what conditions determine whether that support succeeds or fails? The study pursued the question through a qualitative single-case study of The Gambia, combining documentary analysis of national policy instruments and donor programme records with eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with policymakers, programme implementers, youth organisations and donor development agencies, analysed thematically. The answer the study returns is uncomfortable but constructive. The Gambia's problem is not, in the main, a shortage of policy. It is a shortage of the fiscal, institutional and administrative capacity required to implement the policy it has, compounded by informal cultural obligations that quietly drain the capital of precisely those young businesses that succeed. This article presents that argument in three movements: the current situation of the country laid bare in the most recent data; the findings and conclusions of the research; and fourteen prioritised recommendations addressed to the Government of The Gambia.