Skills mismatch and Youth unemployment in Sub-Saharan Africa: Empirical evidence of Labor market frictions in Sierra Leone and Ghana

Bi Vali Martial Landry Gohi
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Bi Vali Martial Landry Gohi: University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (UCASS), Beijing, China.

Journal of Scientific Reports, 2026, vol. 13, issue 1, 129-155

Abstract: Despite the persistent high youth unemployment in Sub-Saharan Africa, the mechanisms that link education to labor-market outcomes remain contested. This study investigates whether skills mismatches and the labor market frictions that shape job matching systematically explain youth unemployment in two West African countries, Sierra Leone and Ghana, and whether these relationships differ across institutional contexts. Using nationally representative labor force/household survey microdata restricted to the internationally recognized youth age range, data were collected from 1200 participants, 720 from Sierra Leone and 480 from Ghana. We estimate multivariate binary-outcome models in which youth unemployment is explained by vertical skills mismatch, horizontal skills mismatch, and labor market frictions, controlling for education and geography. Descriptively, youth unemployment averages 18% in Ghana and 24% in Sierra Leone, alongside substantial mismatch (vertical mismatch: 0.31 vs 0.27; horizontal mismatch: 0.38 vs 0.41) and prolonged job searches (6.2 vs 8.4 months). Baseline estimates show that mismatches and frictions are strong predictors of unemployment in the pooled sample: vertical mismatches (β = 0.214, SE = 0.032), horizontal mismatches (β = 0.147, SE = 0.028), and labor market frictions (β = 0.268, SE = 0.041) are all positive and statistically significant (implying odds-ratio increases of roughly 24%, 16%, and 31%, respectively). Country-split results indicate larger penalties in Sierra Leone (e.g., vertical mismatch 0.261; frictions 0.331) than in Ghana (vertical mismatch 0.182; frictions 0.214), consistent with tighter institutional constraints. Robustness checks confirm that key coefficients remain substantively similar under alternative mismatch measures (e.g., vertical mismatch 0.214 → 0.198) and under alternative estimators (probit and fixed effects), supporting the stability of the core findings. These findings indicate that alleviating youth unemployment necessitates policies that simultaneously tackle education-job alignment and the obstacles that hinder effective matching.

Keywords: Youth unemployment; skills mismatch; labor market frictions; Ghana; Sierra Leone (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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DOI: 10.58970/JSR.1177

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