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importance of this formative period of our lives. To make a demonstrablecontribution to our society, Wole advises, we must set forthat dawn, start early in life.This ADF is not solely about the “debts” that African adult societyowes their youth. That is one side of the coin. It is also about theimportant lifecycle decisions that youth must make, decisions abouttheir own vision of the kind of African society that they and theirchildren and grand-children will live in. In this era of globalisationand heightened individualism, I must admit, making those decisionsis often not easy.But Africa is today mired in poverty. It is the continent making theleast progress towards the targets of the Millennium DevelopmentGoals and it is the continent spoken about with greater pessimismthan optimism. Will our youth choose to live in an Africa that is foreverdescribed as the laggard in terms of human and social developmentamong all regions? An Africa mired in poverty and disease? AnAfrica that is not the leader in aid receipts? An Africa that makes onlybut marginal contributions to the march of science and technology?As inheritors of our continent’s future, the decisions that each of ouryoung people make have enormous consequences for our region inparticular and for humanity in general. In particular, whether Africareaches the targets of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015depends critically on the decisions that youth make.While each of us individual actors can set forth at dawn, there isan important role for our governments, adult society and Africa’sdevelopment partners in making the conditions under which youngpeople set forth as propitious as they possibly can be in terms ofemployment, good health, high quality education and so forth. This, Imust admit, is not often the case. Young people and youth issues areoften marginalised in national economic, social and political structuresand are disproportionately adversely affected by developmentchallenges that the continent faces.In a sense, the challenge of African development can be said to bethe challenge of creating an Africa where the life-chances of youngpeople are not circumscribed by poverty, unemployment, disease,and poor quality education. Take for example the case of migration270 Part Five