Youth Employment Preferences in Rwanda and Sierra Leone: A Constrained Comparative Secondary Analysis

Background: Youth labour markets across Sub-Saharan Africa combine high aspirations for secure wage work with entrenched informality and underemployment. Aim: This article clarifies how structural constraints shape stated employment preferences and entrepreneurial orientation among youth in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Design: A constrained comparative secondary analysis drew on Afrobarometer Round 9 microdata for Sierra Leone and triangulated these findings with nationally reported labour-market and policy indicators for Rwanda. Public microdata for Rwanda were unavailable, so a bounded-evidence strategy transparently distinguishes verifiable survey statistics from document-based context. Findings: Sierra Leonean youth express a cautious economic outlook—fewer than half expect improvement within a year—yet most endorse redistributive growth and demand stronger gender equity in job access. Preference for self-employment appears necessity-driven where institutional trust and public-goods provision remain moderate, rather than an indicator of opportunity entrepreneurship. Rwanda’s reported labour-absorption pressure and pervasive informality reinforce this reading, suggesting that education-fuelled aspiration gaps widen when formal job creation lags. Contribution: The study advances an “institutionally conditioned planned-behaviour” framework that integrates the Theory of Planned Behaviour with opportunity-structure theory and human-capital expectations. Methodologically, it demonstrates how rigorous comparative inference can be maintained through explicit verification protocols when evidence access is asymmetric, and it outlines a reproducible pathway for symmetric modelling once Rwandan microdata become publicly available. Practical implications: Policies that promote youth entrepreneurship without parallel investment in inclusive growth, reliable public goods, and transparent digital governance risk shifting systemic labour-market failure onto young people rather than resolving it.