MONROVIA, Nov. 11 -- Every morning, young men and women across Liberia's towns and cities pick up cutlasses, brooms and wheelbarrows to clear roadsides and drains. Among them are two university graduates who once pictured themselves in offices, laboratories and farms, applying what they learned in lecture halls. Instead, they are part of a government sanitation program that offers short-term work to unemployed youth.

By Selma Lomax, selma.lomax@frontpageafricaonline.com

Their names are Aloysius Tokpah and Jonathan Kien. Their paths to the program differ in detail, but they share a common thread: both did what Liberian families have long told their children to do. They went to university, finished their studies, and waited for the doors ...