Africa Has The Workforce But Not Enough Jobs. What Should Change?

According to World Bank President Ajay Banga, the most pressing development challenge today is not the sharp decline in aid, the rapid increase in public debt, nor even the uneven advancement of technology. It is the need to accelerate the creation of jobs in developing economies.

Over the next 10 to 15 years around 1.2bn young people across developing countries will reach working age, yet only about 400m jobs are expected to be created. Nowhere is this challenge more acutely felt than Africa, home to the world's youngest population and the region that will account for the highest growth in the global workforce over the coming decades.

The World Bank estimates that sub-Saharan Africa alone will add 620m people to the labour force by 2050. At a time when Europe, China, Japan and much of the developed world are grappling with ageing populations, Africa possesses an asset that many countries increasingly lack: a large and growing workforce. The central question, however, is whether this demographic surge will become a driver of inclusive economic growth or a source of economic and social pressures, with consequences extending far beyond the continent.

"If these young people do not find work, the pressures - on migration, on fragility, on political systems - will not remain contained within borders," Banga told a World Bank conference on jobs in Africa in March.

"If they do, then this demographic shift becomes one of the most powerful engines of global growth the world has ever seen. It is not a zero-sum game. When developing countries grow, advanced economies benefit."

Connecting talent to opportunity

The current generation of young, working-age Africans is arguably the most skilled and savvy in the continent's history. This is increasingly visible in global technology firms, medicine, finance, research and entrepreneurship, where African founders are attracting global venture capital and building regional and global businesses.

What ails the continent is not a shortage of talented professionals but a lack of attractive opportunities for them. This explains why more of the continent's youth are relocating to wealthier countries around the world in search of better jobs.

According to a recently published survey by Afrobarometer, a pan-African research network, more than half of African youth are considering emigrating for better economic opportunities abroad.

The survey found that 55% of 18- to 35-year-olds across 38 African countries have thought "a little bit", "somewhat", or "a lot" about emigrating. Among young potential emigrants, 52% cite better work opportunities as their main reason, while 18% wish to escape economic hardship. The survey covered 38 African countries and was based on 50,961 face-to-face interviews conducted in 2024 and 2025.

"We have made significant progress in educational access since independence, but our economies have not created productive employment opportunities at a comparable pace," says Barbara Glover, a programme manager at the education and digital inclusion unit of the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD). "The International Labour Organization's 2024 assessment illustrates an important distinction. Youth unemployment in sub-Saharan Africa was estimated at 8.9% in 2023, but nearly three-quarters of young workers lacked secure employment.

"In other words, many young Africans are working, but their work does not provide sufficient income, stability or opportunities for advancement," she says. "Are we preparing young people for an economy we are actually building? We cannot keep asking our education systems to produce employable young people while leaving the question of who will employ them largely unanswered. We encourage young people to study engineering, for example, without sufficiently expanding the manufacturing, infrastructure and technology enterprises where their expertise can be deployed."

The lack of attractive opportunities across the continent has pushed many of Africa's most talented professionals to pursue careers abroad, putting their skills and expertise to work in other economies. The resulting brain drain has long been cited as a key factor behind persistent skills shortages in critical sectors such as healthcare, where the migration of highly trained workers continues to strain already over-stretched systems.

"International mobility can produce valuable knowledge networks and investment relationships," she argues. "The challenge arises when migration becomes the only reasonable pathway for highly skilled professionals to use their abilities."

The private sector as the engine of transformation

Africa has long grappled with the problem of jobless growth, in which strong headline GDP growth figures fail to make much of a difference to job creation. A key reason for this is that much of the continent's historical growth has been fuelled by infrastructure spending by governments and capital-intensive projects in sectors such as mining and energy that generate massive returns for a handful of investors but create few jobs.

Privately owned and operated businesses hold the key to rapid job creation, Banga argued: "Jobs are created when entrepreneurs and firms of all sizes - large, small and micro - have the confidence to start, hire and expand. The evidence across time is clear: countries that have sustained growth and expanded employment have done so not through isolated projects, but through steady improvements in their business environment."

For Glover, strengthening African businesses requires supporting them at their current phase of development rather than imposing imported models ill suited to the realities of operating on the continent. She argues that one of the most common mistakes policymakers make is designing workforce policies around the formal economy while overlooking the millions of enterprises and workers operating in the informal sector, where much of Africa's economic activity takes place.

"The informal economy is not simply a temporary holding space for people waiting for formal jobs. It is a major part of our productive landscape," she says. "Instead of treating informal entrepreneurs as a population requiring endless introductory business training, governments should examine what prevents their enterprises from becoming more productive and competitive."

Laying the right foundations

Despite Africa's growing pool of educated and skilled workers, many employers say a significant share of job seekers are woefully under-prepared for the intellectual and emotional demands of the modern workplace. This points to deeper structural weaknesses within education systems across the continent.

Policy discussions often focus on expanding access to universities and tertiary institutions. But evidence suggests that there is a silent but troubling crisis in foundational learning: the basic literacy, numeracy and social skills that underpin formal education. Without these core competencies, which are usually learned in the first few years of school, students often fail to thrive later in their studies. Many end up unemployable by the time they attain adulthood.

According to the UN, approximately 89% of children in sub-Saharan Africa cannot read and understand a simple 150-word text by age 10. Around 84% of children and adolescents between the ages of 6 and 14 in sub-Saharan Africa lack minimum proficiency in mathematics.

"I am concerned about foundational learning. If children progress through school without acquiring reading comprehension and numeracy, then the skills problem begins long before university," Glover notes.

Africa's demographic surge is often described as a dividend waiting to be reaped. But dividends are earned and, without the right strategy, can be lost. The continent already has a young and growing labour force that much of the world increasingly lacks. What it needs now are the conditions that allow businesses to grow, expand and create meaningful jobs that raise the standards of living of Africans, along with reforms in the education system to ensure that the next generation has the right foundation for a prosperous life.