Africa’s youth potential: A policy mirage
A guest post by Nanjira Sambuli
Artwork by Liyou Zewide
If there is one word that features prominently in matters Africa—from socio-economic transformation plans to democratic governance ideals, it is “potential.” Africa’s potential animates policy recommendations, institutional formations, development assistance programs and even discourses challenging the prevailing narratives and assumptions about the continent. Since the turn of the century, talk of the continent’s potential has coalesced around its demographics. Youth in Africa have even been described as the continent’s most precious asset, and ‘Africa’s youth potential’ has taken centre stage in policy and strategy planning. The continent comprises the world’s most youthful population and is bound to have the largest workforce globally in a decade’s time.
One outcome of this focus on Africa’s youth potential is a general alignment of diverse actors’ assessments of what needs to happen to harness it. Broad consensus now exists on the urgency of investing in skills and education towards ensuring there are jobs—both through employment and entrepreneurship— as well as meaningful youth engagement in governance and policymaking. These focus areas are meant to build upon the efforts addressing extreme poverty, improving access to health, advancing peace and security, and other continental development priorities. We also see women and youth discussed in tandem, foregrounding and mainstreaming the importance of gender equality. Aspiration 6 of the African Union’s continental blueprint —Agenda 2063 — encapsulates these intertwined goals neatly: ‘An Africa, whose development is people-driven, relying on the potential of African people, especially its women and youth, and caring for children.
African youth— it goes without saying— are not a homogenous entity. Nor is it particularly straightforward to generalize on trends and development progress across Africa. However, the plans, strategies, frameworks and charters agreed upon, signed and ratified at the African Union (AU) level are a useful analytical yardstick. In this regard, there have been notable AU-level developments indicative of the policy thrusts pertaining to African youth. The African Union Commission (AUC) claims a mandate to act on youth issues, bestowed upon it through the decisions of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government, which is the AU’s highest policy and decision-making organ. The AUC additionally states that it has the convening power to mobilize and synergise multistakeholder efforts – that is, national and international stakeholders spanning governments, civil society, development actors, the private sector and ‘youth voices’—and legitimize all their efforts at the continental level. The AU level efforts are also a crucial frame of reference as they bypass the contentious demarcations of Africa — into ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ and North Africa— typically employed in the international development domain. Instead, the AU frames the continent as comprising 55 member states, and eight Regional Economic Communities (RECs) that group individual countries into sub-regions and associations, to primarily enhance regional economic integration.
From potential to policy proposals
Following from the mapping of youth potential in Africa over the past two decades, several policy positions, priorities and investments are taking shape. In education and skills development, a key strategic direction is on reforming and reconstituting Technical and Vocational Training (TVET) across all levels of education. Rather than resorting to TVET when other educational options have failed, the paradigm shift pursued in centering this approach is to accommodate wide-ranging forms for technical and professional skills-building across formal, non-formal and informal environments. This approach is considered responsive to the contextual realities of training avenues readily available across the continent and considers TVET a unifying umbrella. From the Continental TVET strategy to national level policy reforms, the TVET approach encourages training supply to be flexible, adaptive and supportive of continuous apprenticeship in order to accommodate labour market demands— from agriculture and traditional manufacturing to emergent green and blue economies and digital societies. Overall, the TVET reorientation rests on the notion that it prepares young people to go beyond job seeking to become job creators. The TVET paradigm shift also serves to reinforce the narrative on entrepreneurship as key to ‘unlocking the economic potential of Africa’s youth’.
The typical narrative arc on youth entrepreneurship in Africa today is one that articulates endless opportunities to be seized. Young people, it is also said, want to ‘be their own boss’, so their ‘innovative energy’ being channelled into entrepreneurship is widely championed as the solution to unemployment and underemployment, as well as a formula for economic growth. Young people are increasingly encouraged— pressured, even— to create their own jobs, as traditional pathways to employment become less certain. This has gained even more traction with the rapid diffusion of digital technologies, from mobile phones and the internet to Artificial Intelligence.
Then there’s the potential of youth empowerment and engagement in leadership and democratic governance, especially in public service. Exhortations about youth as future leaders abound and have spurred a flurry of initiatives around youth volunteerism, youth advisory panels, youth mentorship programs, youth secretariats, youth quotas and— in the case of the African Union—the appointment of a Youth Envoy to advocate for and represent the interests and voices of African youth.
But potential and policy proposals are not enough
Talk of ‘youth potential’ litters numerous plans and policies as outlined above, and in many more spheres. When is this potential to be met? Is potential just a mirage, a distraction from the action needed today, as the promise of tomorrow is held up as a priority? How and when do we take stock of all the missed or wasted potential, even as more potential is pursued? Importantly, while potential predominantly refers to optimistic future outcomes, it also describes the perilous cost of not realizing them. In between potential risk and potential reward is the intricate theatre of development policies, politics and investments. Arguably, this is the area in which more effort should be applied, as it is where we can learn and iterate on what works and what can be built upon, reformed or discarded. We can better understand which combinations of factors and actors help register meaningful progress. It is what makes the difference in shifting and correcting prevailing perceptions of Africa as a poor continent, to the more accurate reality that its resources —human and natural — are gravely mismanaged.
It is one thing to wax lyrical about potential, and it is another thing entirely to act upon and realize it in the present and near term, just as much as in the long term which is typically the implied horizon. For instance, refrains like youth being leaders of tomorrow never specify when tomorrow is. In the eyes of many of the continent’s young and not-so-young, tomorrow never comes, not in time at least. This is evident in the enduring absence of meaningful youth representation in political and public sector leadership across the continent. In most executive arms of government in Africa today, youth affairs are bundled alongside gender, arts, culture and sports, or ICT.[1] In practice, these categorizations translate into the dockets where policy issues considered secondary are parked, and usually those for which government budgets allocate fewer resources. In fact, only recently has ICT and Digital Economy as a policy theme been elevated from the ‘Youth and—’ dockets to standalone or more prominent portfolios as the economic significance of digitalization has become more evident.
The long-term implications of such an intergenerational gap are dire, and they also raise difficult questions on the future of leadership on the continent overall, as younger people — including those who’ve recently graduated from the youth bracket — are not yet registering in the most influential rungs of governance. Instead, African youth are subjected to endless tokenistic engagement efforts. As a seminal report from the AU Office of the Youth Envoy and the African Leadership Institute rightfully notes, reform on this front is not just about getting youth into governance; it is about refreshing and reshaping the public sector and governance culture on the continent by introducing youthful change agents who can help governments achieve these lofty ambitions.
In education and skills development, African governments are still underinvesting, even as younger generations are entering the workforce having attained higher levels of education. The quality of education received, and even the purpose of education altogether warrant more critical discussion and recalibration. Given the urgency of addressing underemployment and unemployment, there is a fixation on imparting ‘practical’, ‘marketable’ or ‘employable’ skills. A false dichotomy then emerges, where ‘critical’ and ‘soft’ skills are sacrificed for the former. Unfortunately, even the favoured set of skills supplied do not align with labour demand. There remains, for instance, the gnawing challenge of fewer and fewer industries being capable to absorb the talent generated. Manufacturing is on an overall decline on the continent, and while employment in the service sector is on the rise, there remain significant challenges — such as minimum job experience requirements that lock out young people even from entry-level jobs and increased automation— that complicate the prospects the steady and sustained sectoral growth needed to absorb the ever-increasing volumes of talent.
Similarly, while entrepreneurship may be a viable avenue for tackling unemployment and underemployment, the reality is that the potential therein falls woefully short of being realized. A major overall barrier is the harshness of the operational environment across political, cultural, economic and social dynamics that play out both locally and regionally, as well as those of globalization and its unique effects on a continent for which investments have predominantly focused on resource extraction. Additionally, the odd fixation on concentrating (youth) entrepreneurship in Africa at micro, small and medium size enterprises stifles ambition at both policy and innovation levels. Economic growth— as established in numerous development assessments— requires a steady rate of growth of firms, not just many small ones. Unfortunately, the typical profile of African entrepreneurship is based more on survival and a dependence on supplying government and big businesses, than on innovation and growth. This is not to dismiss the successes registered across various sectors, notably the ascendancy of fintech and other tech enterprises on the continent; rather it is to emphasize that those remain the exception rather than the norm.
One of the most frustrating obstacles to earnestly addressing the challenges youth entrepreneurs face is a failure of imagination, both in the policymaking and development circles. They seem stuck at rationalizing the scope of challenges as a skills shortage issue, and a defeatism that they ‘there are no jobs’ for young people (in the existing formal sector). Solutions and investments that follow revolve around recommending more skills, mentoring and capacity building investments, which reinforces a romanticized but vicious circle of perpetual skills development and entrepreneuring — with microfinance, small and medium-size grants proliferating, all of which require significant time and effort to discover, apply for and comply with. Efforts by public, private, philanthropic and development actors alike adhere to this trend, which in turn obfuscates the other structural issues at play, such as market access, inadequate and inappropriate funding structures and regulatory hurdles that all conspire to hinder the growth, survival and scalability of these businesses. This is a challenge plaguing all prospective sectors for youth entrepreneurship— from agriculture and manufacturing to digital economies. The last two decades of Africa potential discourse have already taught us that entrepreneurship cannot per se overcome entrenched and poor public policy. It is especially fallacious to expect young people to magically leapfrog these entrenched complexities.
The problem with potential, it is said, is that it’s easy to recognize, but not so easy to realize. This is certainly true for individuals, and even more acute for a demographic as vast and diverse as African youth. We need sustained efforts and investments in analysing the in-between of potential mapping and realization, and we need them urgently. This is a task for all actors — including development cooperation partners like Germany who invest heavily in continental and country-level efforts. Reforms must incorporate – and in fact, be led by— the wisdom, ideas and solutions that African youth already have. The potential of Africa’s youth is undisputed. But we need intellectually and morally honest stock-taking of attendant policies, strategies and investments to realize it for present and future generations.
A German version of this essay first appeared in Internationale Politik’s May 2025 Special Issue on Africa: https://internationalepolitik.de/de/junges-potenzial-alte-versprechen
You can read more about Nanjira here.
[1] See e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Youth-ministries-in-different-African-Countries_tbl2_326431611