Africa’s young population is often described as a demographic dividend: a potential economic advantage if young people can gain the skills and jobs needed to contribute productively. But for many young people, that promise is slipping away. They leave school or training and enter labour markets where formal jobs are scarce and public programmes too often miss the people who need them most.
Too many programmes are underfunded, weakly targeted and disconnected from employers.
Drawing on more than three decades of applied economics and policy research, with particular expertise in labour markets, public finance, policy evaluation and youth employment programmes in Africa, I recently co-edited a book called Youth Employment Programmes in Africa. The book uses evidence from Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda to show that these programmes cannot succeed as stand-alone projects.
They also need to be:
- linked to real labour demand
- backed by adequate public resources
- implemented through capable institutions
- protected from political capture.
Labour market and youth employment spending averages about 0.35% of GDP across the nine countries, compared with about 0.95% in OECD/developed countries. Private employment incentives average about 0.04% of GDP, compared with about 0.64%. (Computations are based on data for the OECD/developed countries and for the nine African countries.)
The main lesson is clear: youth employment programmes will not create decent jobs unless they are designed around real labour demand, capable institutions and the young people who face the highest barriers to work.
Why youth employment programmes matter
Many African countries are trying to turn large youth populations into productive workers just as public budgets are tight and labour markets are failing to create enough secure jobs. Africa’s median age is about 19 years, far below Asia’s roughly 33 years, North America’s 39 years and Europe’s 43 years. This underscores the scale of the youth employment challenge.
Employment programmes are often treated as a technical fix: train young people, support start-ups and hope that jobs follow. The evidence points to a wider problem.
These programmes need:
- capable public institutions
- employers willing to hire young workers
- good design
- social inclusion
- political support
- public accountability.
Poorly targeted programmes can deepen exclusion instead of reducing it.
Key findings
The study rests on an unusually wide evidence base: nine African country studies conducted between 2022 and 2024. It combines policy, legal, programme and academic reviews with interviews involving young women and men, including vulnerable groups, key informants and policymakers. With more than 500 interviews and 1,500 focus group participants, the study shows how youth employment programmes actually perform.
Three findings stand out.
First, youth employment programmes are now common in policy documents, but many are too small, poorly funded and weakly implemented to match the scale of the challenge.
Second, most programmes focus on improving young people’s skills or supporting entrepreneurship, while doing much less to encourage employers to create jobs.
Third, targeting is weak. Poorer, rural, less educated and digitally excluded young people are least able to access support. These problems are made worse by fragmented coordination, weak data systems, limited monitoring and perceptions that political connections influence programme access.
Variations
The nine countries face different labour-market problems. Based on World Bank/International Labour Organization estimates, South Africa has the highest youth unemployment rate of the nine – about 59.4%, and around 60.9% in recent estimates. This points to a severe shortage of formal entry-level work. The African Union defines youth as people aged 15-35, but this does not always match the age ranges used by national governments to determine eligibility for youth employment programmes. For example, South Africa officially defines youth as people aged 15-34.
In most of the other countries, the bigger problem is informality: young people are working, but often in low-productivity, insecure and poorly protected activities. (In Table 1, youth informal employment ranges from 77.3% in Niger to 98.6% in Senegal, with most countries above 90%.)
High rates of young people not in employment, education or training (NEET) in Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa show another layer of exclusion. Rates are 36.3% in Nigeria, 34.2% in Senegal and 32.9% in South Africa (Table 1, adapted from Youth Employment Programmes in Africa.)
These indicators measure different parts of the youth labour-market problem. The informal employment rate refers only to young people who are already working: in Senegal, 98.6% of employed youth are in informal jobs, meaning that work is overwhelmingly insecure, low-paid or weakly protected. The NEET rate measures a different group: 34.2% of young people are not working, studying or in training at all. Taken together, the figures show a dual challenge: many young people are excluded from work and education altogether, while most of those who do work are concentrated in informal employment. Youth employment policy therefore has to address both access to jobs and the quality of the jobs available.
This means youth employment programmes cannot simply be copied from one country to another. They have to fit local labour-market realities.
A similar mismatch appears when labour-market pressures are compared with programme spending and targeting. Countries facing the deepest youth employment pressures do not always have the strongest programme coverage or the most effective support for job creation. This helps explain why policy commitment has not always translated into measurable labour-market change.
Private employment incentives are especially limited. These could include targeted wage subsidies, first-job tax credits, apprenticeship grants and support for firms that retain young workers after training.
Coverage is modest, and the poorest young people are reached least. The groups most in need of support are least likely to benefit.
What governments should do
The evidence points to a practical but politically difficult reform agenda. Governments need to invest more seriously in youth employment programmes. But funding alone will not be enough. Programmes also need stronger implementation, better coordination across ministries and agencies, transparent data, credible monitoring and evaluation, and eligibility rules that deliberately reach vulnerable young people.
Policy should move beyond an almost exclusive focus on training and entrepreneurship and create stronger incentives for employers to hire and support young workers. Young people should also have a direct voice in how programmes are designed and monitored. That would help turn youth employment programmes from fragmented projects with limited reach into tools of opportunity, trust and accountability.
Good intentions will not be enough. Youth employment programmes need to be built around real jobs, capable institutions and the young people they are meant to serve.
Ramos Emmanuel Mabugu was co-editor of Youth Employment Programmes in Africa, published by Routledge. This article draws on evidence and arguments from the book. The research on which the book is based was funded by the Partnership for Economic Policy, supported by the Mastercard Foundation.
Skygod
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Fun South African Fact: Can you think of any other place in the world where two Nobel Peace Prize winners lived on the same street? Both Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu had houses on Vilakazi Street in Soweto.