Editor’s note:

Below is Chapter 2 of the 2026 Foresight Africa report, which brings together leading scholars and practitioners to illuminate how Africa can navigate the challenges of 2026 and chart a path toward inclusive, resilient, and self-determined growth.

Africa’s jobs challenge is not simply unemployment; it is a question of scale, productivity, and the speed of structural transformation. Over the coming decades, the continent will experience the fastest labor force expansion in the world: The World Bank projects a net increase of roughly 740 million working-age people by 2050, with about 12 million young Africans entering the workforce each year, against only 3 million new formal wage jobs. Yet these same numbers also represent a unique, momentous advantage. No other region will add as much talent, entrepreneurial energy, and consumer demand in such a short period.

This demographic surge can become a workforce dividend if Africa implements the necessary policies to convert its assets into opportunities for large-scale job creation. The real shift needed, however, is to move beyond a narrow focus on job quantity. Africa needs more jobs, but also better jobs—work that is productive, stable, safe, remunerative, and dignified. Structural transformation becomes self-reinforcing only when workers invest in skills and firms invest in people.

Africa needs more jobs, but also better jobs—work that is productive, stable, safe, remunerative, and dignified.

In this essay, I explore how five of Africa’s current assets—a young workforce, a continental market of unprecedented scale, the entrepreneurial dynamism of millions of small firms, expanding digital connectivity that can boost productivity, and vast agricultural potential capable of anchoring agroindustry—can be activated to provide a path to large-scale, high-quality job creation.

Transforming demographic growth into a talent advantage

Africa’s most powerful asset is its young people. Young Africans are entrepreneurial, mobile, and increasingly connected. What remains missing is alignment between training, employers, and real market demand. Three priorities can help close this gap.

Create skill to career learning compacts focused on competency rather than access alone. These should strengthen foundational literacy and numeracy, build digital fluency, and deliver job relevant technical skills while aligning curricula, training providers, employers, and governments around measurable standards, apprenticeships, and verified placement outcomes.
Expand work based skilling, including apprenticeships and modular micro credentials that reward demonstrated mastery rather than time spent in classrooms.
Treat inclusion as a productivity strategy by expanding access to child care, safe transport, and social protection that enable all workers, especially women, to participate fully and advance.

Together, these priorities will match Africa’s rising talent with its youth employment ambitions while sharpening the focus on what truly matters: security, decency, productivity, retention, earnings growth, and dignity in work.

Using the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and economic corridors to create markets for job-creating firms

No economy industrializes behind a fragmented market. This is why the AfCFTA is one of Africa’s most powerful latent job assets. Its scale is unprecedented: 55 member states, a market of more than 1.3 billion people, including a rapidly growing middle class, and a combined GDP exceeding $3.4 trillion. This continentwide market is not only a trade story; it is fundamentally a jobs story. Larger and more predictable markets allow firms to scale, scaling enables specialization and productivity gains, and productivity makes better wages and more stable employment economically viable.

The opportunity is immense, but implementation is the hinge. Despite ratification, fewer than half of member states were actively trading under the AfCFTA framework as of September 2025. This implementation gap constrains job creation, yet a corridor-led industrialization strategy can help close it by concentrating public action where it compounds most powerfully. This strategy should include the following:

Trade logistics and border reforms that cut time to market. In labor-absorbing sectors such as agroprocessing, light manufacturing, and tradable services, time and reliability are often more binding constraints than wages.
Mutual recognition of skills and professional mobility. A truly continental labor market requires transferable certifications and easier movement for technicians, truckers, nurses, coders, and artisans, especially along high potential corridors.
Reliable power and digital connectivity. These systems boost firm productivity, expand market access, and lower transaction costs while enabling new digital sectors that generate employment. When paired with transport infrastructure, they further amplify job creation and attract higher levels of foreign direct investment.

A practical design shift is to move beyond isolated industrial parks toward corridor-based “good jobs zones,” integrated clusters that combine infrastructure, training pipelines, supplier development, and enforceable labor and safety standards.

Converting Africa’s entrepreneurial density into job multipliers

Africa’s labor market is already dynamic, with the private sector serving as the continent’s primary employer. Private firms generate roughly 90% of all jobs, even though many remain small because of financial constraints, weak infrastructure, and fragmented markets that limit their ability to grow. A quality-jobs strategy must therefore be two-track: helping a subset of firms scale into job multipliers while improving the quality of self-employment for the majority. In practice, this means creating pathways from survival businesses to growth businesses and from precarious work to dignified work.

The scalable lever is effective upgrading/formalization, which means bundling services and incentives that expand market access, reduce risk, and raise productivity, rather than formal registration for its own sake. This includes:

Digital rails (identification, e-payments, e-invoicing) which enable firms to build transaction histories and mobile data that strengthen creditworthiness and expand access to finance.
Procurement ladders which allow credible firms to graduate from microcontracts to larger opportunities based on performance and standards.
Lightweight business services which comprise basic accounting, marketing, inventory tools, and quality standards which lower operating costs and can be delivered through platforms and associations, with sector-specific modules for traders, agro-processors, logistics providers, and artisans.

This agenda is essential in a region where informal employment accounts for roughly 85% of the labor force. A jobs strategy that ignores informality cannot reach scale, and one that focuses only on formalization without raising productivity will fail. The goal is to breed more productive firms, regardless of initial formality status.

A jobs strategy that ignores informality cannot reach scale, and one that focuses only on formalization without raising productivity will fail.

Building a digital jobs engine while closing the usage gap

Digital connectivity is now a core jobs lever in Africa, not a luxury. By the end of 2023, nearly 44% of people in sub- Saharan Africa (about 527 million people) subscribed to a mobile service.

Yet more than 900 million people remain offline, and 76% face a usage gap: living within network coverage but lacking the means or skills to use digital services. Closing this gap is a labor market strategy with the potential to unlock millions of livelihoods across three channels:

Platform-enabled self-employment and microenterprise upgrading. Digital commerce can create new “iWorkers” and expand markets for small firms. Up to 80 million young people could benefit from digital commerce by 2030, earning income through gig work or platform based services.
Remote work, business process outsourcing (BPO), and tradable digital services. Online gig work is expanding rapidly and already accounts for up to 12% of the labor market in emerging economies. Sub Saharan Africa has seen the fastest growth in online job postings, more than doubling between 2016 and 2020 (130%). This momentum can translate into real jobs in BPO, cybersecurity, data analysis, software development, and freelance professional services, connecting African talent to both local and global markets.
Productivity gains in offline sectors. Digital tools raise productivity in agriculture, logistics, and retail by improving payment systems, information flows, and coordination across value chains.

But digital job creation must be matched with a quality framework. A decent digital work package should include mass digital literacy and job specific skills; transparent rules for pay, ratings, and grievance mechanisms on platforms; and transferable, contributory social protection that follows workers across gigs and jobs.

Using agro-industry to absorb labor in rural and secondary cities

Agro-industry is Africa’s most scalable employment frontier because it links land, labor, domestic demand, and regional markets on a continent that holds 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land. The binding constraint is productivity, especially in inputs, logistics, and processing. Africa applies only 22 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare on average, while the global average is seven times higher at 146 kilograms. Though many countries use fertilizer far above the rate needed for high productivity agriculture, Africa’s low usage impedes crop growth on the continent. Yet the continent also holds a latent input advantage: Morocco alone has more than 50 billion metric tons of phosphate rock, representing roughly 70% of the world’s known reserves of this essential, nonsubstitutable ingredient for modern fertilizers.

Africa can generate large-scale employment by transforming agriculture into a food systems industry. Priorities may include:

Strengthening soil health and input systems with smarter fertilizer blends and distribution, which can quickly raise yields and incomes and unlock major productivity gains for millions of smallholder farmers.
Expanding irrigation and water control, which reduces climate risk, stabilizes production, and enables multiple cropping seasons that dramatically increase labor demand.
Building cold chains and storage, which reduce post-harvest losses, preserve value, extend market reach, and create new jobs in logistics, maintenance, and temperature-controlled transport.
Developing processing clusters linked to economic corridors and AfCFTA-enabled regional markets to capture more value locally, support rural industrialization, and connect farmers to larger, more predictable regional demand.

These investments can create stable wage jobs in agro-processing and logistics across rural and secondary cities, while raising farm incomes, boosting productivity, and enhancing the dignity of self-employment in allied sectors. Stronger local opportunities can also ease high-pressure migration into already congested urban labor markets.

Conclusion

Africa’s five assets—its young workforce, continental market, dynamic firms, expanding digital opportunities, and vast agricultural base—can become a powerful engine for job creation when they are activated together, rather than treated in isolation. The shift required is to move from fragmented projects to coherent, corridor-led, market-shaping strategies that help firms scale, help workers advance, and turn informality into productivity.

By aligning skills with employer demand, connecting firms to finance and markets, expanding digital inclusion, and transforming agriculture into a food systems industry, Africa can convert demographic pressure into a workforce dividend. The ingredients are already in place; the task now is to connect them into a transformation engine capable of generating millions of productive, dignified jobs.

Triangles pointing to the right

The Brookings Institution is committed to quality, independence, and impact.
We are supported by a diverse array of funders. In line with our values and policies, each Brookings publication represents the sole views of its author(s).