Where's My Job?

Hey, Sheriff here 👋 

Africa is the world’s future workforce. And today, it’s the world’s youngest.

There’s only one problem — that workforce can’t find jobs. And that’s why this week’s edition is about unemployment in Africa.

But first, we have a few announcements.

Now, let’s get into the story.

In 2014, 125,000 young Nigerians stormed a stadium in Abuja for a job test.

The country’s immigration agency was hiring for 4,000 roles.

Only 64,000 people had been invited for the test, but twice as many people showed up.

When the stadium gates opened at 10:00 AM, the crowd turned into a stampede, killing 16 people and wounding many others.

It’s 2025 now, 11 million Nigerians still don’t have a job (according to official numbers), and 33% of the country is underemployed.

Across Africa, many more young people struggle to find work.

And it’s a problem.

Young, free, and unemployed

Africa is the young continent.

Half the population is under 18, and 883 million people are of working age.

But it’s also the unemployed continent.

140 million Africans between 15 and 35 are unemployed.

And it’s because while there are lots of humans, there’s little human capital.

Three in four young Africans lack employable skills.

And most of them get jobs in the informal market where 80% of Africans are employed.

But it’s hard to build a strong economy on informal jobs.

In Africa, the average informal business makes $137 in monthly profit.

And the take-home pay is usually much less.

But first, the root cause…

African youths aren’t learning much

To understand the job crisis, we need to accept a hard truth:

African youths are barely learning anything.

• Only 9.4% of African youths go to university.

• University of Cape Town, Africa’s best university, ranks 116th globally.

• Only 1 in 5 lecturers at universities even have a PhD.

• And 3 in 4 students aren’t learning job-relevant skills.

Against this backdrop, the job crisis starts to make sense.

So it’s worth asking…

Who let the kids out?

1) There aren’t enough colleges to go round.

The US has nearly 4,000 colleges for 350 million people.

Africa—with 1.3 billion people—has just 1,274.

The difference shows up in the size and skill of both economies.

In Nigeria alone, 2 million kids graduate high school each year.

They all take the JAMB exam (Nigeria’s SAT), but only one-third get accepted into universities.

The rest often stay idle, hoping to try again the next year.

While this happens, they don’t contribute to the economy.

2) The colleges around are broken

In many public universities, learning often happens in overcrowded spaces with old curriculums and learning material.

There’s one lecturer to every 64 students in the typical African college—twice the global average.

Schools don’t get much funding either.

African governments spend less than 5% of their budgets on education, compared to a global average of 12.5%.

So, only a tiny fraction (if any) goes to building better schools and keeping the curricula up to date.

3) There aren’t many big companies around

Education doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

When students graduate, they need a place to go to apply their skills.

In Africa, the formal job market is small.

While 12 million young Africans joined the workforce last year, only 3.1 million formal jobs were created.

There’s a gross lack of big companies—the kind that can take in talent, train it, and grow it.

This creates a cycle where lack of talent keeps more big companies from popping up, leading to more lack of talent.

And the ensuing lack of jobs makes colleges less attractive to more young people.

But there’s a new kind of school in Africa

Sometime in 2014, a new narrative came up — the desktop migration.

Andela - an edtech startup - started teaching young Africans to code and placing them in international tech jobs.

And for a while, people bought into the hype that global jobs could fill local shortages.

Young people went from earning as little as $115 a month to as high as $1,350 working in tech.

Other schools like Andela popped up on the continent to train more people — ALX, GOMYCODE and AltSchool.

Even governments bought in — with Nigeria creating its 3 Million Technical Talent Program to train young Nigerians in tech skills.

But here’s the thing: reality hasn’t matched the hype.

Ten years later, Africa’s job crisis is still huge - and tech has barely made a dent in the numbers in the real economy.

And now, there's a chance it gets even worse.

Because the robots are coming

For a long time, desktop migration promised the world cheaper (African) labour, while also promising young Africans a better income.

But that "pretty picture" — millions of young Africans filling global talent gaps — is already starting to crack.

Because while rich countries are running out of workers, they’re also building something else: AI agents.

Unlike people, AI doesn’t sleep, doesn’t need visas, and doesn’t ask for a raise.

And they can work faster and cheaper.

While a junior developer in Nairobi might charge $15 an hour, Cursor — an AI-powered code editor — costs about $20 - $40 per month.

Anthropic's Claude Opus and OpenAI's GPT-4o can write code, design websites, and handle customer requests.

And Adept AI has built AI agents that can complete entire workflows for businesses without human input for a fraction of human costs.

These are the very skills Africa's youth have been banking on with the rise of remote jobs.

And AI is already approaching world-class levels of doing them.

McKinsey estimates that AI will cause South Africa to lose 3.3 million jobs, but will create 4.5 million new ones.

The only question is — what are those new jobs?

A few years ago, remote work opened the door for young Africans to export their skills globally.

AI might just slam it shut - or at the very least, make the future more uncertain.

Digital dreams meet AI reality

When we step back from the hype, two scary truths show up.

1. Tech is not going to solve unemployment for African youths

2. Africa’s window of opportunity (with global remote work) may be closing just as fast as it opened.

This forces us to face more fundamental questions.

If tech won’t cut it, what kinds of jobs can sustainably employ hundreds of millions of African youth?

And what will Africa’s advantage be in an AI-powered world?

The answer likely lies in building up the real, local economy - jobs in manufacturing, infrastructure, agriculture and other sectors.

For these industries to pick up, we need to see massive investments — not just in training young people for them, but also building the companies they’ll work in.

And right now, that’s barely happening.

The ultimate question remains — how do we train Africa’s youth for an uncertain future?

If you have any ideas, let me know here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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