Skills for jobs in Sub-Saharan Africa: An urgent, pressing agenda

Omar Arias

David Evans

Indhira Santos

English

Français

Swahili

English

Français

Swahili

More than one in five youth across Africa are neither in education nor working. Medium and large firms continue to point to an inadequately skilled workforce as a constraint to productivity. Only a small fraction of children are able to read and understand a simple sentence by age ten, a building block and indicator of children’s skills trajectory. In the face of these skills challenges, back in 2019, we published The Skills Balancing Act in Sub-Saharan Africa: Investing in Skills for Productivity, Inclusivity, and Adaptability. We highlighted two balancing acts that policy makers have to reckon with when investing in skills. First, the tension between skills for economywide productivity gains and skills for inclusion of the most vulnerable. Second, countries must balance between investing in foundational skills (both cognitive and socio-emotional) and technical or job-specific skills.

In this post, each of us three lead authors reflects on a key issue that we believe has become more important than we had envisioned seven years ago.

Indhira: Global Skills Partnerships are an underutilized tool to improve Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET). Our report—and reports before and after ours—identifies weak links to employers as a major challenge for TVET in Africa, but it overlooked international partnerships as a solution. We mostly referenced migration in terms of students studying abroad. However, direct employer partnerships, especially through foreign collaborations, can make TVET more market-relevant and boost employment outcomes at home and abroad. These Global Skills Partnerships (GSPs) allow origin and destination countries to jointly invest in education systems, aligning training with industry needs and facilitating skilled migration. The Africa region is best placed for this given its relatively young population in a world where many advanced economies are older. For example, Germany has launched a pilot GSP with Senegal and Ghana in construction, expanding into sectors like renewable energy and IT, featuring dual tracks for local and overseas employment. Foreign partnerships for skills development can, thus, expand the workforce beyond local needs and strengthen training systems for global competitiveness.

David: Better tracer data on TVET graduates is more pressing than ever. Youth face myriad options when trying to get training for jobs. In Ghana, for example, youth can choose between training in cashew value chains, computer data administration, welding, cosmetology, electrical installation, and more. They can also choose between public or private providers. How can a young person make a good choice? Making sure that information is easily available on the average earnings across different professions and TVET programs is crucial to ensure youth migrate to the industries that will lead them (and their economies) to flourish. Some countries in the region currently have occasional tracer studies (e.g., in Ghana or South Africa) but few have national systems to provide this data. Rwanda’s Graduate Tracking System is an example. Its 2024 report provides insights not only on which programs led to higher employment—road maintenance and testing construction materials both did well—but also on how long it took graduates to find jobs. There are limitations, but the initiative is a step in the right direction.

Outside the region, Chile provides a model, with data across careers and institutions—bridging both TVET and general higher education—so that youth can make informed decisions. Better information on returns can change the educational choices that youth make, for the better, and also provide important signals to providers on how they need to improve.

Omar: Last but not least, technological change is getting supercharged. A few years ago, our skills report underscored that the region’s development prospects were being reshaped by megatrends—including quickly evolving digital technologies and automation—and stressed the imperative of building adaptability across individuals’ working lives. We framed the “skills balancing act” around readiness (foundations), opportunities (equitable access), and incentives (systems and governance) in order to equip people for a fast-changing world of work. In retrospect, while we anticipated that continued technological change would disrupt the historical role of manufacturing in structural transformation, we did not foresee the sheer speed at which especially digital innovations—robots and automation, AI, and digital platforms—would diffuse globally and reconfigure tasks across sectors in such a short time span. East Asia’s recent experience helps illustrate both the opportunities and risks for the Africa region.

This accelerated pace of technological change has concrete implications for SSA’s skills agenda. Without strong foundational skills—literacy, numeracy, socioemotional and digital literacy—workers and firms struggle to adapt and productively use new digital tools. Demand for digital competencies is rising beyond ICT occupations—including for basic and intermediate digital skills embedded in everyday jobs. This underscores the need for embedding digital skills in reskilling and upskilling of the current workforce and mobilizing public–private partnerships to deliver demand-driven TVET and higher education. The usage gap (especially for women) must be closed by improving digital infrastructure, connectivity, affordability, relevance, and safety online, alongside reforms to ensure the enabling environment for firms to thrive and create more productive jobs.

With technology supercharging, youth who don’t have relevant skills risk being left out of future opportunities. Now is a crucial time for policymakers and partners to revamp skills development opportunities for youth in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This blog is part of a commemorative series marking 15 years of the Africa Development Forum book series co-published by the World Bank and the Agence Francaise de Developpement

Digital Development

Education

Jobs & Development

Ghana

Rwanda

Senegal

South Africa

Omar Arias

Deputy Chief Economist

David Evans

Director, Global Education and Child Well-Being Program, Center for Global Development

Indhira Santos

World Bank Lead Economist for People, Europe and Central Asia

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