About 71 million Africans ages 15 to 24 are outside employment, education or training. Among young people who do have jobs, informality and working poverty reveal a second problem: employment is not delivering economic mobility.

Roughly 70.9 million young Africans ages 15 to 24 were neither employed nor enrolled in education or training in 2025, according to the International Labour Organization, or about 23.2 percent of the continent’s youth population in that age group. More than one in five young people are disconnected from the three institutions most likely to raise their future earnings. The number is large, and it still understates the problem.

Africa’s youth population is expanding faster than any other in the world. The Mastercard Foundation’s 2026 Africa Youth Employment Outlook estimates the continent has about 532 million people ages 15 to 35, a population expected to grow by 132 million during the 2020s alone. For decades that growth has been described as a potential demographic dividend, a large working-age population capable of lifting production, consumption and economic growth. The dividend depends entirely on what kind of work those people can find.

Having a Job Is Not the Same as Having Economic Security

About 304 million young Africans are working, according to the Mastercard Foundation analysis. Roughly 104 million of those workers live in households classified as extremely poor, and about 90 percent — 273 million young workers — are employed informally. That changes what the employment statistics mean.

A person selling goods roadside, picking up casual construction work or running a tiny unregistered business counts as employed. The work may still produce irregular income, no contract, no pension, no health protections and almost no path upward. Africa is facing two related employment problems at once. One group of young people cannot connect to work or education at all. Another has entered the labor market and landed in work that generates too little security to build on.

A separate 2026 cross-national analysis using the African Union’s broader definition of youth, ages 15 to 35, estimated 104.8 million people in that range were NEET. That figure should not be set directly against the ILO’s 15-to-24 estimate, since the underlying populations differ, but both measures point to the same pressure: the continent is adding young adults faster than many of its economies are creating productive places to put them.

The Jobs Have to Change Too

The task is not creating employment of any kind. The Mastercard Foundation estimates that agriculture remains a major source of youth work while services grow more important, but movement from agriculture into services does not automatically mean movement into higher-productivity employment. Informal retail, transportation and personal services reproduce many of the same problems found in low-productivity agricultural work.

Education is not functioning as a reliable escape route either. The 15-to-35 analysis found that workers with upper-secondary and tertiary education made up more than half of unemployment, evidence of a mismatch between the credentials young Africans are acquiring and the jobs their economies actually generate.

Globally, the ILO reports youth unemployment rose to 12.4 percent in 2025, leaving 67 million people ages 15 to 24 unemployed and more than 257 million neither working nor in education or training. The organization attributes the deterioration to weak job creation, slower growth, geopolitical pressure and rapid technological change. Africa adds demography to that list.

The continent does not simply need to employ today’s young adults. It needs economies capable of absorbing the millions arriving behind them, and jobs productive enough to convert employment into mobility. That is the condition the demographic-dividend argument rests on. A young population becomes an economic advantage when education connects to opportunity, when businesses create productive work, and when employment generates enough income to move a household forward. Africa has the workers. The harder task is building an economy with enough good jobs to meet them.