The numbers are blunt: Africa is the world’s youngest continent. Today more than 60% of the population is under 25, and by 2030 young Africans will make up a very large share of the world’s youth. For many countries this is a potential demographic dividend, for others, a real and present risk if opportunity does not follow population.
Speaking from my role at the intersection of trade, private-sector delivery and on-the-ground programmes, I have seen both sides of that coin. Young Africans arrive at conferences hopeful, articulate and talented, and then ask the same hard question: “How do I access meaningful work and scale my idea?”.
Too often the answer they receive is fragmented: skills programmes without market pathways, donor projects without sustainability, or mentorship that teaches technique but not how to build relationships that open doors.
This is the missing link I continually return to: mentorship that builds relationships is as important as mentorship that builds skills. Relationships are the bridges that connect talent to buyers, apprentices to employers, and prototypes to paying customers. They are the social architecture of markets.
The problem shows up in the data. In Nigeria, a country with enormous youth potential, recent analyses and humanitarian data point to very high youth vulnerability: significant shares of young people are unemployed or not in education, employment or training. This is a practical driver of migration and economic insecurity, and a clarion call for private-sector solutions that treat youth engagement as investment, not charity.
If we treat migration, remittances and donor aid as the default answers, we will miss a larger opportunity: to design market-facing systems that allow young people to trade skills, goods and services across borders. AfCFTA has given us a policy scaffold for trade; what we lack are the connectors, people, platforms and practices, that turn policy into paychecks.
Three practical shifts would make a measurable difference.
- Mentor for relationships, not just skills.
Mentorship programmes must deliberately teach how to form commercial relationships: how to pitch to a distributor, how to negotiate payment terms, how to read export demand signals. This requires mentors who can broker introductions and who are evaluated not only on teaching outcomes but on matchmaking results. ACB’s approach this year, embedding a “relationship building” cohort into mentoring cohorts, is one step in that direction. Mentors must become brokers and bridges. - Build data-driven corridors that match supply to demand.
Institutions such as IOM are increasingly producing migration and employment data that can be disaggregated to reveal where talent sits and where job demand is growing. Public and private actors should co-design dashboards and APIs that feed market actors: exporters, platforms, buyers and incubators. In Abuja this year we began exactly this conversation with IOM, as private partners, not as an academic exercise, but to design pilots that match returnees and youth cohorts with viable market pathways. - Make the private sector the delivery engine for scaled opportunity.
Too often the private sector is invited late to the table. We need corporate purchasing commitments, bankable offtake agreements for youth cooperatives, and financing products that support micro-exporters. ESG, CSR and PPPs must be retooled to create durable market access, for example, institutional buyers agreeing to a quota of youth-sourced goods, or banks creating low-cost trade finance for first-time cross-border sellers.
Concrete initiatives to test right now
- Design sprints that pair youth teams from different regions (Senegal ↔ Kenya, Egypt ↔ South Africa) to co-build exportable products and practice cross-border sales.
- A “relationship-match” pilot where mentors commit to three verified commercial introductions within six months as part of programme KPIs.
- A private-sector data partnership between trade associations and humanitarian agencies to publish monthly labour-market heatmaps for high-opportunity corridors.
A cultural note is necessary. Too often we conflate youthfulness with inexperience. My conversations remind me that African young people are hungry for responsibility and assume leadership earlier than elsewhere. We should not “wait” for maturity, we should give young people market responsibilities and the scaffolds to deliver.
This requires trust from firms, financiers and public institutions.
Finally, metrics will be the test. We must move beyond attendance and training completions to measure real outcomes: paid contracts signed, cross-border transactions completed, and sustained income growth over 12 months. That means donors, governments and private partners must adapt their KPIs.
To those building programmes, leading firms, and designing policy: treat mentorship and relationship building as infrastructure. Fund it. Measure it. Hold it accountable. The demographic reality is not going away. Africa’s youth bulge is an invitation to design different systems, systems that create dignity through work, not dependency through charity.
If you want to pilot an approach that combines relationship-centred mentoring, data-driven corridor mapping and private-sector backed market pathways, my team at LANI Group is ready to collaborate. We are already engaging with partners, including IOM and private innovators, to translate these principles into pilots that yield jobs, not just hope.
The choice is simple: we either let demographics become a liability, or we build the relational infrastructure that converts potential into prosperity. I prefer the latter.
Selected sources & further reading
