Summary:
- Africa’s education-opportunity paradox is widening: More young Africans are graduating with higher levels of education than ever before, yet the continent creates only a fraction of the jobs needed to absorb their skills, leaving millions without meaningful opportunities.
- Skills alone do not create prosperity: While investments in education are valuable, a “push” approach focused primarily on training people is insufficient if economies do not simultaneously create markets and businesses that demand those skills.
- Market creation should drive skills development: Drawing on Apple’s role in building China’s manufacturing ecosystem, Africa must treat education, job creation, and market creation as inseparable, building industries that generate demand for talent rather than producing graduates for jobs that do not yet exist.
In May, I had an aha moment in a conversation with a CEO of an African bank. He explained to me that 30 years ago, he graduated from university with considerably “less skill and exposure” than many Africans do today, yet he had access to way more opportunities. His career trajectory has led him to lead a bank that now generates more than $100 million in profits annually. He was not from a wealthy family nor did he have “connections.” He was largely successful due to his intelligence, work ethic, and a little bit of luck. The story for millions of today’s youth on the continent, many of whom graduate with more years of schooling and far more exposure, couldn’t be farther from this reality.
This is a paradox. More Africans are attending school but there are fewer and fewer opportunities for them to grasp.
The data clearly illustrates this. In almost every level of education, Africans are graduating with the opportunity to gain more skills than their counterparts of yesteryears.
Compared with 1990, tens of millions more Africans now complete primary school, millions more complete secondary school, and university enrolment has expanded several-fold. Although learning quality still requires significant improvement, today’s workforce is the most educated in the continent’s history. Yet the continent only creates approximately three million jobs for the 12 million people who graduate from university every year. This is unsustainable.
Major organizations like the World Bank, the Mastercard Foundation, and the African Development Bank write about it, talk about it, and develop projects to tackle this widening divide between skills and jobs. However, the gap continues to grow.
Rethinking the paradox. A simple solution to a complex problem
In 2017, I wrote about the development industry’s obsession with ending poverty and how that’s where the sector was going wrong. I explained that because “poverty almost always shows itself as a lack of resources in poor communities – food, safe water, sanitation, education, healthcare – it’s reasonable to theorize that poverty is a resource problem. So, based on that assumption, we execute a push strategy of development – pushing the resources poor communities lack in order to solve the issue.”
A push strategy builds schools, educates youth, and focuses on skills. It essentially pushes what experts believe to be the solution to the problem. It sounds good on paper. And it is good, objectively speaking. A country having schools is better than a country not having schools. The millions of Africans who have attended school is objectively better than an Africa where millions wouldn’t attend school.
But just because something is good does not mean it is best. There is a simpler and better way.
In the book, Apple in China, Patrick McGee describes how Apple invested hundreds of billions of dollars to build one of the world’s most sophisticated manufacturing ecosystems in China, working closely with roughly 200 suppliers. But the investment did far more than produce iPhones. As McGee explains, Chinese suppliers and engineers effectively received a world-class education in advanced manufacturing, quality control, product development, and supply chain management by working alongside Apple. Over time, that knowledge spread throughout China’s technology ecosystem, helping fuel the rise of globally competitive companies such as Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo. Apple set out to build a supply chain to support the growth of its business, and in the process, it helped build an industrial ecosystem.
Two things are instructive here.
First, there was a market to absorb the skills that Apple developed in China. Every engineer, logistician, technician, supply chain personnel, and manufacturing worker was skilled for the specific purpose of making an Apple product. The skills didn’t float in an ocean of poverty. Instead, they were absorbed into a thriving market.
Second, the market dictated what skills were required, not the other way around. When skills are tied to the needs of a market, they are more likely to be absorbed by that market. They are also more likely to grow and evolve as we’ve seen in China.
Africa’s skills and opportunity paradox is real, but it is not inevitable. The bank CEO who graduated with, in his words, “far fewer skills” than today’s graduates was able to build an extraordinary career because the economy around him created opportunities to absorb and reward his capabilities. Today, millions of young Africans are leaving school with more education than any generation before them, yet too many are entering economies that have not created enough productive opportunities to put those skills to work.
The lesson is not that Africa should invest less in education. Quite the opposite. It should continue investing in education while placing equal, or even greater, emphasis on creating new markets that demand talent. Skills alone do not create prosperity. It is the prosperous markets that create demand for skills.
If Africa wants to solve its skills and opportunity paradox, it must stop treating education, job creation, and market creation as separate agendas. The three are inseparable. Until Africa creates many more market-creating businesses capable of absorbing the talent it is producing, it will continue educating millions of young people for jobs and opportunities that do not yet exist.
