African finance ministers, bankers and economists met on 4 October at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris to exchange ideas on promoting youth employment. Nigeria’s former President Olusegun Obasanjo said chronic unemployment linked the insurgencies in the Niger Delta and in northern Nigeria. Others such as Ecobank’s Temitope Oshikoya and the African Development Bank’s Chief Economist Mthuli Ncube called for more investment in technical and vocational training. Currently, such training gets between 2-6% of education budgets.

Arend van Wamelen from McKinsey’s office in South Africa reeled off statistics about African employment: today the continent’s workforce is 382 million, of which 42% are employed outside farming; and 18% of the new wage-paying jobs are in the retail and hospitality sectors. By 2020, Africa will have another 122 mn. workers and by 2035, its workforce will be bigger than China’s or India’s. More than 48% of Africans will go to secondary school by 2020 but business leaders are still reluctant to invest in skills and training.

The World Bank, which produces its own tome on job creation this year, emphasises financial sustainability. Since four out of five workers in Africa are farmers or self-employed (8 mn. out of the 10 mn. new workers every year), the priority should be to make smallholder farming more productive, and therefore profitable. That would help sustain investments in education and keep them relevant.