Why Development Partners Must Bet on TVET to Unlock 72 Million Jobs
GABORONE, BOTSWANA – Twenty-nine (29) technical and vocational training leaders from ten (10) African countries have put a number on the continent’s next big economic test: 72.6 million young people are projected to enter Africa’s labour market between 2023 and 2050. Their message to the world’s development community, delivered in a communiqué issued in Gaborone on 28 November 2025, is blunt – the institutions best placed to prepare that generation for work are chronically underfunded, and the cost of continuing to overlook them will be measured in millions of unemployed youth.
The TVET principals, representing colleges and institutes from Benin, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Uganda and Zimbabwe, met on the margins of RUFORUM’s 21st Annual General Meeting under the banner of “Transformation and Scaling for Impact in Agri-Food Systems.” Their communiqué sounds less like a wish list and more like an audit of a sector that has mostly been overlooked in terms of development financing.
A System Asked to Do More With Less
The principals were candid about the state of their institutions. TVET systems remain underprepared and insufficiently connected to the demanding labour markets, producing a persistent mismatch between what graduates can do and what employers need. Instructors often lack the digital and technical skills to teach emerging tools, including Artificial Intelligence (AI). Weak governance, thin infrastructure and fragile institutional linkages make it hard to scale even proven innovations. On top of that, TVET’s still battle a stubborn public perception problem: too many families and students see it as a fallback, not a genuine, respectable pathway to a livelihood.
These are not new observations, what gives them weight is who is making them. It was noted that national governments across Africa are showing renewed commitment to TVET, but that commitment has yet to translate into the strategic, sustained investment the sector urgently needs. Development partners, meanwhile, are increasingly interested in youth employment and agribusiness, but their support, the principals argued, is often short-term, fragmented, and driven by pressure to show quick results rather than build lasting systems.
Practitioners, Not Just Petitioners
Notably, the communiqué is not simply a request for money. The principals committed to concrete actions of their own: modernising curricula to reflect climate-smart agriculture, digital skills and entrepreneurship; strengthening industry partnerships through internships and co-designed training; building instructors’ capacity in agritech and digital pedagogy; and expanding outreach to out-of-school and rural youth through mobile and community-based training models. They pledged to turn their institutions into scaling hubs for university-generated innovations, and the applied, hands-on link that research too often lacks on its way to communities, and to establish incubation centres that give young entrepreneurs start-up support and direct market access.
They also called for something development financing rarely funds directly: coordination. The group agreed to explore an African TVET–University Network for Agri-Food Transformation, envisioned as a continental community of practice linked to RUFORUM, alongside a shared framework aligned with the African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) 2026–2035 strategy. A proposed continental TVET mobility programme, mirroring the exchange schemes universities have long enjoyed – would, they argued, expose trainers and students alike to standards and opportunities beyond their home countries.
The Case for Investors
For the development community, the communiqué amounts to a pitch: TVET institutions are not a peripheral add-on to Africa’s education strategy but the delivery mechanism through which agricultural innovation, youth employment policy and industrial ambition either succeed or stall. The principals pointed to viable financing models already emerging – income-generating units, co-investment arrangements and public-private partnerships – that could make investment in TVET both catalytic and sustainable, rather than another short-lived donor project.
The underlying argument is hard to dismiss: with tens of millions of young Africans about to reach working age, the return on investment in institutions built to turn skills into jobs may be one of the more consequential bets development financing can make in the next decade. The principals have named their commitments. The open question the communiqué leaves for donors, governments and investors is whether they will match that commitment with capital.
