Vocational training: skills, the missing link in youth employment

In West Africa, youth unemployment is a misleading indicator. At 3.1 % in Benin, 5.1 % in Nigeria and 0.4 % in Niger in 2024 (World Bank, ILO), it looks almost enviable. But in an economy where no one can afford the luxury of staying officially jobless, this figure measures nothing essential. The true face of the crisis is the youth NEET rate, those who are neither in employment, nor in education, nor in training: 35.2 % in Senegal, 30.1 % in Mali, against 11.9 % in Nigeria. In other words, as many as one young person in three is quite simply disconnected. Between these two measures, a link is missing: certified skills, the kind that turns an abundant youth into a dividend rather than a social liability.

The optical illusion of unemployment: what the indicator hides

Decision-makers' first reflex is to track the unemployment rate of young people aged 15 to 24. Yet this indicator, designed for formal economies, says almost nothing about West African realities. To be "unemployed" presupposes actively looking for a salaried job without finding one, a status few young people can afford to declare where there is neither benefit nor social safety net. The result: the rates shown are artificially low, not because young people are working, but because they slip into inactivity or into informal survival work that escapes employment statistics.

The youth NEET rate corrects this bias. It counts all those who, at an age when one should be studying, training or working, do none of the three. It is a measure of wasted human capital, and it tells a very different story. In Senegal, declared youth unemployment hovers around 3.9 % while NEET exceeds 35 %. In Benin, the gap is of the same order: 3.1 % unemployment against 14.2 % NEET. The gap between the two curves is not a methodological detail, it is the heart of the matter.

This divergence is not unique to West Africa, but it is more gaping there than elsewhere, because informality absorbs almost everything that official unemployment does not see. Unemployment presupposes a labour market that clearly distinguishes employment from its absence; the West African economy, for its part, offers a continuum of underemployment, casual work and unpaid family help in which a young person is never quite "employed" nor quite "unemployed". Steering youth employment with the thermometer of unemployment means measuring the fever of an illness one does not have. NEET, by contrast, captures the essence of what matters: the number of young people that neither school, nor workshop, nor firm takes in charge.

One region, deeply unequal fractures

Read through NEET, the West African landscape proves deeply contrasted. Senegal (35.2 %) and Mali (30.1 %) show the highest rates, followed by Ghana (23.9 %) and Burkina Faso (21.6 %). At the other extreme, Nigeria (11.9 %), Togo (13 %) and Benin (14.2 %) display more contained levels. A ratio of nearly 1 to 3 thus separates the extremes of the region. As with many development indicators, this hierarchy does not map onto wealth levels or natural conditions: it reflects the state of training systems, the structure of economies and the place left to women in the labour market.

The trajectory over time confirms that there is no fatality. Some countries have seen their NEET fall sharply: Nigeria dropped from around 29 % in the early 2010s to less than 12 % today. Others remain stuck at high levels, like Senegal, which has oscillated around 30 to 36 % for fifteen years without lasting improvement. These divergences over a decade say the essential: youth disconnection responds to policies, not only to demography or the business cycle.

These opposite trajectories carry a precise economic lesson. One point less of NEET is not only one more young person occupied: it is an asset made productive, one fewer mouth dependent on families, a potential taxpayer rather than a social risk. Conversely, one point more of NEET in a large cohort represents tens of thousands of young people durably marginalised, whose marginality tends to be passed on, for a disconnected parent rarely raises a qualified child. The divergence between Nigeria and Senegal is therefore not a mere statistical curiosity: it separates two futures, one that converts its youth into growth, the other that lets it crystallise into frustration.

The missing link: an almost absent skills pathway

Why do so many young people disconnect? Because between general schooling, which rarely leads to a trade, and the informal sector, which absorbs everything else, one route is missing: that of certified skills. Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) should play this role. Yet, according to UNESCO, less than 15 % of upper-secondary students in Africa are enrolled in TVET, against a world average of 22 %. The pathway meant to connect youth to the labour market is thus structurally undersized.

Across our nine countries, the picture is even more severe. The share of technical and vocational education in secondary education ranges from 2.4 % in Burkina Faso and 2.7 % in Ghana to 12.2 % in Mali, with 2.8 % in Benin (World Bank, UNESCO-UIS). In other words, in most of these countries, fewer than one secondary student in twenty follows vocational training. Nearly all young people leave the school system without a directly usable certified skill, with on-the-job apprenticeship in the informal economy as their only outlet.

Between a general school that rarely leads to a trade and an informal sector that absorbs everything, a route is missing: that of certified skills. It is this link, and not unemployment, that decides the future of West African youth.

Financing the missing link: the sinews of war

If TVET is so narrow, it is first because it is budget-starved. Vocational training is almost everywhere the poor relation of education spending, sacrificed to general education which captures the bulk of resources. A multi-country study by the African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET) quantifies the scale of the underfunding: Côte d'Ivoire and Niger devote 8 % of their education budget to TVET, Rwanda 7 %, Ethiopia 5 %, Uganda 4 %, and Ghana barely 2 %. Yet the same work recommends a range of 10 to 20 % for a TVET system to deliver on its promises. In other words, most countries fund their vocational pathway at half, a quarter, or even a tenth of the threshold deemed necessary.

This underinvestment is all the more costly because it is paid with delay. A TVET pathway is not built in a single budget: it requires equipped workshops, technical teachers who are rare and expensive to train, and durable partnerships with firms. Each year of underfunding therefore translates into a shortfall of infrastructure and trainers that takes a decade to close. Conversely, the social return on a well-placed franc invested in skills is high: where apprenticeship really leads to a trade, it reduces NEET, broadens the tax base and eases migratory pressure. The real cost is not that of investing in TVET, but that of continuing not to, paid every year in disconnected cohorts.

The informal sector as default destiny

For lack of skills pathways, young people move directly into the informal sector. The ILO figures leave no ambiguity: 95 % of young Africans aged 15 to 24 work in an informal setting, and 90 % of youth employment on the continent is informal (ILO, ILOSTAT). The informal sector is therefore not a margin, it is the norm, and for the overwhelming majority, the only gateway into working life.

In this institutional void, only one skills route really works at scale: traditional apprenticeship, the system in which a young person learns a trade from a master craftsperson, through observation and repetition, with no curriculum and no certification. It is today, and by far, the region's leading training scheme, the main gateway to self-employment in micro-enterprises (ILO). But its limits are severe: dropout is estimated at 20 to 25 %, a micro-enterprise "graduates" on average only one apprentice per year, and above all the skill acquired is recognised by no qualification. The apprentice comes out with real know-how, but invisible to the eyes of the formal market, the banker and the recruiting employer. The system thus trains massively, but never turns know-how into a marketable qualification.

This informality is not neutral. It rhymes with absence of social protection, unstable incomes, low productivity and, above all, absence of progression. A young person entering the market without a certified skill remains trapped there: without a recognised qualification, they can neither negotiate a better wage, nor access credit, nor escape precariousness. The training deficit therefore translates not only into employment figures, but into lasting poverty: nearly 34 % of employed young people in Sub-Saharan Africa live below the poverty line of 2.15 USD a day (ILO). Working no longer protects from poverty when work is devoid of skill.

The consequence is a paradox that no policy can ignore: West Africa does not suffer from a lack of work, but from a lack of skill-building work. Its young people are active, learn trades, open workshops; but for lack of certification and upgrading, this energy remains stuck at the floor of productivity. The decisive lever is therefore not to create employment from nothing, but to recognise, structure and upgrade the immense informal apprenticeship that already exists. It is a task of certification and quality, not of creation from scratch.

The cost of inaction: when demography outpaces skills

The urgency is first arithmetic. Each year, more than 10 million young people enter the African labour market, while current growth creates only about 3 million formal jobs (World Bank). The gap, seven million young people a year, spills into the informal sector or into NEET. To absorb its new workers by 2030, Sub-Saharan Africa will need to generate around 15 million jobs a year, five times the current pace of formal job creation.

This pressure will only intensify, for the demographic wave has not finished rising. In Niger, 46.6 % of the population is under 15, a world record; in Mali, 46.1 %; in Benin, 41.6 % (World Bank, UN DESA). The cohorts that will enter the labour market in the coming decade are already born and already numerous. The window to build the skills pathways that will receive them is narrow, and it is closing.

Youth NEET in Sub-Saharan Africa reaches 20.4 % in 2024 (ILO, Global Employment Trends for Youth 2024), more than one young person in five excluded at once from employment, school and training. Without a rise in skills, the much-hoped-for demographic dividend turns into a social liability: a numerous, available generation, but deprived of the qualifications that would make it productive.

One must grasp what "letting slip" such a window means. The demographic dividend is not a gift of numbers, it is a premium on preparation: it is triggered only if the numerous cohort arrives on the market with skills that make it more productive than the one before it. Failing that, the same age pyramid that promised growth becomes a burden, for one must feed, supervise and occupy an inactive youth whose idleness in turn fuels instability and the migratory temptation. East Asian countries converted their demographic bump into decades of growth because they had, beforehand, built massive skills systems. West Africa has the same raw asset; it remains for it to finance the engineering that converts it into wealth rather than risk.

What averages hide: female disconnection

A national NEET figure is an average, and that average masks a gaping fracture between the sexes. The NEET rate of young women crushes that of men everywhere. In Mali, the gap is dizzying: 44.4 % of young women are disconnected, against 13.8 % of young men, a ratio of more than three to one. In Senegal, 43.7 % against 26.6 %. In Burkina Faso, 26.3 % against 15.8 %. The first face of the missing link is female.

This massive disconnection has a documented driver. Across the continent, women make up around 61 % of all young NEET, nearly 62 million young women (ILO). And 28 % of women outside the labour force cite family responsibilities to explain their situation, against only 3 % of men. Early marriage, motherhood and the domestic burden push young girls out of school and training well before they reach the labour market. Inclusive TVET is therefore not an optional extra: it is the most powerful, and the most neglected, lever to bring back into training the half of youth left aside today.

The gender dimension does not stop at the disconnection rate: it also shapes the nature of the skills acquired. Where young women do access training, they are concentrated in a small number of so-called female fields (sewing, hairdressing, catering), often saturated and poorly paid, while the better-paid technical trades (construction, mechanics, digital, energy) remain largely closed to them. This segregation of fields reproduces the income gap within vocational training itself. A genuinely inclusive TVET therefore does not settle for opening its doors to young girls: it actively works to steer them towards high-potential skills, which requires measuring, field by field, where they are and where they are missing.

This issue connects directly with CRAD's field of expertise, which has measured and documented gender gaps in access to productive resources through the regional WOCEWA project, on the gender equality index in sustainable-energy SMEs of ECOWAS. The same method, data disaggregated by sex and by field, applies to vocational training: without a fine measure of female disconnection, no TVET policy can claim to be inclusive.

Comparing without erring: the pitfalls of NEET data

Steering by evidence requires knowing the limits of the evidence. The World Bank NEET series mix national survey values and ILO modelled estimates, and some isolated years show sharp breaks, probably linked to one-off surveys, which must be discarded as outliers in favour of the trend. Regional levels themselves vary by source: the ILO estimates Sub-Saharan Africa's NEET at 20.4 % in 2024, while other accounts cite higher values. We therefore remain qualitative, more than one young person in five, without artificially settling the matter.

The Nigeria case illustrates the stakes: the World Bank, ILO series gives 11.9 % in 2024, while national work advances a much higher average, the gap owing to the definitions used, the age bracket and the survey year. Likewise, the TVET-share data date for the most part from 2016 to 2019 and are missing for Nigeria: they should be read as a recent order of magnitude, not as a current value. These precautions do not weaken the diagnosis, they make it honest, and they plead precisely for what the region most lacks: regular, comparable and disaggregated national surveys.

This fragility of the data has a direct, often underestimated political cost. When a ministry has only a national figure three years old, it can neither target its training centres, nor judge whether a scheme works, nor arbitrate between two regions. It then steers by intuition, distributes resources uniformly and discovers too late that the funds went where the need was least. The measurement deficit is therefore not a statisticians' problem: it is a governance flaw that makes public money miss its target. Investing in a skills information system costs a fraction of what the poorly targeted schemes it helps avoid cost.

Measuring the skills that truly are missing: the CRAD angle

The usual reflex in the face of youth disconnection is to multiply training schemes. But training without measuring risks producing skills the market does not expect, while those firms need remain nowhere to be found. The West African problem is not only quantitative, a TVET deficit, it is also qualitative: a mismatch between the training supply and the real demand of the local economic fabric, field by field, employment basin by employment basin.

This is where CRAD's work lies, connecting field data to decision. Mapping the real TVET supply in a territory, measuring the fit between the skills taught and the jobs available, then tracking the actual insertion of graduates through robust monitoring and evaluation systems: this is the chain that allows states and funders to target the skills that truly are missing, rather than financing training disconnected from the market. Our field surveys, our digital data collection and our sectoral databases make this precision possible.

• Map the supply. Inventory, geolocate and characterise existing TVET centres, their fields and their capacities, to reveal training deserts and costly duplications.
• Measure the fit. Confront the skills taught with the real demand of employers, field by field and basin by basin, in order to identify trades in tension and training with no outlet.
• Track insertion. Establish monitoring and evaluation of graduates over time (job obtained, income, sector), to judge schemes on their results and not on the number of enrolments.
• Disaggregate by sex. Systematise the gendered measurement of disconnection and insertion, a condition of a genuinely inclusive TVET able to bring young women back into training.
• Value informal apprenticeship. Inventory and assess skills acquired on the job to make them certifiable, turning invisible know-how into a recognised qualification.

Converting a numerous youth into a dividend presupposes evidence-based steering. This is the conviction that structures CRAD's approach, backed by more than 40 studies and a footprint in 18 countries: skills data have value only if they are geolocated, disaggregated and repeated over time. Failing that, youth employment policies will keep advancing blind, multiplying training courses no one knows whether they lead to a trade.

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