Lord Paul Boateng, a member of the United Kingdom’s House of Lords, has cautioned that Africa risks stalling its economic progress unless governments deliberately place young people at the centre of national development strategies.
Addressing participants at the KPMG 2026 Post-Budget Forum in Accra on Monday, Lord Boateng argued that the continent’s economic ambitions will remain out of reach if structural obstacles—particularly those affecting job creation and enterprise development—are not urgently addressed.
Framing youth empowerment as an economic imperative rather than a social aspiration, he stressed that existing policies often focus narrowly on skill-building without creating the conditions for young people to thrive in the labour market.
“Africa cannot afford to continue producing skilled young people only for them to remain unemployed,” he warned, urging governments to rethink the link between education, entrepreneurship, and real economic opportunity.
Lord Boateng emphasised that unlocking growth requires decisive collaboration between the public and private sectors. He noted that persistent challenges in procurement systems, regulatory processes, and the general business climate limit the private sector’s ability to expand and generate jobs.
“The public sector must focus on enabling—not doing everything. When governments clear the bottlenecks in procurement and make it easier to do business, they release the natural enterprise that already exists among Africans,” he said.
He underscored that meaningful economic transformation will depend on policies designed not only to train young people but also to absorb them into productive employment and support their ventures.
“The youth are not just the future—they are the key to the growth, jobs, and transformation we seek today,” he noted.
