Why measuring youth opportunity in Africa's agrifood systems is essential for growing quality jobs

YAPI is a continental policy instrument designed to measure the quality of opportunities available to young people across Africa’s agrifood systems.[File, Standard]

Africa’s greatest asset is often said to be its young people, who are entering the labour market by the millions every year.

But turning the promise of their energy, ambition, and talent into inclusive and sustainable development requires real opportunities for productive and decent work, especially in the continent’s agrifood systems.

The challenge and potential of the “youth bulge” was the topic of the 2025 African Food Systems Forum, and this year’s forum will continue the dialogue on growing jobs that can make agrifood system employment inclusive, appealing, and empowering for youth.

Agrifood systems are among the continent’s best opportunities to convert the demographic shift into productive employment, entrepreneurship, food security and shared prosperity.

This potential is recognised in the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme's (CAADP) Kampala Declaration and its Strategy and Action Plan, which commits member states to empowering at least 30 per cent of youth in agrifood value chains by 2035.

But if Africa is serious about achieving that ambition, we need to ask a more fundamental question: Are we creating enough high-quality opportunities for young people, or simply counting their participation?

That means job quality must grow alongside job numbers, and achieving this will require credible measurement.

The continent has long measured youth participation in agrifood systems too narrowly, capturing the numbers employed, without asking whether the systems around them create decent work, viable enterprises, resilience and voice.

Measuring the quality of job growth, not just the volume, will require data to answer key questions: Are new jobs decent, productive or resilient?

Do young people have competitive skills? Can they access land, finance, technology and markets? Can their livelihoods withstand climate, price and market shocks?

To meet this need, the Youth in Agrifood Systems Performance Index (YAPI) was launched by the African Union with support from partners including the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), at the ninth Africa Agriculture Science Week in July.

YAPI offers a continental policy instrument for assessing whether young people are being included, empowered, and enabled across agrifood systems. Its logic is clear: Stronger youth capabilities improve access to resources and services.

Better access expands economic opportunity. And opportunity, reinforced by voice and resilience, makes agrifood systems genuinely youth-responsive.

An 11-country pilot of YAPI, covering Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Eswatini, The Gambia, Kenya, Malawi, Morocco, Nigeria, Tunisia and Uganda, already offers important lessons.

Across the pilot, the aggregate score on the YAPI index was just 1.55 out of 5, pointing to persistent structural constraints on quality job growth.

The pilot also exposed major gaps in data on economic opportunity, governance, resilience, and the quality of youth participation.

To fill these gaps, YAPI offers clearer definitions, structured scoring, indicators, and data-collection pathways that national statistical systems can sustain.

This is not simply a measurement shift, it is a governance and policy shift.

By collecting data and measuring constraints and opportunities for quality youth employment and entrepreneurship, YAPI can make them more visible, comparable, and actionable for policymakers.

YAPI gives national governments, regional economic communities, development partners, youth organisations, and the private sector a tool for determining where finance, technical assistance, and political capital can have the greatest effect, and for tracking that impact on expanding productive and decent work for young people.

Africa now faces a clear policy choice: keep invoking the promise of a youth dividend without pursuing it, or build the policy environment needed to turn that promise into inclusive and sustainable growth. Used well, YAPI can translate Africa’s commitments into better investment choices, trackable progress, and public accountability.

The youth dividend will not happen simply because Africa has a young population. It will happen when young people have the capabilities, resources, markets, resilience and voice to build productive livelihoods and enterprises.

Measuring opportunities for youth in agrifood systems honestly, and acting on the evidence, is no longer optional. It is a development imperative.

Alice Ruhweza is President, AGRA, while Johan Swinnen is Director General, International Food Policy Research Institute