How to move Africa from potential to performance

The engine of Africa’s future is running hot, but the gears are not engaging. The continent is projected to outpace many regions economically over the next five years, driven by a booming youth population and rapid digital adoption. Yet, this forward momentum is not translating into human dignity. Unemployment is high, income growth is stagnant, and 85% of households face food insecurity.

We are growing fast, but we are not developing well. In fact, Africa is on track to achieve less than 6% of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.

The stakes of this underperformance extend far beyond the continent as well. As the Brookings Foresight Africa 2025-2030 report argues, solving global challenges such as resource scarcity, climate change, and instability depends on whether Africa can close its performance gap. This, in turn, demands a new kind of leadership from institutions of higher education and business schools. If the goal is to bridge the gap between potential and performance, we cannot carry on doing the same things and expect a different outcome. We must become the architects of change.

Here are five areas of action where educational institutions can play a catalytic role.

1. Start from Africa’s strengths, not its deficits

Africa possesses structural advantages that, if unlocked, could reshape global growth. Its young population will add roughly 800 million people to the worldwide workforce by 2050. Its domestic market is booming, with consumer and business spending projected to exceed $16-trillion in the same timeframe. The continent holds around 30% of global mineral reserves, including roughly 70% of the world’s cobalt, placing it at the centre of the green transition. Its digital ecosystem is evolving rapidly: internet use is surging, mobile money has transformed financial access, and tech start-ups are multiplying.

Yet without deliberate policy choices, these assets risk reinforcing extractive, unequal, or externally driven growth rather than broad-based prosperity. These strengths will matter only if productivity rises across agriculture, industry, and services, and if economic strategies are tailored to Africa’s diversity rather than imported wholesale. Universities and business schools can contribute by co-creating solutions with African partners on industrial policy, skills development, and financing models grounded in local realities.

2. Close the implementation gap

Africa’s main development challenge is not a shortage of good strategies but a gap between policy intention and execution. Although governments have committed to the SDGs and the African Union’s Agenda 2063, progress toward targets is stagnating or reversing. Public trust reflects this failure, with few citizens confident in governments’ ability to manage economies or create jobs.

The Foresight Africa report highlights practical frameworks to help leaders assess whether goals are clear, whether stakeholders are aligned, and what forms of leadership and coalition-building are required. Universities and business schools can support this agenda by training leaders in delivery, embedding research in fundamental reforms, and ensuring lessons feed directly into policymaking. The next five years must be defined by execution, not new plans.

3. Put women and youth at the centre of economic strategy

Africa’s demographic future is both its greatest asset and its greatest risk. Women remain systematically excluded from full economic participation, while a large share of young people are not in employment, education, or training (NEET). At the same time, the working-age population will continue to expand through the end of the century.

If this generation cannot find decent work, the continent will face rising frustration, fragility, and missed opportunity.

Foresight Africa proposes a practical “Laws–Jobs–Cash” agenda. Removing discriminatory regulations that limit women’s economic participation and young people’s access to labour markets is essential – so is prioritising job-rich sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, and digital services, and supporting entrepreneurial ecosystems capable of absorbing Africa’s youth cohort. Expanding financial inclusion and targeted social protection can help young people start businesses, withstand shocks, and invest in skills.

Education reform is central to this agenda. Systems designed for another era must shift from rote learning toward problem-solving, digital literacy, and teamwork at scale, while research capabilities can be directed toward evaluating youth training models, supporting entrepreneurship incubators, and measuring impact.

4. Use AI and digital technologies as accelerators – responsibly

With Africa far off track on the SDGs, development accelerators are urgent. Artificial intelligence and other digital technologies can raise productivity and improve service delivery across health, agriculture, education, and finance – if their deployment is inclusive and well-governed.

AI tools are already improving diagnostics, boosting agricultural resilience, and expanding financial access. But without deliberate action, AI could deepen inequalities, entrench bias, and leave rural and marginalised communities behind. Many African countries still lack digital infrastructure, data governance, and regulatory capacity.

Universities and business schools can help implement the African Union’s Continental AI Strategy by training data scientists, policymakers, business leaders and regulators; co-developing ethical guidelines; and supporting African-led AI labs and start-ups. Done well, AI can compress development timelines; poorly executed AI strategies will likely widen the divide.

5. Reimagine global partnerships around African agency

Africa’s share of global GDP and trade remains small, but its political weight is rising. It’s 54 countries, it’s the African Union’s seat in the G20 (and the recent hosting of Africa’s first G20 meeting), and its demographic trajectory is driving growing influence in global institutions.

To sustain momentum, the continent needs to continue shifting away from partnerships defined by aid and geopolitical competition toward relationships rooted in mutual interest and African agency. This includes leveraging the African Continental Free Trade Area to build regional value chains, negotiating more equitable climate and trade terms, and engaging partners strategically on infrastructure, digital connectivity, and industrialisation.

For education and research institutions, this is an invitation to build long-term, trust-based collaborations with think tanks and policymakers to co-produce knowledge and drive evidence-driven teaching, share methods, and jointly train the next generation of African and global leaders equipped to drive change.

To realise Africa’s potential, we will need more than optimism; we will need effective execution and coordinated action. We will also need skills. It’s absolutely impossible to build a future-focused nation without skills. This means that, underpinning all of these initiatives, is the absolute necessity of investing in education, whether as a public or a private good. Our current education system simply does not cut it, and if we are serious about national success, education has to move to the front line of investment and policy attention.

But it’s not just about putting in more money – it’s also about bringing together the right people who can reinvent education in the way Singapore, Korea, and Vietnam did.

The world cannot afford another five years of Sisyphean struggle in Africa. Unlike Sisyphus, condemned forever to roll the boulder uphill, our fate is not sealed by the gods; it is determined by our capacity to think, evolve, and execute. By facing the hard choices that can make a genuine difference, rather than retreating into comfortable truths, we can create a sea change and engage the gears of development to ensure that as Africa rises, it stays up and lifts the world with it.