Africa is the youngest continent in the world. Nearly 60% of its population is under the age of 25, a demographic reality that should be its greatest strategic advantage.

Yet for millions of African young people, this youth dividend has become a liability rather than a promise.

Across the continent, young Africans face some of the harshest conditions of our time: chronic insecurity, political exclusion, mass unemployment, and forced recruitment into armed groups and criminal networks. For many, the future remains profoundly uncertain on the very land of their ancestors.

Stripped of opportunity and dignity, countless young people are pushed, not by choice, but by necessity, to flee. They risk their lives crossing deserts and seas in search of survival, only to encounter new forms of precarity, rejection, and invisibility in foreign lands.

African youth are not fleeing Africa because they reject it.
They are fleeing because Africa is failing to offer viable futures at scale.

This is the great African paradox: a continent endowed with immense human and natural wealth, yet unable to secure a dignified future for its own youth.

Conflict remains one of the strongest drivers of forced migration. At the same time, widespread unemployment fuels recruitment into armed groups, militias, and criminal economies. While the world builds its prosperity from Africa’s resources, Africans themselves are not building secure lives from that same wealth.

Migration Is a Symptom, Not the Disease

Youth migration across Africa is increasingly multi-national, crossing borders, regions, and identities. This reality alone reveals a critical truth: the crisis is continental, not country-specific.

Young Africans are leaving environments defined by:

• weak institutions and governance failures,

• electoral manipulation and democratic erosion,

• corruption and elite capture,

• chronic insecurity,

• and the absence of meaningful economic opportunity.

In such contexts, migration becomes a rational response to systemic exclusion. No border wall, visa regime, or deterrence policy can resolve a crisis whose roots lie at home. Migration pressures cannot be solved at Europe’s borders when they are produced in Africa’s political and economic systems.

Democracy Without Security Is Hollow

For Africa’s youth, democracy is not an abstract principle. It has value only when it delivers:

• personal safety,

• freedom of movement,

• jobs and livelihoods,

• and a credible sense of future.

Where democratic systems fail to guarantee these fundamentals, young people disengage—or depart. The result is a deepening cycle of disillusionment, brain drain, and loss of human capital that Africa can least afford.

The African Union: Limits and Responsibilities

The African Union cannot—and should not—seek to “stop” migration. Movement is human. Movement is rational.

But the AU can shape the conditions that reduce forced migration by addressing its structural drivers: insecurity, economic exclusion, and governance failures. The true challenge is not mobility itself, but creating systems in which staying becomes a dignified and viable choice.

The uncomfortable truth is this: attempting to curb youth migration through restriction alone will fail. Young people will continue to move. Restriction without reform only deepens desperation and risk-taking.

The real question Africa must confront is not how to stop its youth from leaving, but rather:

How do we fix the systems that force them to leave in the first place—rather than criminalising their search for dignity?

This Friday’s conversation places youth voices, leadership perspectives, and policy realities at the centre of Africa’s geopolitical discourse.

???? Friday, 13 February 2026
? 11:00 AM SAST | 12:00 PM EAT | 10:00 AM WAT
???? Virtual (Zoom

Leading Women of Africa (LWA) invites male and female experts from across Africa and the diaspora to contribute to the Women in Geopolitics Debate Series – Season 1.

We welcome expressions of interest from:

 

• Diplomats and former diplomats

• Policymakers and parliamentarians

• Academics and researchers

• Peace and security practitioners

• Governance and gender experts

• Civil society leaders

• Independent analysts and strategists

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