Everywhere I look, the conversation around AI seems to come down to one question:
Will AI take our jobs?
For young people in Kenya and across Africa, I think we're asking the wrong question.
The more important question is:
Will African youth have the skills, infrastructure, capital and opportunities to participate in the economy that AI is creating?
Because the employment challenge was already here.
The numbers were already difficult
Africa has one of the world's youngest populations, but that demographic advantage comes with an enormous responsibility.
In Eastern and Southern Africa alone, around 8 million young people enter the labor market every year, while fewer than 1 million secure waged employment.
Across the continent, the African Development Bank estimates that more than 12 million young people enter the labor market every year, while the private sector creates only around 3 million formal jobs annually.
So when a young Kenyan graduates and struggles to find work, the problem isn't necessarily that they aren't ambitious.
Sometimes there simply aren't enough opportunities being created at the rate people are entering the workforce.
And now the nature of work itself is changing.
Enter AI
AI is already changing how we write, code, analyze information, design products, provide customer support and run businesses.
For developers, this is particularly obvious.
Tasks that once took hours can now take minutes.
Prototyping is faster.
Documentation is faster.
Debugging can be faster.
Learning new technologies is becoming more accessible.
That sounds great.
And it is.
But there is another side.
If companies can accomplish more with smaller teams, some traditional entry-level opportunities may become harder to access.
That matters in Africa because entry-level employment is already one of our biggest challenges.
The solution, however, isn't to resist AI.
It is to make sure young people aren't only consumers of AI.
They need to become builders with AI.
From AI users to AI builders
There is a huge difference between knowing how to ask ChatGPT to write code and understanding how to build a reliable system using AI.
The latter requires fundamentals:
Programming.
Databases.
APIs.
Cybersecurity.
Data.
Cloud infrastructure.
Product thinking.
Communication.
Critical thinking.
And increasingly, understanding how AI systems actually work and where they fail.
This is why I don't think the future belongs exclusively to “AI engineers.”
It will belong to people who can combine AI with domain knowledge and real-world problem solving.
A farmer who understands AI.
A healthcare professional who understands data.
A designer who understands generative tools.
A developer who understands AI products.
A financial professional who understands blockchain.
A young entrepreneur who can use technology to reach customers beyond their local market.
That combination is powerful.
And then there's Web3
Web3 is another area where Africa's young population is already participating.
Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, making it one of the fastest-growing crypto regions globally. Kenya was among the region's significant markets.
But we should be careful about what we mean by “Web3.”
It shouldn't simply mean:
Buy a token → wait → become rich.
That isn't innovation.
The more interesting possibilities are around the underlying infrastructure:
- Cross-border payments
- Digital ownership
- Stable coins
- Decentralized applications
- Tokenization
- Digital identity
- Creator economies
- New financial infrastructure
For a continent where cross-border payments can still be expensive and complicated, these technologies deserve serious investigation.
But they also require serious regulation, education and consumer protection.
Crypto adoption without financial literacy can create opportunity.
It can also create vulnerability.
The real digital divide isn't just internet access anymore
For years, we talked about the digital divide as:
Who has internet access?
That question still matters.
But the next divide could be:
Who has access to AI infrastructure, computing power, quality data and the skills required to build with these technologies?
A recent World Bank discussion on Africa's digital transformation highlighted both the enormous opportunity and the risk that countries without the right foundations could fall further behind as AI adoption accelerates.
This is why simply telling young people to “learn AI” isn't enough.
What happens when someone has the motivation to learn but cannot afford reliable internet?
What happens when their university curriculum hasn't caught up?
What happens when they have the skills but no laptop powerful enough for the work?
What happens when they build something valuable but cannot access funding?
Skills matter. But ecosystems matter too.
Africa could build differently
There is a reason I remain optimistic.
Africa doesn't necessarily need to reproduce the exact technological path taken by Silicon Valley, Europe or Asia.
We can build for our own realities.
AI systems that understand African languages.
Fintech products designed around African payment behavior.
Agricultural technology built for smallholder farmers.
Healthcare tools designed for communities with limited resources.
Educational platforms that work on low-bandwidth connections.
Web3 infrastructure that addresses actual problems in remittances and cross-border commerce.
And software companies that sell globally while being built by African teams.
There are already examples of young Africans doing exactly this.
An ILO-supported AI hackathon in Kenya, for example, brought together young innovators who built solutions ranging from AI-powered agricultural tools to platforms aimed at improving access to online learning.
The African Development Bank and other institutions are also increasingly investing in digital skills, AI and entrepreneurship because the opportunity is becoming impossible to ignore.
So what should young Africans actually do?
I don't think the answer is to chase every new technology.
Today's buzzword might be AI.
Tomorrow it might be something else.
Instead, build foundations that survive technological cycles.
Learn how to solve problems.
Learn to code.
Learn how data works.
Learn how businesses work.
Learn how to communicate.
Learn how to use AI as leverage.
Understand blockchain without treating every token as an investment opportunity.
Build projects.
Contribute to open source.
Work with people outside your country.
Create products for problems you actually understand.
And most importantly:
Don't wait for someone to give you a job to start creating value.
That doesn't mean entrepreneurship is the answer to unemployment.
It means our definition of opportunity needs to expand.
A job is one form of economic participation.
Building a product is another.
Freelancing is another.
Open-source contribution is another.
Creating digital infrastructure is another.
Working remotely for a global company from Nairobi, Lagos, Accra or Kigali is another.
The internet has already made geography less important for certain kinds of work.
AI may accelerate that shift.
The question isn't whether Africa will use AI
We already are.
The question is whether Africa will primarily consume technology built elsewhere, or whether we will increasingly become the people building it.
That distinction matters.
Because Africa's youth aren't just the workforce of tomorrow.
We're the people who will decide what tomorrow's African technology looks like.
And perhaps the biggest opportunity isn't for AI to replace African workers.
Perhaps it's for African workers to use AI to become dramatically more productive, build globally competitive companies and solve problems that have been ignored for generations.
Africa has the people.
We have the creativity.
We have the problems worth solving.
Now we need to build the infrastructure, skills and ecosystems that allow that potential to become reality.
**The future isn't waiting for Africa.
We're already in it.**
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