Young Africans’ migration crisis: To re-risk or de-risk?
Dr. Joachim Adenusi
Every day, Africa’s greatest asset — its young people — board boats, cross deserts, and risk everything for a future they believe cannot exist at home. Nearly 22,000 migrants have died or gone missing on the Central Mediterranean route since 2014, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
This is not just migration; this is a haemorrhaging of hope, talent, and the continent’s tomorrow. As global powers quietly benefit from Africa’s educated youth, a question demands urgent attention: Should African leaders embrace opportunity risk (re-risk) to innovate and compete globally, or minimise threat risk (de-risk) to protect what remains?
The historical context reveals disturbing parallels to colonial exploitation. Colonisation came through force, promises of superior education and modernity; it displaced productive Africans and created lasting inferiority complexes that persist today. (Today, Africa’s creative industries is proving the continent’s unique value to the world.)
Modern “colonisation” operates more subtly through programmes like Australia’s General Skilled Migration, the UK’s Global Talent visa, Canada’s skilled worker pathways, and similar initiatives in the US, UAE, and Netherlands. These nations systematically attract African talent, de-risking their own skill shortages by drawing from Africa’s human capital investments without contributing to their development.
Youth migration or “Japa” phenomenon represents Africa’s most urgent crisis. Young Africans, seeing limited opportunities at home, seek dignity and meaningful work abroad. The global North benefits from African professionals without investing in their education or development, creating a vicious cycle that impoverishes the continent’s future. Brain drain has already created havoc across Africa, with Nigeria alone losing thousands of doctors, engineers, and innovators — professionals whose skills could transform healthcare, infrastructure, and technology at home.
Africa needs intelligent risk management combining both re-risking and de-risking strategies. Re-risking elements include setting clear human capital goals, fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, aligning education with future technological demands, and preparing for rapid global economic changes.
De-risking elements involve creating competitive, secure jobs locally, providing dignified employment to prevent modern slavery, building stable societies that retain talent, and ensuring social protection for workers. African human resources’ future does not require choosing between these approaches but rather intelligently managing both to equip Africans with future-ready skills while retaining home-grown talent.
African nations must establish trackable objectives with clear performance indicators that transform human capital management into critical political priorities. These objectives should be incorporated into national development plans, annual budgets, and performance contracts with ministers, governors, and local leaders. For example, they must prioritise workforce resilience through comprehensive skills gap analysis, tracking quarterly changes in current versus future workforce requirements.
Education and training reform becomes essential, measured through graduates securing high-skill jobs and ensuring educational alignment with evolving market demands and technological advancement. Talent retention and empowerment strategies must make countries attractive to their own professionals, reducing skilled migration while increasing local high-paying opportunities. Balancing innovation with security enables entrepreneurial growth through new startup creation, while protecting workers via comprehensive social protection coverage, creating sustainable competitive advantages from Africa’s human capital.
With over 60% of Africa’s population under 25, young Africans are both the largest stakeholders and the biggest victims of failed human capital policies. They suffer most from poor education, joblessness, and brain drain, yet will inherit whatever institutions current leaders build or fail to build. Silence of young people allow leaders to escape responsibility, but through organising, speaking up, and voting, they can reorient priorities toward human capital and the future.
Young people must demand accountability through publishing national scorecards and quarterly progress reports, parliamentary oversight questioning ministers about results, media and civil society monitoring and exposing failures, international benchmarking using SDGs and Human Capital Index, and setting performance contracts with clear consequences for underperformance.
Young people must mobilise through social media, civic movements, and elections to keep leaders focused on people over power, demanding transparency and progress on human capital indicators while holding leaders to their campaign promises and policy commitments.
One observer has noted: “When the best of Africa is leaving, when young people risk their lives crossing deserts and seas, when others profit from African professionals, and when leaders fail to prepare for the future — it is not just an economic risk, but a moral and existential crisis. To de-risk is to secure Africa’s human dignity and future prosperity.”
Africa stands at a precipice where every talented young person who leaves represents not just individual loss, but the systematic dismantling of the continent’s future. This crisis has already created havoc across Africa and Nigeria specifically, with entire sectors struggling from professional shortages while international competitors benefit from African expertise.
The time for half-measures and political rhetoric has passed. If Africa’s youth do not hold their leaders accountable now, they risk inheriting broken systems, empty universities, and economies dependent on raw material exports. But if they act, (demanding measurable progress and genuine commitment to development) they can create a future where Africa’s potential is realised at home.
The choice is binary and urgent: Transform Africa’s demographic dividend into global competitive advantage or watch the continent’s future board the next boat to Europe. Consequences of inaction are already visible: crowded lecture halls without lecturers, crowded hospitals with overstretched staff, and the tears of mothers watching their children disappear into the desert, chasing dreams that should have been possible at home.
