The missing infrastructure for Africa's young workforce.
What Mastercard Foundation helped build — and what scale can now unlock.
EMERGE · Delivered by TheBoardroom Africa
Africa's youth potential is not a side issue. It will determine the continent's future.
Africa is home to the world's fastest-growing generation of young talent. The choices made now will determine whether that demographic reality becomes shared prosperity — or deepens exclusion, insecurity and underemployment.
Source: Mastercard Foundation, Africa Youth Employment Outlook 2026.
More young people must enter work — and the work they enter must lead somewhere.
Africa needs many more pathways into employment and self-employment. At the same time, young people who do enter work need reliable income, dignity, growth and a route to progression. Young Africa Works requires both access to work and better outcomes through work.
Reliable income
Income that meets needs or grows meaningfully over previous work.
Respect
Work where young people are valued, treated with dignity and able to contribute.
Purpose
Work that offers accomplishment, growth and a sense of direction.
Reputation
Work that is honest, valued and recognised by society.
The goal is not only more young people in work. It is more young people in dignified, fulfilling work that can grow with them.
African talent is not scarce. The system around it is.
Capability is too often obscured by pedigree, geography, limited networks and credentials that do not reveal what a person can actually do.
Fragmented development
Learning, mentoring, networks and opportunities exist in disconnected pieces.
Unequal access
Sponsorship, insight and professional networks are distributed by luck and proximity.
Weak signals
Employers struggle to see readiness, adaptability and potential beyond credentials.
Stalled progression
Support improves performance in the current role but rarely creates a route to what comes next.
This is not simply a skills gap. It is an infrastructure gap.
Transitions do not end when a young person gets a first job.
The journey into sustainable livelihoods continues through capability, visibility, mobility and progression.
A programme has become pan-African career infrastructure.
With Mastercard Foundation support, TheBoardroom Africa has built and launched an integrated platform that brings together what young professionals otherwise have to assemble alone.
Develop
Structured learning, leadership assessment and practical tools shaped around each member's progression.
Connect
Executive access, peer networks, sector exposure and a continent-wide professional community.
Progress
Professional profiles, evidence of capability and multiple pathways into work, income and progression.
Not a job board. Not a training programme. A 360° career progression platform.
Most interventions solve one moment in a young person's journey. EMERGE connects the full progression pathway in one continuous system.
Job boards
Make vacancies visible, but do not build readiness, trusted signals, networks or sustained follow-through.
Training programmes
Build skills and knowledge, but often stop before opportunity access, career navigation and progression.
Mentoring programmes
Provide advice and exposure, but rarely combine scale, structured development and labour-market pathways.
Recruitment platforms
Support hiring transactions, but not the young person's long-term capability, mobility and career sustainability.
Every layer is designed to remove a barrier to progression.
The programming is not content for content's sake. It is designed to change how young people understand themselves, perform at work, navigate opportunity and become visible to the people and systems that shape advancement.
Assess
The Leadership Compass creates an evidence-based baseline of strengths, development areas and readiness.
Early signal: 274 assessments completed.
Develop
Practical programming builds capability in leadership, strategy, finance, conflict, visibility and organisational navigation.
Early signal: around 60% cite a tool now in use at work.
Connect
Executive and peer connections democratise access to insight, networks, sponsorship and sector exposure.
Early signal: 80 executive matches; 79% live-programme participation.
Progress
Professional profiles, evidence of capability and opportunity pathways convert growth into mobility, income and advancement.
Early signal: 47% took ownership of something previously avoided; 39% navigated a difficult conversation better.
Young professionals are already choosing the model.
Demand is not being manufactured. It is already here.
The infrastructure is changing how members show up at work.
have attended a live session, masterclass or event.
cite a specific tool or concept now in use at work.
report at least one behavioural shift since joining.
Voice
Speaking up, contributing to strategy and navigating difficult conversations.
Agency
Moving from waiting to be noticed to managing visibility and opportunity deliberately.
Direction
Using assessment and reflection to make more intentional career decisions.
Employers are not only hiring from EMERGE. They are using it to develop the people they already have.
Enrol a cohort
Employers nominate eligible employees into a dedicated, branded pathway.
Develop at scale
Employees access the full learning, mentoring and community experience.
See aggregate progress
Employers gain evidence for development, succession and retention.
Hire what comes next
The same platform opens structured access to a curated pan-African talent pool.
Telecel Ghana
90+ employees enrolled through a formal employer cohort, with dedicated onboarding, aggregate reporting and organisational finance programming.
Additional employer conversations include financial services, investment and technology organisations. Logos and names should remain examples of traction, not the centre of the story.
EMERGE has exceeded its first Youth in Work target.
young people have already achieved qualifying work or income advancement outcomes against a grant target of 50.
What counts
Verified new roles, promotions, income increases, consulting or freelance work, entrepreneurship or business growth, and other qualifying outcomes aligned to the Foundation's Youth in Work framework.
The first phase proves that the model can generate outcomes — and has built the technology, data, community and delivery infrastructure with scale in mind. The next phase must prove that it can generate them at scale.
Scale is a throughput challenge: move more young people through a stronger pathway to verified work outcomes.
The platform is already built. The next phase increases the number of young people reached, the depth of their activation, the volume of real employer and opportunity demand, and the rate at which those pathways convert into dignified and fulfilling work.
Reach inclusively
Bring more young people, especially those historically excluded, into one pan-African opportunity infrastructure.
Activate deeply
Move members into assessment, learning, networks, profiles and personalised progression pathways.
Open more routes
Create pathways into jobs, promotions, better income, consulting, enterprise and other forms of sustainable work.
Convert and verify
Support transitions, verify outcomes and track whether the work is reliable, respectful, purposeful and valued.
Five youth-centred levers turn the infrastructure into work, income and progression.
Inclusive reach
Recruit beyond traditional networks and deliberately reach women, refugees, displaced people, persons with disabilities and other excluded groups.
Personalised activation
Use assessment, member data and guided pathways to move people from registration into meaningful participation.
Capability + agency
Build practical capability, confidence, networks and credible evidence of what each person can do.
Multiple routes to work
Connect members to jobs, progression, income growth, consulting, enterprise and sector opportunities through a broader ecosystem.
Quality + persistence
Verify outcomes and continue supporting young people so entry into work becomes sustained career mobility.
One platform. Three strategic entry points.
Systems change at scale
African-led infrastructure operating across markets, strengthening institutions and converting large-scale participation into meaningful economic opportunity.
Outcome lens: scale, cost per outcome, multi-country reach, employer demand and Youth in Work volume.
A better-functioning labour market
Capability development connected to trusted signals, employer access, mobility and progression — not training in isolation.
Outcome lens: readiness, productivity, income growth, retention, mobility and work quality.
Beyond first work
Wraparound infrastructure that helps young people enter, navigate and progress through work into sustainable livelihoods.
Outcome lens: transition, persistence, progression, confidence, networks and sustainable careers.
The infrastructure can support a materially larger Youth in Work ambition.
These are concrete planning cases for discussion. The final target should be co-designed against the grant envelope, priority markets and verified cost per outcome.
Focused scale
young people reached
deeply activated
verified Youth in Work outcomes
Recommended scale
young people reached
deeply activated
verified Youth in Work outcomes
Pan-African expansion
young people reached
deeply activated
verified Youth in Work outcomes
The strongest evidence is what changes in a young person's sense of possibility.
Kumbuka Masitchwe
Founder & Director, Hope of the Hopeless
Mary Wamaitha
Strategy, Policy and Delivery Associate, Tony Blair Institute
EMERGE is built to find potential that traditional systems overlook.
Inclusion is not a participation statistic added at the end. It shapes how members are reached, admitted, supported, made visible and connected to opportunity.
Who the platform is already reaching
Where the model goes next
We are moving from demographic inclusion to design inclusion: understanding the barriers that affect progression and adapting the platform around them.
EMERGE is exploring a partnership with the Africa Dyslexia Organisation to understand how neurodivergence shapes career progression, and is planning a study to build evidence and inform more inclusive pathway design.
The infrastructure is built. The evidence is converting. This is the moment to scale — not pause.
What the first grant built
Technology, a curated community, programming, employer architecture, talent screening, safeguarding, governance and outcomes measurement.
What the next grant unlocks
Activation, employer expansion, opportunity conversion, longitudinal evidence and materially larger Youth in Work outcomes.
A funding break would interrupt momentum precisely when platform adoption, employer demand and verified outcomes are beginning to converge.
This is not an argument for sustaining activity. It is an argument for realising the return on infrastructure already financed.
Partner with us to turn a proven African career platform into a measurable engine for dignified and fulfilling work.
Scale the model
Expand across Africa through technology, employer partnerships and a repeatable member journey.
Co-design the target
Agree an ambitious Youth in Work goal, conversion assumptions and cost-per-outcome pathway.
Deepen inclusion
Design for young people historically excluded by gender, displacement, disability, geography, neurodivergence and limited access to professional networks.
Build shared infrastructure
Make EMERGE available to employers, implementing partners and the wider Mastercard Foundation ecosystem.
Everything changes when youth potential is unlocked.
For the individual. For the employer. For the economy. For the generations that follow.
We are building the conditions through which Africa's young people can thrive — and, through them, a continent that thrives.