Former President John Mahama has commended young Africans working in the fintech sector for developing solutions to issues that governments have grappled with for generations.
Speaking at the public-private business forum during the 9th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD IX) in Yokohama, Japan, on Thursday, Mahama emphasized that youth-led innovation is reshaping Africa’s economic landscape and providing lasting remedies to problems once deemed unsolvable.
“The youth form 60%. If you take the age category of between 16 and 35, they form 60% of Africa’s population. And so that’s not a demographic you can ignore. But aside from that, the world is changing, and it’s now a knowledge economy.” he stated.
Mahama noted that young Africans are gravitating toward unconventional industries and are spearheading progress in areas that governments have struggled to fully develop.
“The youth are interested in certain sectors that are not the traditional sectors, and so in the creatives, in the renewable energy space, even if they go for traditional sectors like agriculture, they are looking at agri tech and other knowledge-driven aspects of those traditional sectors.
“And so it is important to find where their interests are and invest in those sectors so that you can attract the youth to go into those sectors.”
He cited the explosive growth of fintech across Africa as a clear example of youth ingenuity.
“If you look at Africa in 2024, there was about an investment of 4.2 billion in startups, and a lot of that went into the biggest majority, about 45%, which went into fintechs.
“The fintech space is growing at an astronomical rate in Africa, and it’s mainly driven by smart, tech-savvy youth who have seen openings and are taking advantage of it. In all our countries, a change in the economic structure is happening.
“For instance, in Ghana, about in 2015 the services sector overtook agriculture and industry and manufacturing to become the largest sector in our economy. And that’s how it should be.”
Mahama shared a personal experience with a fintech startup that had resolved a persistent issue governments had long struggled to fix.
“For instance, if you take the fintechs, I met the fintech groups, and one of the interesting ones I found was an agri tech company, and it was solving a problem that we’ve been struggling with as government for many years, how to extend credit and support to farmers in order that they can increase productivity.
“And so we had a shot in the dark approach, distributing fertilizers, distributing inputs and so on and so forth, and you couldn’t tell who exactly those inputs were going to and whether you were getting value for money for those inputs. I mean, these young people set up the fintech.
“They set up a platform. They gave mobile phones to farmers. They distributed the agricultural inputs to the farmers based on their acreage and their need, and based on the fact that they had them on the platform, they could send credit to them by mobile money, and at the end of the farming season, go directly to the farmer and off-take the production. And that changed it completely.”
He said this breakthrough had transformed Ghana’s agricultural sector in ways that government programs had failed to achieve.
“The farmers are able to get a credit score now, and so you can see who’s creditworthy and who’s not. And so it’s changed the face of agriculture. It’s changing the face of agriculture in our country.”
Mahama also spotlighted other dynamic sectors—such as the creative industries, renewable energy, and digital startups—where young Africans are generating employment at a rate far exceeding that of traditional fields.
“Apart from that, the creative sector and youth startups are adding jobs faster than the traditional sectors. And so if you take the creatives, renewable energy and those spaces, they add about four jobs before you can create one job in agriculture or manufacturing.
“And so investing in that sector means that we can absorb more of the myriad of young people who are coming out of school. If we decide to concentrate on manufacturing and industry, Africa needs to turn up about 12 to 15 million jobs a year.
You cannot create that in manufacturing and industry and agriculture alone, but the rate at which the creatives and digital space add jobs is much faster than the traditional economy, so it’s a place that we must invest as governments in order that we can absorb more of the youth.”
He concluded with a cautionary note, stressing that Africa’s youthful population will only remain a strategic advantage if governments foster environments that support innovation and employment.
“We know that we say the youth bulge, or the huge youth population in Africa, is an advantage, but if we do not create enough jobs fast enough to absorb those young people coming out, then it will become a gunpowder keg and it could cost us.”
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