By Kibrom A. Abay, Meseret Wondale, Josphat K. Korir, Fantu Bachewe, Mesele Araya, Clemens Breisinger and Audrey Lulu Mandi

Key takeaways:

• The popular story that young Africans are abandoning agriculture “in droves” does not hold up. Across Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria, youth remain engaged in farming almost as much as adults.

• Labour is moving out of agriculture, but mostly into services rather than industry — an unusual path that breaks with how today’s richer economies developed.

• The shift looks different for young women and young men, raising questions about who actually gains from the transformation underway.

This post is based on research that is not yet peer reviewed.

There is a story about young people and farming in Africa that gets told so often it has hardened into common sense. It goes like this: the continent’s youth, restless and ambitious, are walking away from agriculture as fast as their legs will carry them, leaving the fields to their parents and grandparents. It is a tidy narrative. It fits our intuitions about young people everywhere. And according to a new study that tracks more than two decades of labour data, it is mostly wrong.

The study examines Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria, three countries that together are home to around 40% of Africa’s young people. It draws on nationally representative surveys stretching from the 1990s to the 2020s, which is what makes it unusual. Structural change in an economy is a slow business, the work of decades, and most research on African youth has only ever taken short snapshots. This study examines the film rather than the photograph. And the film tells a more interesting, more complicated story than the headline version.

The Myth and What the Data Actually Reveals

Let’s begin with the central claim about youth leaving agriculture. Researchers have compared the rates at which young individuals (defined here as those aged 15 to 35) leave the farming sector to those of older adults. The findings may be disappointing for proponents of the “droves” narrative: both groups are exiting at approximately the same rate. Young people are not rushing to leave while their older counterparts remain. Instead, everyone is gradually moving in the same direction at a similar pace.

There is one partial exception, and it is a revealing one. In Ethiopia, youth are leaving agriculture slightly faster than adults. But even there, the gap is modest, something like 0.8 percentage points a year for youth against 0.5 for adults. That is a nudge, not an exodus. And the likely reason is less about youthful wanderlust than about something far more practical: in Ethiopia, young people increasingly struggle to get land of their own. When you cannot inherit or access a plot, leaving is not a choice so much as a lack of one.

So the first correction the study offers is this. Agriculture has not been abandoned by the young. It remains, across all three countries, a central part of how young people make a living. Any policy built on the assumption that youth have already given up on farming is building on sand.

A transformation, yes — but not the one the textbooks describe

This is not to say nothing is changing. Labour genuinely is moving out of agriculture. The question is where it goes, and here the African story diverges sharply from the familiar one.

In the classic account of economic development, as written in the histories of Europe, North America, and later East Asia, workers leave farms and go to factories. Industry absorbs them, productivity climbs, wages rise, and a country hauls itself up the income ladder. It is the path from field to factory floor.

Africa is not walking that path. In all three countries studied, workers leaving agriculture are moving overwhelmingly into services rather than industry. Manufacturing, the engine in the textbook version, is largely stuck. In Ethiopia, industry’s share of employment barely moved in two decades, hovering between 6% and 8%. In Nigeria, industrial employment actually rose and then fell back. The factories that were supposed to catch the workers leaving the land have, for the most part, not been built.

Economists have a slightly awkward name for this: “structural transformation without industrialisation.” A country reorganises its economy, but skips the industrial chapter. And the worry is straightforward. A great deal of the service work absorbing these workers is not the high-productivity, high-wage kind, but rather banking, logistics, and tradable digital services. It is petty trade, small-scale retail, the selling of goods in markets and on roadsides. Work, certainly. But not the kind that reliably lifts a whole economy’s productivity and incomes the way a factory job historically did.

The three countries sit at different points on this road. Ethiopia is still early, heavily agricultural, with services only beginning to attract young workers. Kenya is further along, with agriculture and services more evenly balanced, with even a small but real rise in industrial jobs. Nigeria began service-heavy and has only leaned further that way, with agriculture now a secondary employer. Same broad direction, three different stages, and a useful reminder that “Africa” is never one story.

The quieter finding: it is not the same for young women and young men

Underneath the headline numbers sits a pattern that deserves more attention than it usually gets. The transformation is not gender-neutral.

In Ethiopia and Kenya, young women and young men are moving in subtly different directions. Young women are leaving agriculture and, in particular, heading into services. Young men are also entering the workforce, but they have a clearer advantage when it comes to better-regarded jobs in industry. The doors that open are not quite the same doors, depending on who is walking through them.

This matters because services and industry are not interchangeable. If young men are more likely to land the relatively higher-productivity industrial jobs while young women are channelled into lower-paid service work, then the transformation is quietly building inequality into the next generation’s economy. A shift that looks neutral in the aggregate can be anything but, once you separate out who ends up where.

There is also a stubborn gap that sits behind all of this. Across all three countries, young people, especially young women, participate in the labour force at lower and more volatile rates than adults. In Kenya, young women’s participation barely shifted across the entire survey period, hovering around half. The reasons are familiar and structural: too few jobs to begin with, a mismatch between the skills young people have and those employers want, little access to the capital needed to start something of their own, and, for many young women, the competing demands of early marriage and caregiving responsibilities.

Why “agriculture is not finished” is the most useful conclusion

It would be easy to read all this as a gloomy story. It need not be. The study’s most practical message is also its most hopeful one: because young people have not abandoned agriculture, the sector remains one of the most realistic places to create dignified and fulfilling work for them.

The authors point in three directions. The first is to strengthen the wider food system, not just farming itself, but everything around it: processing, storage and cold chains, transport, aggregation, and quality control. These activities create jobs that are close to where young people already live, and they sit at the productive end of the service sector rather than the petty-trade end. The second is to help service work climb the value ladder, easing young people into the genuinely modern, tradable services, logistics, digital business services, tourism, that can lift productivity rather than just absorb labour. The third is to address the constraints that hold young people back across sectors: access to land, access to capital, and a stable, predictable policy environment.

The deeper point is a correction of emphasis. Africa’s youth employment challenge has often been framed as a problem of young people in the wrong place, clinging to a dying sector they ought to leave. The evidence here suggests the opposite. They have not been clinging, and agriculture is not dying. The task is not to push young people off the farm. It is to make the farm, and the long chain of activity that runs from it to the dinner plate, a place where a young person can build a genuine livelihood. That is a more modest ambition than waiting for an industrial revolution that may not arrive. It is also much more achievable.

Kibrom A. Abay is a Senior Research Fellow in the Development Strategies and Governance (DSG) Unit of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Meseret Wondale and Josphat K. Korir are Research Officers, and Fantu Bachewe is a Research Coordinator, in IFPRI’s DSG Unit. Mesele Araya is Country Economist at the International Growth Centre, Ethiopia. Clemens Breisinger is Director of the CGIAR Science Program on Policy Innovations.

This post is based on research that is not yet peer reviewed. The opinions expressed are those of the authors.

Reference: Abay, K. A., Wondale, M., Korir, J. K., Bachewe, F., Araya, M., and Breisinger, C. 2025. The Landscape of Youth Engagement in Labor Markets in Africa: Are Youth Driving Structural Transformation? IFPRI Discussion Paper 02382. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/178454.