The missing middle in Nigeria’s youth employment push

On the fifth floor of the ITF Building in Iponri, Surulere, guests at ALX’s Lagos office sat around tables, each group working through the same question. “Nigeria channels real money into preparing its young people for work, why does so little of it lead to sustainable jobs or new businesses?”

The gathering, a roundtable titled From Funding to Outcomes, brought together foundations, non-governmental organisations and development partners from across Nigeria. Its host, Ruby Igwe, Regional Manager for West and Central Africa at ALX, believes the answer sits in a stage of the process that rarely draws attention.

In her words, “There is real money going into youth skills and employability in this country, but too many programmes do not deliver the jobs and the change they promised. They rarely fail at the funding stage, because they lose their way in the middle, in how they are delivered, and that is the gap we want to close.”

That middle where that loss happens is where the work gets difficult. A programme can be funded, launched and publicised, and still fail to reach the young people it was designed for, or fail to carry them through to employment. Igwe argues that funders need partners who can manage that stretch between the cheque and the job.

The session was designed to be an interactive one, allowing attendees to trade pain points and possible solutions at their tables, and use the networking time to continue those exchanges.

Participants shared what is working in youth development and where programmes fall short, but the discussion also turned to young Nigerians themselves, their readiness to enroll on structured learning platforms, their motivation to study, and, in many cases, the absence of both.

During the session, ALX asked partners how to make its learning platform accessible to more young people. It is positioning itself as a technical, delivery and implementation partner for any organisation seeking to run youth programmes at scale, and it points to its record in Nigeria, where more than 150,000 young people have gone through its programmes.

Commenting further on the event, Igwe said, “We did not bring people from different sectors into one room by accident. No single organisation can solve this alone. When foundations, NGOs, development partners and implementers work together, we can reach far more young people than any of us could on our own, and we can build the capacity to serve them well.”

The proposition was direct for the funders in the room. Collaboration, in ALX’s view, would extend the reach of its work and increase its capacity alongside partners, so that the benefit reaches more young people.

ALX is part of the African Leadership Group, which has spent more than two decades widening access to opportunity for young Africans. ALX reports that 347,100 learners have graduated from its programmes across the continent and that 257,900 young people have moved into work. It counts 154,300 graduates in wage employment and 43,400 running businesses or freelancing, and says alumni entrepreneurs have created more than 60,000 jobs for others.

The platform’s support does not end when training does. Graduates have access to mentorship, and ALX runs regular grant readiness sessions to help them position themselves for funding opportunities.

The same emphasis on measurable results runs through ALX Enterprise, ALX’s business-to-business offering, which works with organisations across Africa to develop leaders, strengthen teams and build digital skills. Each engagement starts with a consultation on the client’s specific challenges, and results are measured against the change agreed at the outset.

Whether that collaboration takes shape will depend on what the partners around those tables do next, and this was framed as a question in Igwe’s next step.

She asked, “Our question to partners is simple. What is working, what is not, and how can we help? If you are funding young people, we want to make sure that funding ends in a job, a business or a career.”