The African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD) has set out plans for a Continental Centre of Excellence for Human Capital and Institutional Development, to be hosted in Kenya, positioning it as the agency’s central answer to one of the continent’s most pressing economic problems: the widening gap between the millions of young Africans entering the workforce each year and the far smaller number of jobs and opportunities available to them.
The proposal was placed at the heart of the inaugural AUDA-NEPAD Human Capital, Social and Institutional Development Week, which opened in Nairobi on 11 August 2026. Framing the initiative, AUDA-NEPAD Chief Executive Officer H.E. Ms Nardos Bekele-Thomas was emphatic that the Centre is intended to be an engine of delivery rather than another layer of bureaucracy.
“Not another institution. A platform for execution,” she told delegates, describing a body designed to help member states move “from research to application, policy to implementation, successful experience to scale, and knowledge to investment.”
The Centre, centred on industrial adaptation for development, is envisaged as a hub connecting governments, universities, industry and development partners around the specific capabilities Africa needs to industrialise and compete. Crucially, Bekele-Thomas argued, it should make South-South Cooperation “practical, measurable and scalable” rather than confining it to dialogue and study visits.
A demographic dividend that must be built
The urgency behind the initiative is rooted in stark arithmetic. Each year, approximately 12 million young Africans enter the labour market, while the continent’s formal economies create only around 3 million jobs. Bekele-Thomas was clear that this is not merely an employment problem.
“That gap is not simply an employment challenge,” she said. “It is an economic and development challenge.”
Closing it, she argued, requires far more than training young people. It demands economies that produce, enterprises that grow, investment that creates opportunity, and institutions capable of delivering at scale — all against a backdrop of rapid change, as technology, automation, climate pressures and new production systems reshape the global economy and the capabilities countries need to compete.
Africa’s demographic dividend, she cautioned, cannot be assumed. “It has to be built” — through health, education, skills, technology, productive sectors and capable institutions. It is on this basis, she said, that human capital must sit at the centre of economic policy: “People are the productive capacity of an economy.” But none of these elements works in isolation. As she put it, “Skills without opportunity will not transform economies. Investment without capability will not deliver. Policy without institutions remains ambition on paper.”
Stronger institutions, stronger delivery
AUDA-NEPAD’s case for the Centre rests partly on its own record. Since 2022, the agency says stronger systems, accountability and implementation capability have helped grow its programme portfolio from below $30 million to more than $350 million, mobilise a further $250 million in project financing, and sustain budget execution above 90%. It has also become the only African Union institution to pass the European Union’s Nine-Pillar Assessment.
“Stronger institutions produce stronger delivery,” Bekele-Thomas said, casting these figures as evidence of a principle rather than a set of milestones.
That same logic, she said, now guides the agency’s human-capital work. Its Human Capital, Social and Institutional Development portfolio today comprises 26 programmes reaching all 55 African Union member states. Yet programme growth, she insisted, is not the objective — “system change is.” That means education aligned with demand, skills linked to work, health systems that enable participation, innovation that strengthens enterprise, and institutions that deliver results. “We cannot train for yesterday and expect to compete in tomorrow’s economy,” she warned.
A continental market that needs capability
The stakes rise further, she noted, as Africa builds a larger and more integrated market through the African Continental Free Trade Area — a market of more than 1.5 billion people. But market access alone, Bekele-Thomas argued, will not transform economies: the continent needs the skills to produce, the qualifications to move, the enterprises to compete and the institutions to make a continental market work.
To that end, AUDA-NEPAD is strengthening the link between skills, labour-market demand and productive work. Through the Skills Initiative for Africa, approximately $120 million has been mobilised for 48 projects across eight countries, while programmes such as Energize Africa and the Africa Critical Skills Bank aim to strengthen entrepreneurship and labour-market intelligence so that capabilities translate into opportunity.
Human capital, however, cannot stop at skills and employment. “People cannot contribute fully to an economy if they are unhealthy, excluded or vulnerable,” Bekele-Thomas said, pointing to the agency’s parallel work on medicines regulation, social protection, inclusion, public-sector capability and digitally enabled institutions.
Sharing what works
A recurring theme in the CEO’s address was that Africa cannot build these systems in isolation. Across the continent and the wider Global South, countries have accumulated valuable experience in skills development, digital government, health systems, industrialisation, public-sector reform and youth employment. “We should not be reinventing solutions that already exist,” she said. “Solutions that work should be adapted, shared and scaled.”
This, she argued, is the kind of South-South Cooperation Africa actually needs — one that delivers technology transfer, skills mobility, joint research, institutional partnerships, co-investment and implementation. It is also why she pressed for Africa to move beyond consuming technologies developed elsewhere. As artificial intelligence, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing and green technologies redefine production and competitiveness, she said, “we must build the capability to shape them, apply them and create value from them” — by investing in African scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, researchers and skilled workers, and in the institutions that govern technological change.
From ambition to delivery
Bekele-Thomas was candid that the Week’s value would be judged by results. It should, she said, help move from discussion to clearer priorities and practical next steps, leaving Nairobi “better aligned on what needs to be done, who will do it, and how we will follow through.”
Each constituency, she added, has a part to play: member states must place human capital at the centre of economic planning; the private sector must help define future capabilities and create the opportunities to use them; universities and research institutions must connect knowledge more directly to Africa’s productive economy; and development partners must invest not only in projects but in the African institutions that will sustain results over the long term.
For AUDA-NEPAD itself, she said, the responsibility is clear: “to close the distance between Africa’s ambition and Africa’s delivery” — young Africans moving from learning to earning, institutions from policy to delivery, knowledge from research to application, and partnerships from goodwill to measurable impact.
The conversation will continue in Accra, Ghana, from 9 to 12 December 2026, through AFESTACC and Industrial Skills Week Africa 2026. But the work, Bekele-Thomas said, begins in Nairobi, with the choices delegates make and the commitments they carry forward.
“Africa’s young people are not waiting for the future. They are ready to build it,” she said. If the continent can give them the systems, institutions and opportunities to turn their energy into productive power, she concluded, its demographic future “will not be a risk to manage” but “the generation that drives Africa’s transformation.”