Reflections on Seven Years of Implementation and Learning
The Mastercard Foundation marks 20 years of work alongside partners and young people this year. Seven of those years have been spent implementing Young Africa Works, our strategy to enable 30 million young Africans, 70 percent of them young women, to access dignified and fulfilling work by 2030.
This brief is a shared reflection on what it takes to expand access to dignified and fulfilling work at scale. Seven years of implementation offer a useful vantage point: far enough along for patterns to have become visible, and early enough for those patterns to inform the years ahead.
This is not the full account of what Young Africa Works has achieved. That will come later this year in the Foundation’s first Young Africa Works Impact Report, which will draw on our Program Outcome Assessment, a large-scale review of outcomes for young people reached through Young Africa Works. The assessment will also include findings from conversations with over 200,000 young people about their journeys toward work.
What we offer here, ahead of that report, is the learning behind the numbers: how we have come to understand dignified and fulfilling work, how we assess it, and what seven years of implementation have revealed about young people, the systems around them, and the conditions that make progress more likely to endure.
This brief discusses the importance of dignified and fulfilling work, how we understand impact, what seven years of implementation have shown us, what this means for those working on youth livelihoods, and a look ahead as we continue the work.
Supporting young people in Africa to access dignified and fulfilling work is not only a delivery challenge. It is a systems and partnership challenge. Young people are asking more of work than conventional measures often capture, and implementation requires more than any single actor can deliver. This brief is an invitation to act on both.
Why dignified and fulfilling work matters
Africa’s youth population is the largest and fastest growing in the world. By the end of this decade, the continent will be home to the majority of the world’s young people entering working age. Whether those young people can find work that allows them to build a life, support a family, contribute to their communities and broader society, and strengthen their economies is a defining question of our time.
The conventional response to that question has often focused on counting jobs and tracking employment rates. Those measures remain important, but they do not fully answer questions that young people are asking about work and livelihoods. Consider a young woman running a small tailoring business in Kampala, Uganda. She is earning income, but often below the minimum living standard, while working long hours in uncertain conditions. Most standard frameworks would count her as employed. Our approach asks a further question: whether the work offers her a pathway toward stability, recognition, growth, and a sense of purpose.
The Foundation believes that Africa’s youth livelihoods agenda cannot be understood through employment numbers alone. Dignified and fulfilling work is a complementary measure that builds on employment data by asking whether the work is meaningful and sustainable from the perspective of young people themselves.
When the Foundation initiated the Young Africa Works strategy, we engaged directly with young people to understand what mattered most to them in accessing work. What emerged consistently was that young people did not separate income from dignity. For many young people, the question was not simply whether work existed, but whether it created the conditions to imagine and sustain a different future.
Dignified and fulfilling work, understood this way, is a more demanding standard than employment alone. It asks whether a young person has work they can build a life around, and whether the systems around them – households, communities, employers, institutions – are able to sustain that work overtime.
Getting this right matters. Without a fuller understanding of dignified and fulfilling work, we risk measuring progress that young people themselves do not experience as progress. We also risk overlooking the systems that shape access to work. Labour markets, financial services, education systems, and social norms were not built with this generation of young Africans in mind, and they will not adjust on their own. The scale of what is required, across a continent of 54 countries and over a billion people, cannot be met by any single actor. It demands shared language about what counts as progress, shared responsibility for strengthening the conditions that enable dignified and fulfilling work, and shared accountability to young people themselves.
How we think about impact and assess dignified and fulfilling work
At the Mastercard Foundation, impact is understood as the sustained improvements in the quality of life of young Africans, the broader socio-economic effects for their families and communities, and the overall health of the systems around them.
At its core, this means understanding whether young people are increasingly able to live lives marked by stability, agency, opportunity, and hope, and whether the systems around them are becoming more capable of sustaining those conditions over time.
This reflects a broader recognition that participation in a program, on its own, does not necessarily translate into meaningful improvements in a young person’s life. For the Foundation, impact means real and lasting change in how young women and men live, and in the effects that flow into households, communities, and economies. Understanding what drives that change, and who contributes to it, is where our approach to measurement begins.
The Foundation’s role in enabling access to dignified and fulfilling work
Young people to work and entrepreneurship opportunities, while also supporting the systems, institutions, and market conditions that make those opportunities more sustainable, inclusive, and meaningful over time.
This contribution is not limited to direct support for individual young people. It also includes working with partners to strengthen the conditions that determine whether opportunity becomes dignified and fulfilling work.
Three levels of change
Progress in young people’s lives depends on movement at three interconnected levels: I. Individual II. Households and Communities III. Institutions and Systems
Around individuals are households and communities. When a young woman earns a reliable income, whether that changes her life depends heavily on whether her household supports her decisions and whether the people around her recognize her economic participation as legitimate. Individual progress without that surrounding environment is fragile. In turn, when a young person accesses dignified and fulfilling work, the effects can flow into their family and community.
Beyond this are the institutions and systems that shape who gets trained, who accesses finance, who enters markets, and on what terms. When these systems are designed with young people in mind, especially young women and those excluded by conflict, poverty, or disability, individual effort is more likely to translate into something lasting.
Each level shapes the others. A policy shift can open a door that no training program could, while a household norm can close one. Progress at any single level rarely holds without movement in the others. Measuring whether that movement is real, and what it means for individual young people, requires a definition of success that goes beyond employment figures and earnings alone.
What we mean by dignified and fulfilling work
Dignified and fulfilling work is a complementary framework that sits alongside conventional labour market and
employment measures, helping to capture dimensions of work quality and lived experience that young people
themselves consistently identified as important.
This understanding emerged from direct conversations with over 4,000 young people in Ghana, Kenya, Uganda,
and Senegal in 2018. It was further reaffirmed through baseline studies completed between 2021 and 2023, which
drew on engagement with approximately 70,000 young people across Africa. We asked young people what good
work meant to them, and from those conversations, we built an assessment system around four markers.
A young person is accessing dignified and fulfilling work when they have reliable income and meet at least one of the three additional markers. Together, these markers provide a fuller understanding of whether work is improving young people’s quality of life.
A progression, not a moment
We have come to understand that access to dignified and fulfilling work is not a single moment in a young person’s life. It is a progression shaped by opportunity, stability, setbacks, resilience, and the systems surrounding them. Young people move toward and away from different dimensions of dignified and fulfilling work over time as their circumstances change.
For many young people, the journey begins through work-enabling opportunities such as skilling, enterprise support, access to finance, work placements, or market linkages. These opportunities matter, but participation in related programs alone does not mean a young person is in work. Under the Foundation’s Youth-in-Work metric, a young person is considered in work when they begin earning income from new or additional work, or when they sustain existing work despite a shock such as conflict, a pandemic, or a family crisis.
Accessing such work is an important step, but it does not automatically translate into dignified and fulfilling work. Young people often move gradually toward greater income reliability, stability, confidence, recognition, and purpose as they acquire skills and experience and navigate changing labour markets and life conditions.
When a young person earns reliable income and attains at least one of the additional markers, (respect, reputable work, and a sense of purpose) they are accessing dignified and fulfilling work. When they are working and earning and feel that one of those markers describes their experience, but their income is not yet reliable, we describe them as progressing toward dignified and fulfilling work.
These are point-in-time assessments. They reflect where a young person is at the moment they are asked about their standing, not where they will be or where they were. What we look for is whether the support a young person has strengthened their ability to keep moving toward reliable income and the other markers, even when circumstances push back.
These distinctions matter because they allow us to do more than count outcomes. By tracking where young people are along this progression we can assess whether our programs are genuinely building the conditions for dignified and fulfilling work, identify where approaches need to be strengthened, and course correct when results fall short of what young people need. At the same time, holding ourselves to a definition this specific means we cannot mistake activity for impact. It keeps us accountable to the young people whose progress this work is meant to serve.
Anchored in what young people say
The core principle is that the designation of accessing dignified and fulfilling work rests with the young person. Young people defined this approach, and they are the only ones who confirm whether it applies to their own lives.
Building a framework capable of tracking this kind of change, across different systems and contexts, while staying centred on what young people report, took time. Our Shared Measures Framework was built through multiple iterations, and it continues to evolve.10 Measures alone are not enough. Young people have told us, repeatedly and clearly, that they are not numbers. The Foundation has invested in storytelling approaches that capture what young people say about their own lives, in their own words.
Contribution, not attribution
Young Africa Works operates inside systems that no single organization controls. Governments, education systems, financial institutions, markets, families, communities, and the social norms they carry all shape the conditions in which young people seek work. Change in those systems comes through the efforts of many actors over many years.
Rather than claim that outcomes result directly from our work, we ask where our contributions open doors or shift conditions in ways that make progress more likely. We ask about contribution. It is a more complex question to answer than counting reach, and a more meaningful one.
What seven years of implementation have shown us
Seven years of implementation of our Young Africa Works strategy across multiple countries, sectors, and partnerships have surfaced recurring patterns about how young people navigate livelihoods, the barriers they face, and the conditions that make progress more likely to hold over time. The insights below are not a full account of impact. They are the patterns that have most shaped our understanding of what it takes to enable dignified and fulfilling work.
1. Young people are not waiting to be helped. They are making considered choices in difficult conditions.
One of the most consistent and unexpected findings was how rational and strategic young people’s choices were, even when those choices looked, from the outside, like limits on ambition. In Ghana, young people managed multiple small income streams not because they lacked ambition but because single-source income felt too exposed. In Kenya, young women often chose lower but predictable earnings over higher uncertain ones. What mattered was not just earning, it was the ability to plan around what they earned. Progress for young people is shaped by risk as much as by opportunity, and effective support has to be designed around the choices young people make to manage both.
2. Income matters, but it does not tell the whole story.
Across thousands of conversations, young people described safety, dignity, and the recognition of family and community as inseparable from the question of good work. Young women described care burdens and mobility constraints as barriers as real as the absence of skills. Young men described networks too thin to carry their ambitions anywhere. Approaches that focused only on income often missed the surrounding conditions that determine whether progress becomes sustainable.
3. Reaching young women requires designing for them, not only including them.
From the beginning, Young Africa Works set out for 70 percent of the young people we reached to be young women. This was a design principle in place before the strategy launched, and what implementation revealed is that it is also one of the hardest principles to honour in practice.
Young women in every country where we work face barriers to employment that go well beyond skills, including access to finance, mobility constraints, care responsibilities, and social norms that shape what work is considered acceptable for them. A strategy that does not actively address those barriers ends up systematically underserving the people it most needs to reach. In practice, this meant the commitment to young women had to run through every part of the work, from how partners were selected to what program designs were asked to deliver. The shift was from including young women to designing for, and with, them, asking at every stage whether what was being built would reach young women as readily as young men.
That proved harder to deliver than it sounds. Some partners were not equipped for it. Others were willing but found the systems they worked within structured in ways that made genuinely inclusive delivery much harder than expected. Changing those structures and practices took persistence and, in some cases, walking away from partners who could not move far enough. Reaching young women in rural areas, or in sectors where informal work dominates, also cost more and took longer than similar efforts for young men. Programs had to be more flexible, smarter, and more locally embedded.
What also became clear is how slowly gendered systems evolve. Opening access to education, training, and finance did not translate into proportional gains for young women. Deeply embedded norms do not shift because a program asks them to. Meaningful progress required sustained attention over years and enough institutional patience to stay in situations where change was not yet visible. We have stayed the course, and we understand now what this commitment actually requires.
4. Standalone interventions rarely produce lasting progress.
Skills training without market access, finance without enterprise capability, and entrepreneurship support without addressing broader enabling conditions each tended to produce partial progress rather than sustained outcomes. The strongest results came when programs were redesigned around integrated pathways. In Senegal, Foundation partners bundled finance, technical assistance, and market access together. In Kenya, enterprise development efforts integrated market access support. In Nigeria, skilling initiatives added structured internships and employment pathways. In Ethiopia, work placement incentives were linked directly to micro, small-, and medium-sized enterprise support channels. The pattern was consistent across these examples: young people’s progress depends on multiple supports moving together.
The evidence repeatedly affirmed and pointed toward the importance of connected pathways rather than isolated interventions.
5. Proximity matters.
As we examined the barriers young people face, it became increasingly clear that those barriers are deeply shaped by surrounding context. Whether a young person can seize the opportunities they seek is determined by local labour markets, the quality of education systems, access to finance, and the social norms that determine who gets to participate and succeed. These realities cannot be fully understood from a distance.
This led to a deliberate transformation in our operating model. The Foundation expanded its presence across Africa, establishing country offices and recruiting staff and leadership locally. Today, the Mastercard Foundation has an on-the-ground presence in seven African countries – Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, and Uganda – and works with organizations and communities through regional initiatives that extend its reach across 47 African countries. Staff based in Africa and more than 450 programs under implementation reflect this shift toward decentralized, country-based engagement, designed to support impact at scale while aligning with the national systems and priorities that shape young people’s lives.
On the other side of this shift are our partners. Working closer to young people meant working more directly with African implementing organizations. Many of these partners had long track records, often as subpartners to larger international organizations. For their experience, judgement, relationships, and local knowledge to shape the work, they had to be in a position to have more of a say in how the work is done. This required a different kind of partnership, one that meant taking the journey with them, paying close attention to what they needed, and providing support that was practical and tailored. Not generic capacity development, but accompaniment that responded to the partner’s specific context while respecting the knowledge and assets they brought. This was especially critical in rural areas and in communities where young women faced deeply rooted social and cultural barriers.
The same learning pushed us to think differently about young people themselves. They could not be treated only as program participants. They also needed to be partners in shaping the work. This led to the Young Leaders Partnership approach. In 2024, we partnered directly with 20 youth-led organizations in Kenya and Rwanda. The results were powerful, creating more direct access to young people, deeper insights into their realities, and a closer connection to communityrooted youth leadership. Building on the success of the pilot, we are now scaling this approach to support 1,000 youth-led organisations across multiple countries
None of this means we have stopped seeing the value of working with international organizations. They bring experience, technical depth, reach, and the ability to operate at scale, all of which continue to matter. What we have come to understand is that how these partnerships are configured matters just as much. The strongest approaches create space for African organizations to lead, grow, and shape delivery, not only as sub-partners, but as institutions with their own capacity, credibility, and long-term role in the systems we are working to strengthen.
6. Alignment with national priorities strengthens sustainability.
Where Young Africa Works programs were integrated into existing initiatives and host government institutions, rather than operating in parallel to them, there were indications of stronger long-term potential. Our work in Ethiopia embedded policy units within public sector partners. In Uganda, we supported district-level youth planning systems. In Senegal, we co-created delivery frameworks with national employment agencies. Work in Nigeria aligned with national employment initiatives to scale proven models.
This does not mean every program needs to be embedded in the same way. The evidence points to a promising pattern, not a universal rule. What matters is that programs align and connect to national priorities and institutions in ways that strengthen the systems young people depend on and increase the likelihood that progress can be sustained beyond a single intervention.
7. Geography shapes who gets to participate.
Many of the young people facing the steepest barriers remained outside the geographies where programs traditionally concentrated. Country teams expanded toward arid and semi-arid counties in Kenya, conflictaffected areas in Ethiopia, rural Southern Senegal, Karamoja, and Northern Uganda, and informal and peri-urban settlements in Ghana. This reach also extended to forcibly displaced populations, including refugees and internally displaced persons in encampment settings such as Kakuma and Dadaab in Kenya, and displacement-affected communities in other countries where geographic isolation, legal constraints on movement and work, and limited market access compound the barriers young people already face. Location shaped who could be reached and who would not. Opportunity is not evenly distributed, and getting closer to where young people actually are remains one of the most important choices a program can make.
8. Listening is not a phase. It is a practice.
The strongest programs treated listening as part of ongoing implementation, not a one-time consultation at design. Many of the barriers that ultimately shape whether young people sustain progress only became visible over time, including social norms, unstable income, care responsibilities, mobility constraints, safety, confidence, and employer perceptions. Programs that adapted in real time based on lived experience consistently outperformed those that relied on original assumptions.
9. Progress is fragile and rarely linear.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how quickly shocks can disrupt progress, and climate change poses a similar and more sustained threat. Unlike a pandemic, it is not a single disruption but a compounding pressure that reshapes agricultural seasons, displaces communities, and narrows economic options for young people across the continent. Adaptive local partners were better positioned to continue support during disruption. Programs with stronger local embedding were generally more resilient. Across the seven years, young people’s journeys have been characterized by advancement, setbacks, adaptation, recovery, and uncertainty, not a steady climb. This kind of resilience was also important as young people and economies adapted to the increasing effects of climate change, which disproportionately affect young people.
10. Employment systems were more fragile than we assumed.
Markets in many of our operating contexts were more fragmented than we anticipated. Young people trained in agrifood sectors faced thin markets and supply chain instability that individual skill could not overcome. Climate shocks reversed enterprise gains in parts of East Africa in a single season. Informality was not a problem to be solved. It was simply how these economies worked. What we had underestimated was how fragile the broader employment system was. When the system itself is unstable, equipping individuals can only go so far
11. Scale and effectiveness are not the same thing.
Some of the most effective programs worked precisely because they were small, locally embedded, and led by people whose communities trusted them. Encouraging those programs to grow sometimes stripped out the elements that made them work. Scale is a real and necessary goal, but it has to be pursued in ways that protect what makes the work effective in the first place, and it asks more of smaller partners than is always acknowledged. Scaling what works therefore requires preserving the local trust, flexibility, and contextual grounding that made the work effective in the first place.
What this means for those working on youth livelihoods
These insights are not the Foundation’s alone to act on. They point to choices facing governments, funders, implementers, employers, and the wider field. Several implications stand out.
1. Access alone is not enough.
A training place, a loan, or a job posting may each be necessary, but none is sufficient on its own. The harder question is what surrounds the access, including whether the market is functioning and transparent, whether the household supports the choice, whether the workplace treats the young person with respect, and whether the system accommodates those at the edges. Strategies built only around expanding access will reach numbers without reaching lives. Strategies built around the conditions that make access hold are harder to design and slower to show results, but they are the ones that change what is possible.
2. Systems are the work, not the context.
Labour markets, education systems, financial services, and the institutions that govern them shape what is possible for young people in ways that no individual program can overcome. For governments, this means treating youth livelihoods as a cross-ministerial priority, not the responsibility of a single agency. For funders, it means investing in system strengthening alongside direct delivery and being willing to fund the slower work of policy integration, institutional capacity, and local infrastructure. For implementers, it means designing programs that connect to and strengthen existing systems rather than operating parallel to them. None of these shifts is sufficient on its own. Together, they change what the system can deliver and what young people can expect from it.
3. Define success in terms young people recognize.
Employment counts and completion rates are easier to measure, but they are not what young people are asking for. Frameworks that take seriously the conditions around the work, reliability of income, respect, reputation, and purpose are harder to build but produce better decisions. We would encourage others in the field to develop, adopt, or adapt measurement approaches that young people themselves would recognize as a true account of their lives. The point is not the specific markers we use, but the principle that the definition of success must come from those it is meant to describe.
4. Design for young women, do not only include them.
The barriers facing young women are structural and slow to shift, and they are not addressed by inclusion targets alone. Strategies that design for young women at every stage, from partner selection to programme structure to follow-up support, are the ones more likely to reach them. This costs more and takes longer than gender-neutral approaches, and it requires institutional patience to stay in situations where change is not yet visible. It also means being honest about which partnerships are moving in the right direction and being willing to make difficult decisions when they are not. Increasingly, it also means bringing young women themselves into the design process early, so that their experience shapes what programmes look like before decisions are made.
5. Inclusion of young people with disabilities, refugees, and those who are displaced requires more than access to opportunity.
One of the Foundation’s emerging lessons is that traditional approaches to inclusion often mistake proximity for participation. Across several programs, we found that refugees, displaced youth, and young people with disabilities were frequently “reached” by systems, trained by programs, or counted within outreach figures, yet remained structurally excluded from accessing work that was stable, respected, and economically meaningful. This forced a deeper reflection: inclusion is not simply about bringing marginalized young people into existing systems, but about questioning whether those systems were designed to enable dignity in the first place. In many cases, the real barrier was not skills alone, but the invisible architecture around work, including transport systems, financing models, employer assumptions, legal identity structures, digital accessibility, social norms, and even how opportunity itself is communicated.
A second lesson is that young people experiencing displacement or disability often develop forms of resilience, adaptability, and entrepreneurial navigation that traditional labour market systems fail to recognize or measure. Some of the strongest signals of transformation emerged where programs shifted from “accommodating vulnerability” toward investing in agency, voice, and localized economic participation. This challenged many conventional assumptions about employability. The Foundation increasingly learned that dignified and fulfilling work for these groups is less about integrating them at the margins of economies, and more about ensuring that the places where people work, trade, learn, and build livelihoods are shaped to include them from the start as a matter of course
6. Build pathways, not interventions.
Young people’s progress depends on multiple supports moving together. Skilling that leads to market access, finance that leads to enterprise capability, education that leads to employment: each step must connect to the next. For implementers and employers, this means thinking about the full arc of a young person’s transition into work, not just the segment within a single program or sector. For funders, it means resourcing coordination across the pathway toward accessing dignified and fulfilling work, which often falls through the gaps of conventional funding structures.
7. Work locally, partner locally, lead locally.
Proximity matters. The barriers shaping young people’s lives are deeply local, and they cannot be fully understood from a distance. For us, this has meant establishing country offices and recruiting staff and leadership locally, partnering directly with African implementing organizations rather than only through international intermediaries, and increasingly working with youth-led organizations as partners in shaping the work, not only delivering it. The wider implication is that African organizations need to be at the center of this work with leadership, resourcing, and decision-making authority that reflect that, and the time horizons to make it real.
8. Design for disruption.
Progress is rarely steady, and shocks are not the exception. Programs and policies that assume linear progression underprepare young people for the conditions they will actually face. Building in resilience through diversified livelihoods, stronger local networks, adaptive partners, and flexible support structures must be treated as part of the design itself, not as a contingency bolted on later.
9. Measure contribution, not attribution.
Change in the systems that shape young people’s lives comes from many actors over many years. Insisting that any one organization’s investment is the cause of an outcome distorts the work and crowds out collaboration. Asking instead where our investments opened doors or shifted conditions is a harder question, but it makes shared progress possible.
A look ahead
This brief has set out the thinking behind our work and impact measurement. The impact report later this year will set out the evidence for progress against the targets we hold ourselves to: what the data show about who has been reached and how, where outcomes have held and where they have not, and what young people say about the journeys the strategy was built around. It will also look forward to the choices that the next phase of Young Africa Works will need to make in light of what implementation has revealed. Some of what the report will show is not yet settled. The Program Outcome Assessment is still underway, and some of the patterns we expect to see will only become clear as the evidence comes together. We will share what it tells us, including where it complicates the account offered here. Until then, we offer this paper as an invitation to look beyond numbers alone, to ask what makes work dignified and fulfilling, and to consider what governments, funders, employers, implementers, and young people themselves can do together to strengthen the conditions that make such work possible.