Global youth unemployment rose in 2025 as weaker growth, geopolitical tension and sluggish job creation made work harder to find, the International Labour Organization said — with Northern Africa recording the second-highest rate of any world subregion.
The unemployment rate among 15-to-24-year-olds reached 12.4%, up from 12.3% in 2023, equivalent to 67 million young people worldwide. The share not in employment, education or training edged up to 20%, or more than 257 million people.
“The picture is worsening almost universally,” the report said. Youth unemployment rose between 2023 and 2025 in eight of the world’s 11 subregions, and across high-income, lower-middle-income and low-income countries alike.
Youth unemployment was highest in the Arab States at 26.2%, followed by Northern Africa at 22.6%. Some of the sharpest deterioration was in wealthier economies: North America climbed to 9.8% from 8.3%, while Northern, Southern and Western Europe stood at 15%.
Where the ILO puts AI risk
The agency’s AI finding is more specific — and more counterintuitive — than most commentary on the subject.
The ILO estimates that 6.1% of jobs currently held by people aged 15 to 29 fall in occupations most exposed to AI-related change. If 10% of those jobs disappeared, around 5.6 million young workers could face unemployment, career change or exit from the labour force — “mainly in high-income countries.”
That is close to the inverse of how AI’s employment threat has usually been framed on the continent. Research covered by iAfrica last year projected AI-powered automation could eliminate more than 40% of Africa’s business process outsourcing jobs, a sector projected to reach $35 billion by 2028, with women at 10% higher risk due to overrepresentation in junior roles. Those risks are real for the specific sectors exposed to them. But on the ILO’s global assessment, direct AI displacement is concentrated where automatable white-collar work is concentrated — which is not, for the most part, Africa.
The entry ramp is narrowing anyway
The ILO’s more immediate concern is the decline of middle-skilled work: clerical, administrative, sales and manufacturing roles that have traditionally provided the first step into the labour market for school and university leavers.
“A shrinkage of jobs associated with middle-skilled occupations means longer job queues and growing unemployment for young people with secondary-level education that seek them,” the report said.
That maps onto a debate already running in South African business. Commentary published by iAfrica in April and July has argued that agentic AI is eroding precisely the entry-level tasks through which junior staff historically learned their trade — and that companies cutting those roles for short-term efficiency risk hollowing out their own succession pipelines. The Youth Employment Service has created over 209,000 work experiences since inception, contributing R12.3 billion through youth salaries, entirely privately funded. The question raised was whether equivalent effort is going into redesigning what entry-level roles look like inside AI-enabled organisations.
High-skilled sectors — science, engineering, healthcare, information technology — continue to expand in most countries. The problem is the missing rung between school and those jobs.
The informality problem
The ILO’s finding on developing economies points somewhere else entirely. Young people who cannot afford prolonged unemployment take insecure work instead: nearly nine in ten young workers in low and lower-middle-income countries are in informal employment, without adequate labour or social protection.
That figure reframes what AI has to do to matter in African labour markets. Roger Jantio argued in a column published by iAfrica last week that the informal economy is the decisive test for African AI policy — that if adoption stays concentrated among large corporations and central governments, the continent becomes more digitally sophisticated without transforming its underlying economy. His examples were deliberately mundane: a trader improving inventory management, a farmer getting pest and market advice, a mechanic improving diagnosis, a transporter optimising routes.
On the ILO’s numbers, that is where roughly 90% of young workers in the relevant income brackets actually are. The risk for African economies may be less that AI takes existing jobs than that it never reaches the work most young people are already doing.
The ILO has been directly involved in African AI-and-labour policy, including through Kenya’s National AI Skilling Alliance, where the agency’s Caroline Njuki has argued AI must support fair, decent work and inclusion.
