Investing in young people’s health and education is the best way for a country to unlock productivity...says Goalkeepers Report (Gates Foundation)

Africa is a young continent. Nearly 60 percent of Africans are under the age of 25. Compare that to 27 percent of Europeans. The median age across Africa is 18. Compare that to 35 in North America (or 47 in Japan).

Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about what happens if large numbers of young people in the poorest countries are denied opportunities to build better lives. People worry about insecurity, instability, and mass migration. We wish they would also recognize young people’s enormous potential to drive growth. They are the activists, innovators, leaders, and workers of the future.

Investing in young people’s health and education is the best way for a country to unlock productivity and innovation, cut poverty, create opportunities, and generate prosperity. Human capital is not a magic bullet, but it has played a pivotal role in the success of emerging economies around the world.

What’s the challenge?

Projections show that human-capital investments can do the same for the poorest countries in Africa. Across sub-Saharan Africa, these investments could increase the size of the economy by nearly 90 percent by 2050, making it much more likely that the poorest countries can break through their stagnation and follow the path of India and China.

There are blueprints for investing successfully in human capital.

First, health: Most African countries have participated in the global revolution in child survival. Rwanda, just a few years removed from genocide, has built an effective health system from the ground up and seen the steepest drop in child mortality ever recorded. The next step is making sure children don’t merely survive but also thrive. One-third of African children are stunted, which means their brains and their bodies aren’t developing fully. But there are proven strategies for solving the stunting problem. In last year’s Goalkeepers report, we wrote about Peru, where government interventions helped reduce stunting by more than half in just eight years.

Second, education: Since 2000, the number of African children enrolled in primary school has increased from 60 to 150 million, and the number of girls in school is now virtually equal to the number of boys. The next step is improving the quality of the education all students receive. The world has ideas about how to do that, too.

The basis of our optimism about the world has always been our belief in the power of innovation to redefine what’s possible.

When we were children, experts predicted that famines would sweep across Asia. In fact, thanks to new seeds and other agricultural technologies, crop yields more than doubled.

When we started our foundation, no children in poor countries were protected from diarrhea, malaria, and pneumonia, the three leading causes of death among children. Now vaccines for diarrhea and pneumonia are widely available, as are bed nets that have prevented well over 500 million cases of malaria.

Thanks to digital technology that didn’t exist 10 years ago, 1.2 billion people now have bank accounts for the first time ever.

It may be difficult to imagine millions of young people in the world’s most impoverished countries climbing rapidly up the ladder of success described by Hans Rosling. But the weakness is our imagination, not the young people.

If we invest in human capital today, young people wearing sandals in the poorest, fastest-growing countries will be riding bicycles tomorrow—and inventing cheaper, cleaner, safer cars next week. That’s good for everyone.

This is not an exhaustive agenda for ending extreme poverty on earth, but we hope it starts a conversation about how to do so.