Proposal Description

Africa's development ambitions increasingly depend on timely, reliable, quality and usable data. Governments need sound evidence to plan services, target investments, monitor inequalities, respond to crises, and track progress toward the SDGs and Agenda 2063. Yet while Africa has the youngest population in the world, many countries have not built deliberate pathways to identify, train, and absorb young statisticians and data scientists into public systems. This is fundamentally a human capital development challenge at the heart of Africa's digital transformation, with growing pressure to modernise its statistical and data systems in response to big data, digital transformation, and the expanding use of AI/ML in decision-making. Anchored in the African Union's demographic dividend roadmap and its three E pillars, this session frames youth data workforce development as central to harnessing Africa's demographic dividend and advancing its digital development agenda. Without a deliberate youth policy, countries risk a growing gap between demand for evidence-based governance and the human capacity required to deliver it.

This session, hosted by YASA, UNFPA ESARO and Country Offices will present evidence and debate on the case for a dedicated youth policy across Africa. It will examine the structural barriers young demographers/statisticians/data scientists face in entering public systems, explore what a credible policy response should include (training, structured pathways into practice, innovation spaces, mentorship, data ethics), and debate the respective responsibilities of governments, universities, National Statistics Offices, and development partners. The session will move the conversation from broad calls for youth empowerment toward concrete, actionable policy design.

The session itself is deliberate: positioning young African statisticians not as a subject of discussion but as active contributors to shaping the policy agenda. UNFPA will set out the regional youth policy landscape, presenting evidence on Africa's youth workforce gap and the structural factors driving it, and YASA will bring the practitioner's voice, speaking to the lived experience of young African statisticians and what meaningful institutional support looks like in practice. Together, speakers will make the case that a youth workforce policy must treat statistics, data science, and AI/ML as interconnected parts of a modern public-interest skills agenda, and that investing in Africa’s youth is not simply a youth agenda, but a development agenda.

Relevance to the World Statistics Congress: This session directly addresses the statistical modernisation, capacity development, and the responsible use of emerging technologies Congress themes. Population dynamics, demographic projections, and technological transformation are collectively reshaping how Africa must generate, interpret, and act on evidence. At a time when the continent is facing a profound demographic transition, the failure to institutionalise data skills poses a systemic risk to the sustainability development agendas and the digital transformation of public services. Africa's data future will not be shaped by technology alone but will be shaped by whether countries invest in people who can use technology well, interpret evidence responsibly, and connect analysis to public purpose. We invite the international statistical community to engage with that challenge and to consider what practical support, solidarity, and shared learning can look like in practice