More than one million trained health professionals across Africa are without meaningful employment despite a continent-wide shortage of 5.5 million health workers, highlighting a widening gap between health-sector needs, training and employment opportunities for young professionals.
The figures, cited at the Ubuntu Rising 2026 gathering in Cape Town, South Africa, have prompted more than 80 young health professionals, researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and representatives of higher institutions to call for reforms to improve employment opportunities and give young Africans a greater role in shaping health policies and systems.
The participants, drawn from across Africa, unveiled nine recommendations covering leadership, innovation and employment.
The recommendations are particularly relevant to countries such as Nigeria, where the health sector continues to contend with workforce shortages, migration of health professionals and difficulties in creating sufficient opportunities for newly trained professionals.
Ubuntu Rising 2026 was convened by the Africa Health Collaborative and hosted by the University of Cape Town ahead of the 18th World Congress on Public Health.
The meeting was designed to move beyond simply consulting young people and instead give them a direct role in determining priorities and solutions for Africa’s health sector.
The health workforce figures were presented alongside a broader youth employment challenge across the continent.
Prof. Brandon Collier-Reed, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Teaching and Learning at the University of Cape Town, cited the Mastercard Foundation’s Africa Youth Employment Outlook 2026, which found that 90 per cent of employed young Africans work in the informal economy, while only 10 per cent of youth jobs are formal.
The report also found that 34 per cent of employed young Africans live in households below the $2.15-a-day poverty line, while only nine per cent have completed tertiary education.
According to Collier-Reed, the figures require African countries and institutions to look beyond employment numbers and examine whether existing systems are creating sustainable opportunities for young people.
“Employment, on its own, is not the goal we should be measuring ourselves against. The question before us is not whether young Africans are working. It is whether the systems we have built are working for them,” he said.
The health workforce data cited at the meeting came from the World Health Organisation Regional Office for Africa’s Health Workforce Reports 2024 and 2025.
The reports point to a continent struggling with both an insufficient number of health workers and an inability to adequately absorb some of those who have already received professional training.
For the young participants, addressing the contradiction requires changes not only in health-worker recruitment but also in education, skills development, innovation and policy participation.
Under employment, they recommended harmonising curricula across African countries to make qualifications and skills more transferable and improve opportunities for young health professionals to work across borders.
They also called for stronger pathways into dignified health employment, including paid internships for young members of the health workforce.
The participants said young professionals should also be involved in health policy and decision-making rather than being restricted to implementing decisions made by older professionals and institutions.
They further recommended incorporating entrepreneurship and a stronger understanding of community needs into health curricula and training.
The proposal could help connect the training of health professionals with the actual needs of communities and create opportunities for young people to develop solutions to health challenges.
On leadership, the participants called for stronger links between young professionals and health policy and health-system management.
They recommended creating learning and networking opportunities that would enable young people with technical expertise to understand how health policies are developed and how health systems function.
They also urged institutions to measure youth leadership by its influence and the changes it produces, rather than simply counting the number of young people who attend programmes, conferences or training sessions.
The group called for institutional environments where young people could contribute meaningfully to decision-making and develop into future leaders.
On innovation, the participants recommended that leadership, problem-solving and entrepreneurship should be integrated into existing university and professional training programmes instead of being treated as separate interventions.
They also called for structured capacity-building programmes to help young people turn health ideas into viable innovations and enterprises.
Another recommendation was to improve access to existing expertise and innovation infrastructure.
Rather than establishing disconnected facilities, young innovators should be linked with experts from different disciplines and existing infrastructure that can help them develop, test and scale health solutions.
The keynote speaker at the gathering, Dr. Nathina Pakade, Public Health Medicine Registrar at the University of Cape Town and the Western Cape Department of Health and Wellness, said young people’s involvement in decision-making must go beyond inviting them to meetings.
“There is a difference between asking young people what they think and giving them a meaningful role in deciding what happens next,” she said.
Pakade said meaningful participation meant giving young people the opportunity to influence decisions rather than merely ensuring their presence at meetings.
“For me, meaningful participation is moving beyond simply being present in the room to having the opportunity to influence what happens in that room,” she said.
She also argued that education and professional training were insufficient if young people were not provided with opportunities to acquire practical experience, mentorship and career progression.
According to her, health systems should create pathways that enable young professionals to “enter, learn, contribute, progress and lead”, rather than leaving them as “holders of potential” without opportunities to exercise influence.
The nine recommendations will form part of the Africa Health Collaborative’s Youth Agenda and are expected to guide its future programmes, partnerships and engagement with the wider health sector.
Prof. Tracey Naledi, Deputy Dean for Social Accountability and Health Systems at the University of Cape Town and host of Ubuntu Rising, said young people should be involved in designing the systems they would eventually inherit.
“If we’re building a world we won’t be part of, then those who will inherit it must help create it,” she said.
Naledi said the Collaborative was increasingly moving towards allowing young people to lead its initiatives while institutions provide support.
“At the Africa Health Collaborative, everything we do is done with young people and informed by young people, and increasingly, led by young people, with us in a supporting role,” she said.
“For us, this is more than participation or consultation. It’s co-creation of the future we all want to see.”
The Africa Health Collaborative is a multi-year partnership focused on strengthening primary healthcare systems across Africa through health workforce development, education, innovation and entrepreneurship.
The partnership includes the Mastercard Foundation, Amref Health Africa, Addis Ababa University, African Leadership University, African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Ashesi University, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Moi University, University of Cape Town and University of Toronto.
Its work contributes to the Mastercard Foundation’s Young Africa Works strategy, which aims to enable 30 million young people, particularly women, to access dignified and fulfilling work by 2030.
The recommendations from Ubuntu Rising therefore place youth employment and leadership within the broader challenge of strengthening Africa’s health workforce , including finding ways to ensure that young people who are trained for the sector can secure meaningful opportunities to contribute to the continent’s health systems.