Why Job Centres should be at the heart of our youth employment strategy
With most students unable to pass the national exams, Ethiopia faces the danger of losing a generation’s potential. Establishing job centres could provide the crucial link between schooling and the labour market.
The release of the latest Ethiopian national secondary school leaving examination results sent shockwaves across the nation. Once again, more than 90 percent of students failed to achieve a passing grade. For families, this was heartbreaking. For the nation, the consequences are profound. At stake is the fate of a generation and the prospects of Ethiopia’s economic transformation.
This crisis is not simply about education standards. It reflects a deeper disconnect between the output of schools, the capacity of universities, and the limited absorption power of the labour market. Unless addressed, this gap will undermine our growth ambitions and risk turning our youth bulge into a liability rather than an asset.
A Nation of Youth, but Few Pathways
Ethiopia is one of Africa’s youngest nations, with more than 70 percent of its population under the age of 30. Every year, hundreds of thousands of students complete secondary school. Yet universities cannot absorb them all. Those who fail the national exam are effectively shut out of higher education, with few alternative options.
The result is a growing pool of young people who are neither continuing in school nor employed. For them, a single exam failure becomes a life-defining barrier. The economic cost is immense: a generation left idle instead of contributing to national productivity. The social cost is just as grave, as frustration, disillusionment, and migration pressures mount.
Job Centres: A Practical Bridge
Ethiopia urgently needs a new institutional bridge between education and employment. One such mechanism is the establishment of job centres—accessible hubs that connect young people to real labour market opportunities.
Job centres would provide career guidance and profiling to help young people identify realistic pathways, offer real-time job-matching services with employers in both the private and public sectors, and deliver short, demand-driven training tied to growing industries such as construction, ICT, logistics, tourism, and agribusiness.
They would also facilitate apprenticeships and internships to give practical, on-the-job experience while supporting entrepreneurship through mentoring, business training, and links to finance. Instead of letting exam “failures” drift into unemployment, job centres would ensure every young Ethiopian has a second chance.
Instead of letting exam “failures” drift into unemployment, job centres would ensure every young Ethiopian has a second chance.
I speak from personal experience. After finishing college in the United Kingdom, I found myself uncertain about the next step. The Jobcentre Plus became a lifeline: it offered guidance on how to present my skills, connected me to employers, and pointed me towards short training opportunities that boosted my employability. That early support helped me transition from education into the world of work with confidence. It showed me that when well designed, job centres can give young people not only access to jobs but also a sense of direction and dignity.
Learning from Europe
Other nations have faced similar challenges and responded with structured solutions, and Europe offers some of the most relevant models.
In the United Kingdom, Jobcentre Plus goes beyond listing vacancies by actively engaging employers, running work trials, and connecting youth to apprenticeships with a focus on getting young people into work quickly. France, through its 2024 creation of France Travail, consolidated fragmented agencies into a unified “one-stop” system integrating employment, training, and social services so that no one—whether a university graduate or a school dropout—is left behind.
Denmark’s municipal job centres embody the “flexicurity” approach, combining flexible labour markets with strong social support and active measures, profiling youth early and guiding them swiftly into jobs or training. Sweden contracts NGOs and private firms to deliver job-placement services, paying them based on successful outcomes to ensure efficiency and innovation, particularly for harder-to-reach groups.
And at the EU level, the Youth Guarantee pioneered a bold commitment that every young person under 30 should be offered a job, apprenticeship, or training within four months of leaving school—an approach that has significantly reduced youth unemployment in countries like Ireland and Spain.
These lessons show that job centres, when designed well, are not mere bureaucracies but vital public institutions that shape national development.
Why Ethiopia Must Act Now
The government’s Homegrown Economic Reform Agenda (HGER) aims to modernize the economy, attract investment, and create millions of jobs, but these reforms will stall unless Ethiopia develops clear human-capital pathways for its youth. Job centres can absorb the shock of exam failures by offering structured alternatives, align skills with market demand to ensure training leads to real employment, support industrialization by producing job-ready workers for priority sectors, and reduce instability by giving frustrated young people a sense of direction and opportunity.
Imagine an Ethiopia where, within four months of leaving school, every young person is guaranteed either a job, an apprenticeship, or a training opportunity. Such a commitment would turn failure into resilience, and despair into hope.
Building the Ethiopian Model
To succeed, Ethiopia’s job centres must reflect local realities. This means integrating and co-locating them with existing TVET colleges, municipal service centres, or industrial parks to minimize costs; adopting a digital-first approach by building a multilingual portal in Amharic, Afaan Oromoo, Tigrigna and English for job matching, applications and training offers; and forging employer compacts in high-growth sectors to guarantee pipelines of vacancies linked to tailored training. It also calls for a youth employment guarantee that no young person remains idle for more than four months after leaving school, while engaging NGOs, training providers and development partners through outcome-based public–private partnerships to deliver specialized services. Finally, robust data systems must track job-placement rates, employer satisfaction and retention to ensure public resources are used effectively.
A Call to Action
The exam crisis is a warning bell. Ethiopia cannot allow a single test to condemn an entire generation to unemployment. The choice is stark: either waste the potential of millions of young people or create new institutions that unlock their contributions.
Establishing a national network of job centres, rooted in Ethiopian realities but inspired by international best practice, is one of the most practical and urgent steps the country can take. If designed with ambition and backed by political will, job centres could transform Ethiopia’s youth bulge into a demographic dividend.
The national exam results have laid bare the cost of inaction. Now is the time for bold, decisive leadership. Ethiopia’s future depends on whether we turn today’s failures into tomorrow’s opportunities.
Assefa Sumoro is a : (The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the views or positions of the institution with which I am affiliated.)
Contributed by Assefa Sumoro
