I met Nyakarere in Musoma twenty weeks ago. Nyakarere is around two or three years old. As we waited for the young people to gather around so we could start our conversation, Nyakarere seemed to be interested in everything that I did.
She sat closer to me, looking at my phone, and so I showed her a few pictures from my little world in Dar es Salaam. Not sure if she was impressed.
I started taking notes in my notebook once the conversation began, and Nyakarere still didn’t leave my side. Her curiosity made me think about her future. How will it turn out? What kind of world will she grow up in? Will she go to a school that will nurture her curiosity? What opportunities will be available to her when she eventually has to make a living?
Over the past few months, Twaweza and The Chanzo have been speaking with young people across five regions about their livelihoods, the opportunities around them and the futures they imagine for themselves.
My focus returns to the ongoing conversation with the young people just a few meters from where Nyakarere and I are sitting. I hear a young person speak about how bodaboda has become a common livelihood pathway for young people, especially young men. However, the sector itself has become so overcrowded that it can no longer provide the income many of them need.
More riders than passengers
“There are now more bodaboda riders than passengers,” said a young woman as they spoke about the available livelihood opportunities for young people. This made me wonder: if many young men are expected to employ themselves and bodaboda is one of the easiest ways to do that, how do we expect them to improve their lives?
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For years, a recurring message from politicians and people in power has been that formal jobs cannot absorb Tanzania’s growing youth population, and that young people therefore need to create livelihoods for themselves. The question that comes to mind is: where are the systems that allow young people to do what they are told to do?
For example, the 10 per cent local government loans, allocated on a 4-4-2 basis to young people, women and people with disabilities respectively, come with so many barriers that they can be difficult to access even when young people try.
In Arusha, one group told us they had obtained a letter of introduction and even gone to court to get the required verification, only to be rejected because the members did not come from the same area, despite working in the same market.
Beyond capital
As we had more conversations with young people, it became clear to me that the problem is not only about accessing capital. In Arusha, young people are actively trying to build livelihoods through tourism, informal trade, agriculture and entrepreneurship, and several participants shared examples of starting businesses with very limited resources.
At the same time, they described an environment that makes self-employment difficult. Street vendors spoke about being removed from commercially viable spaces, having their goods confiscated and sometimes being detained.
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Young entrepreneurs raised concerns about taxes, limited capital and difficult loan requirements. Again and again, young people distinguished between opportunities existing and actually being able to benefit from them.
There is something that a machinga in Arusha said that I still think about every now and then: “Serikali inapoita maeneo sahihi, si sahihi kwetu, ni sahihi kwao.” That when the government calls an area the right one, it’s not right for them — it’s right for them, the government.
When you create solutions for a group of people, those people need to be involved to ensure that the solutions work for them, not for you simply because you thought of them. It makes me think about the market buildings that get constructed every day, only to end up abandoned because they do not serve the people they were built for.
For a street vendor, the right place to do business is not necessarily the place designated on a government plan; it is where there is a mzunguko wa pesa na watu. A place where money goes around and with enough people.
A market can be beautifully constructed and formally designated, but if customers do not go there, what opportunity does it provide to the young person we are asking to employ themselves?
Opportunity and tools
The same question followed us in Zanzibar. Young people recognised the opportunities around tourism, fishing and the Blue Economy, but they kept coming back to whether they could actually participate in them.
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In Matemwe, one young person asked, “You say blue economy… but you give me a 15-horsepower boat… is it for me or for the Chinese with ships?” An opportunity can exist on paper and even be visible all around you, but that does not mean you have the tools to benefit from it.
Perhaps the problem is not that young people cannot see opportunities. The question is whether our systems allow them to turn those opportunities into livelihoods. My mind goes back to Nyakarere. Will things be different when she grows up? Will the education system equip her with the skills she will need in her world when she turns 18?
The question is not simply whether she will go to school. It is whether what she learns there will connect to the world of work she eventually enters. Seven years of Mastercard Foundation’s Young Africa Works initiative have shown that skills training alone rarely produces lasting progress. Skills need to connect to markets, finance, internships and actual pathways into employment.
According to the 2025 Integrated Labour Force Survey, more than 95 per cent of jobs held by young Tanzanians are informal. This is where young people are already working. The question, therefore, cannot be only about how we formalise the informal sector. It must also be how we make the informal sector work for young people rather than against them.
Questions that matter
Can a machinga trade where customers actually are? Can the woman selling food through WhatsApp grow that business without being crushed by costs? Can a young farmer reach a market?
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Can someone access affordable capital without finding nine other people who want exactly the same business? Can an informal worker build skills, accumulate assets and eventually employ somebody else?
If this is the labour market Nyakarere is likely to inherit, then preparing her for work cannot mean preparing her only for a formal job that most young Tanzanians do not have.
When we asked young people what they would do differently if they were leaders, their answers were strikingly practical. Across the five regions, they spoke about making finance easier to access, reducing the cost of doing business, connecting young people to markets, investing in local economic opportunities, making education more practical and involving young people in decisions that affect them.
In Arusha, one participant said education should help a young person “know themselves and recognise their own skills,” so that when the time comes to become independent, they know where to begin.
But hope, hope is the one thing that young people have plenty of. Despite the challenges they face every day, they remain positive about their future. They believe things will get better because they believe in what they do.
They are determined, but hope should not have to do all the work. I hope that this hope reaches the people who make decisions that affect young people. They have solutions. They want to be involved. Is anyone listening?
I think about Nyakarere again. By the time she becomes one of the young people we talk about in employment statistics and national policies, I hope we will have done more than teach her to keep fighting. I hope we will have built systems that give all that curiosity I saw in her somewhere to go.
