Youth Unemployment in the Arab States and Africa: The Complete 2026 Statistics Report

The Arab States region holds a distinction no government wants: it has recorded the highest youth unemployment rate of any region on earth for years running, and in one G20 economy, South Africa, the youth unemployment rate now exceeds 59 percent. This report compiles the most current, verifiable data on youth unemployment across the Arab States and Africa, drawn directly from the International Labour Organization, World Bank, and Mastercard Foundation, with every figure sourced individually throughout.

The headline figure: the Arab States lead the world

According to the ILO’s Global Employment Trends for Youth report, the Arab States region recorded a youth unemployment rate of 28.0 percent in 2023, the highest of any region globally. That figure represented a decrease from a pandemic-era peak of 31.3 percent in 2020, but remained a full percentage point above the 2019 pre-pandemic level of 27.0 percent.

The ILO’s most recent report, titled Global Employment Trends for Youth 2026: Back to the Future, places the Arab States figure at 26.2 percent and Northern Africa at 22.6 percent, the second-highest subregion in the world, describing both as consistently the regions with the highest youth unemployment globally. In both subregions, at least one in three young people are classified as NEET, not in employment, education, or training. Youth unemployment rose in eight of the world’s eleven subregions between 2023 and 2025, a genuinely broad-based deterioration rather than a problem confined to any single part of the world.

Not just a developing-world story

One of the more surprising findings in the ILO’s 2026 report is where the sharpest deterioration actually occurred. Youth unemployment in North America climbed from 8.3 percent in 2023 to 9.8 percent in 2025, and youth unemployment across Northern, Southern, and Western Europe reached 15 percent, both genuinely sharp increases in wealthy, high-income economies that are not typically associated with a youth jobs crisis. The ILO frames this as evidence that weaker global growth, geopolitical tension, and technological disruption are pushing countries toward what it calls a new youth jobs crisis, not a phenomenon isolated to any single income bracket or region.

Country by country: a genuinely wide spread

Regional averages hide enormous country-level variation. World Bank data via FRED shows Saudi Arabia’s youth unemployment rate has fallen sharply, from 19.77 percent in 2021 to 10.01 percent in 2025, one of the steepest declines recorded anywhere in the region over that period. The UAE sits even lower, at 6.45 percent in 2025. Egypt and Jordan tell a very different story: Egypt’s rate has been rising, reaching 18.29 percent in 2025, while Jordan’s rate remains among the highest in the world at 38.88 percent, despite a decline from 43.86 percent in 2021. Morocco’s rate sits at 21.88 percent in 2025, having eased slightly from 22.37 percent in 2024 but remaining well above the pre-2021 baseline.

South Africa’s youth unemployment rate, at 59.93 percent in 2025, is genuinely one of the highest recorded among major world economies, and Statistics South Africa’s Q1 2025 data adds a further detail: 58.7 percent of the country’s 4.8 million unemployed young people had never held a single job in their lives.

The gender gap within the region

The unemployment burden inside the Arab States and MENA region falls unevenly by gender, and the gap is not confined to unemployment alone. ILO data shows young women’s unemployment rate running at roughly 1.8 times that of young men, approximately 34 percent for young women against 18.8 percent for young men. Northern Africa records one of the widest gender gaps in labour force participation anywhere in the world at any age: only 22.5 percent of working-age women are economically active, compared to 73.8 percent of men, a 51-point gap that dwarfs the disparity seen in most other regions. That structural gap sits underneath the youth unemployment numbers and helps explain why the region’s female youth unemployment figure is so persistently high, since young women face both a youth-specific and a gender-specific barrier to entering the labour market at the same time.

If you want the fuller picture on how this plays out for young women specifically, we’ve covered career choice patterns among Nigerian youth by gender in a separate piece.

The AI factor: a warning sign for entry-level work

The ILO’s 2026 report introduces a new variable into the youth unemployment picture that previous editions did not need to address at this scale: artificial intelligence. The report warns that rapid technological change, alongside weaker economic growth and geopolitical tension, is contributing to what it calls a new youth jobs crisis, with entry-level and early-career roles, the jobs young people typically use to gain their first professional foothold, identified as particularly exposed to AI-driven disruption. Notably, the sharpest AI-linked displacement risk identified by the ILO sits primarily in higher-income economies with more advanced automation adoption, rather than in the lower-income markets where youth unemployment is currently highest, suggesting the picture may shift further as AI adoption spreads more broadly across income levels in the years ahead.

A demographic clock ticking

Africa’s youth employment challenge sits against a demographic backdrop that makes the stakes considerably higher than the current numbers alone suggest. Roughly 70 percent of Africa’s population is under the age of 30, and the continent’s working-age population is projected to double by 2050, according to OECD data. The African Development Bank has warned that the continent needs a fundamentally new growth model to deliver quality jobs at the scale required to absorb that growth, and the World Economic Forum has directly linked recent youth-led protests in Kenya, Madagascar, and Morocco to exactly this combination, limited opportunity meeting rising living costs and a rapidly growing young population with nowhere near enough decent jobs to absorb it.

Beyond unemployment: the NEET measure

Unemployment alone understates the scale of youth economic exclusion, since it only counts people actively seeking work. The NEET rate, the share of young people Not in Employment, Education, or Training, captures a wider population. Globally, the NEET rate reached 20 percent in the most recent ILO reporting, affecting more than 257 million young people worldwide. In both the Arab States and Northern Africa specifically, at least one in three young people are NEET, a genuinely striking share of an entire generation sitting outside the three pathways, work, study, or training, that normally define the transition into adulthood.

Africa: a different picture from the raw unemployment rate

Sub-Saharan Africa’s raw youth unemployment rate is, counterintuitively, lower than the global average. World Bank data puts the 2025 rate for developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa at 10.66 percent, continuing a gradual decline from 12.71 percent in 2021.

The reality underneath that number is more complicated. Youth employment on the continent remains heavily concentrated in agriculture, which accounted for 47 percent of jobs held by young Africans as of 2025, roughly 143 million young people. Among working 15 to 17 year olds specifically, 96 percent held informal jobs, and 40 percent were living below the international poverty line of 2.15 dollars a day. Only 9 percent of young Africans had completed tertiary education as of 2025. We’ve explored the fuller regional picture, including country-by-country breakdowns, in our companion piece on youth employment statistics across Africa.

Africa’s youth unemployment challenge is less about young people having no work at all, and more about the quality, formality, and earning power of the work they do have, a genuinely different policy problem than the high, visible unemployment recorded in South Africa, Jordan, or the Arab States more broadly. Programmes that respond to this reality directly, rather than assuming formal salaried employment as the default outcome, matter accordingly; we’ve written separately about upskilling strategies for gig economy and informal workers across MENA and about designing volunteer programmes that build genuine youth capability in low-income MENA communities.

Summary table

Sources

• ILO, Global Employment Trends for Youth 2024
• ILO, Global Employment Trends for Youth 2026: Back to the Future
• World Bank, Youth Unemployment, modelled ILO estimates
• FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, country-level youth unemployment series
• Mastercard Foundation, Africa Youth Employment Outlook 2026
• World Economic Forum, on Gen Z labour market pressures

This report will be updated as newer ILO and World Bank data becomes available. Last compiled August 2026.

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