The Missing Middle: Why Employment Must Precede Entrepreneurship in Africa’s Youth Development

During my time with The Harvest Fund, I sat across from highly competent women farmers who had just completed intensive training in milling, business development, and food safety. They attended every session, took meticulous notes, and asked insightful questions. Yet, when we asked them what they envisioned building next, many went blank. It wasn’t a lack of intelligence or ambition; rather, no one had ever told them their ambitions could be that grand. To some, owning a hammer mill sounded like an enterprise for other people—not for them. I used to find this deeply frustrating, but I now understand what was truly happening in that room. We had taught them a skill, but we had not given them a job.

The development sector consistently gets a critical sequence wrong, so much so that we have stopped noticing the gap. The typical model goes as follows: identify an economically excluded population, train them in a trade, encourage them to start a business or join a cooperative, count the registered businesses, and declare the initiative a success. What this sequence entirely skips is the crucial middle phase: the transition from worker to employer. This is the stage where individuals learn, not in a classroom but on the actual job, what it means to show up with accountability, to make and correct mistakes, to take pride in a process, and to understand the fundamental difference between being paid and being exploited.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, our empowerment architecture is built almost entirely on the first and third stages of this sequence: training and entrepreneurship. The middle step—employment—is treated as optional, as if it were a luxury that communities in poverty cannot afford to wait for. I argue the exact opposite. The middle is not a luxury; it is the foundation. Without it, both training and entrepreneurship tend to collapse. By 2050, Africa is projected to host the world’s largest workforce, with one-quarter of the global labor force being African. Yet, the continent’s response in development programming, government policy, and the billions spent annually on livelihood interventions has largely prepared this massive workforce for self-employment rather than structured work.

We train farmers to own agribusinesses, women to run cooperatives, and youth to be entrepreneurs. Then, we count the outputs: loans disbursed, businesses registered, and products sold. What we almost never measure is whether these individuals have ever held a structured job. We fail to ask if they have ever been employees, or if they have experienced regular, accountable employment that allows them to develop mastery in a role before being handed the immense responsibility of running an enterprise.

The result is that our outcome numbers look reasonable on paper but feel hollow on the ground. I have witnessed and measured this firsthand. When three or four women from a cohort of sixty thrive independently, we celebrate their success without asking what happened to the other fifty-six. The reality is that we handed them the third floor of a building and forgot to construct the first two.

In May 2026, Msitu360 launched the “Feeding Msitu” school feeding program at Chainda Community School in Lusaka, serving 132 children daily. The program is staffed by four women whom we call the Mamas. These Mamas are not volunteers, nor are they community mothers giving up their scarce time in exchange for goodwill and a participation certificate. Instead, they are paid, contracted, and trained workers with regular salaries, defined working hours, and weekends off. They receive professional food safety training and work within a nutritionally designed menu developed by a qualified nutritionist. They are, unequivocally, employees. In the context of African school feeding programs, this model is highly unusual. The dominant model across the continent relies on unpaid community labor—typically women—to prepare and serve meals under the guise of “community participation,” which is, more accurately, the extraction of women’s labor under a different name.

At Msitu360, we made a different choice—not because we have more funding than other programs, but because we hold a different thesis: the meal is the proof of the employment model, not the other way around. The product we are building is not nutrition; the product is dignified, paid, and certified employment for African women. The meals are simply what that employment produces. In our first month of operation, the Mamas served 3,312 meals with zero days of service disruption. They prepared a nutritionally complete, locally sourced menu, cooked by women who live in the same communities as the children they feed—communities that include, in some cases, their own children.

Here is what I observed at The Harvest Fund, and what I have seen everywhere I have worked since: a woman who has held a job, who has been an employee, who has been paid and managed, and who has made mistakes in a structured environment and been supported to correct them, approaches the idea of owning a business completely differently. She is not dreaming from a standing start; she is extrapolating from lived experience. She knows what a supply chain feels like because she has been inside one. She knows what accountability looks like because she has been held to it. She knows what fair compensation feels like because she has experienced being compensated at all. Work ethic is not a personality trait; it is learned and developed through practice. We cannot train it into existence in a two-week workshop and then release people into entrepreneurship, wondering why the outcomes are so thin.

There is another cost to skipping the middle that we rarely discuss. The women and youth who do beat the odds—who build something from nothing and become the success stories in our program reports—almost universally remain self-employed. They do not hire others, and they do not scale. Scaling is not even a concept available to them, because nobody has ever shown them what a growing organization looks like from the inside.

But a woman who has been an employee understands systems. She has seen how a supply chain is managed, how a team is coordinated, and how a process is documented, repeated, and improved. When she eventually builds her own enterprise, she builds it differently. She knows that growth requires people. She knows how to bring others in, how to structure their roles, and how to create the conditions for someone else to learn what she learned. Whether someone stays in a job and becomes exceptional at it, or uses that position as a foundation to eventually start their own catering company, mill, or food processing enterprise and employ others—both outcomes are successes. Both paths require the same fundamental experience: having held the job first.

Sustainability, in many ways, looks exactly like this.

The Kampala Declaration, which guides the post-Malabo CAADP framework for African agricultural transformation, calls for inclusive growth, women’s economic empowerment, and community-rooted food systems. These are noble and correct objectives. However, objectives without proper sequencing are merely aspirations. The sequencing matters: employment must come before entrepreneurship, the worker before the business owner, and the foundation before the floors. As Msitu360 scales the Feeding Msitu program to 20 schools by 2031, the employment model scales with it—bringing more Mamas, more salaries, and more women who understand what it means to hold a job before being asked to imagine owning one. When some of them do eventually imagine owning a hammer mill, they will imagine it from solid ground, rather than as something that happens to other people. This is what we owe them: not a dream handed down from a training room, but a foundation that makes the dream make sense.

Namonje Izukanji Namukonda is a Zambian systems builder and development practitioner working at the intersection of child nutrition, circular economy, and community livelihoods. She is the Founder of Msitu360, a registered Zambian nonprofit running the Feeding Msitu Child Feeding Programme in Lusaka and the Twapeza Zero Waste Factory in Chingola, on the Copperbelt. She also serves as Secretary General of the CAADP Non-State Actors Group Zambia Chapter and Country Adviser to the Alliance for Women and Girls (AFWAG).

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