Africa needs a generation of young people prepared to build businesses, influence policy and strengthen institutions, rather than remain trapped in frustration over the continent’s economic and political failures, business executive Senyo Hosi has said.
Hosi, Founder and Executive Chairman of Kleeve and Tove Ltd, made the call while speaking to students and young professionals at the 2026 Students & Young Professionals African Liberty Academy (SYPALA).
“Africa does not simply need more anger. We have enough,” Hosi said. “Africa needs more builders.”
He was speaking against a backdrop of high youth unemployment, weak economic opportunities and widespread frustration with the performance of public institutions. But rather than urging young people simply to demand change from government, Hosi challenged them to develop the capacity to help produce it.
“Do not reduce citizenship to you voting and complaining,” he said.
For Hosi, political participation without an understanding of how economies and institutions work leaves young people poorly equipped to influence the decisions that affect their livelihoods.
He urged students and young professionals to study public policy, understand government budgets and markets, and learn why institutions fail and how they can be repaired.
That knowledge, he said, should translate into practical action.
Young people should build businesses, he argued, but should not separate entrepreneurship from ethics. They should engage in public policy without reducing every issue to partisan politics, and hold governments accountable while developing the competence to propose and shape better policies.
“Go into business but do not abandon ethics,” Hosi said. “Demand good policy but also develop the competence to shape it.”
The emphasis on building also extends to the private sector, where Hosi sees young entrepreneurs as part of the answer to Africa’s employment challenge. Rather than waiting for governments to become the main source of jobs, he wants young people to create enterprises capable of producing value, employing others and expanding beyond small-scale activity.
At the same time, he argued that stronger businesses and institutions depend on a change in the values that govern them. Corruption, weak accountability and unethical conduct cannot be treated as problems belonging only to politicians, he said; businesses and citizens also have a role in sustaining or challenging those practices.
Hosi’s argument puts greater responsibility on young Africans at a time when the continent’s demographic growth is rapidly expanding the number of people entering the workforce. The question, in his view, is not simply whether young people will demand better economic opportunities, but whether they will acquire the skills and take the risks required to create them.
“Africa Transformation is not waiting for one hero,” Hosi said. “It is waiting for a generation of builders.”
For Hosi, that generation will have to do more than criticise what is broken. It will have to build companies, understand policy, strengthen institutions and develop the ethical standards needed to make those systems work.
