Africa’s green transition is projected to generate tens of millions of jobs by mid-century, many of them for women, according to new research commissioned by FSD Africa, Shell Foundation and Shortlist. But, while that might sound like progress the reality, says Tokunboh Ishmael, Managing Director and co-founder of Alitheia Capital and a board member of FSD Africa, is that without concerted action this will do little for women’s empowerment.
Writing for Ecofin, Ishmael makes the case that women’s rising participation in green sectors like clean cooking, off-grid solar and waste recycling is masking a deeper problem: they are being concentrated in the lowest-paid, least protected, most precarious tiers of these value chains, while technical and supervisory roles remain overwhelmingly male. Addressing this imbalance is not just a matter of fairness but of returns, she argues.
When Africa talks about its green transition, it counts megawatts, tons of carbon avoided, and dollars mobilized, but new research commissioned by FSD Africa, Shell Foundation, and Shortlist has now given us a number for something we often miss: people. Africa’s green transition could generate up to 7.9 million jobs by 2030, and up to 84.5 million by 2050.
But there is another number that should interest anyone allocating capital on this continent. By 2030, women are projected to hold 31 percent of green jobs, rising to 44 percent by 2050. While it is tempting to read that as progress, it is not. 31 percent is below women’s current share of the workforce, and the report suggests it is a gap that remains entrenched.
I have spent close to twenty years investing in African businesses, the last decade of it through an explicitly gender-lens fund, and I have learned to be suspicious of headcount. Counting women is not the same as including them.
Across all three countries studied in the report, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, women are concentrated in commission-based sales, community distribution, and subsistence micro-trading. Men, meanwhile, dominate the technical, field-based, and formally contracted positions where earnings and progression actually live. So, we are on course to build a green economy that hires millions of women into work that is unskilled, low-paid, and unprotected. That is being called inclusion, and it is not an accident of culture. It is a consequence of design, and a huge transformative opportunity missed.
The reasons lie in the fact that, unlike other regions, Africa’s transition will be driven by decentralized, service-led industries such as clean cooking, off-grid solar, waste recycling, and electric mobility, rather than by large infrastructure projects. Those value chains have the lowest barriers to entry, which is precisely why they are the most accessible to women.
But the same distributed, low-capital delivery models that let women in also channel them into the segments with the weakest job quality. The report found that 86 percent of the green jobs projected for 2030 will be informal. Labor protections designed for formal workers will reach at most 14 percent of that workforce.
When we look at the root causes of this imbalance, one thing stands out: there simply isn’t the focus on training and development needed to move women up the employment value chain. For instance, women make up just 15 percent of certified solar PV trainees, and female enrolment in technical programs rarely exceeds one in five.
Nor is this just a problem confined to women. Only 6.5 percent of young people in Africa have completed a technical and vocational program. Meanwhile, deployment increasingly requires skills such as remote monitoring of distributed assets and battery management. Yet none of the three countries studied has national training programs for these roles at meaningful scale, let alone ones that women can access.
The report warns that without a skilled local workforce, green projects could stall, rely on imported expertise, and struggle to deliver local economic benefits. The scale of the gap is stark. While the continent holds 60% of the world’s best solar resources, it accounts for just 2% of the world’s renewable energy workforce. That shows just how much the skills deficit could be holding us back.
Investment in training alone will not fix this. But the report finds that where local governments and industry have also addressed barriers such as childcare at TVET institutions, female participation and completion have measurably improved.
This is not charity, and it is not about compliance. It is smart economics. Women are producers, distributors, owners, and customers in exactly the value chains this transition depends on. Most clean cooking and solar home system customers are women, which is why distribution works when the agent looks like the customer. Refusing to invest in their skills is leaving money on the table.
In our own portfolio, I have seen how small the fix can be and how large the return. We have walked into factories as recently as 2020 where there were women on the line, yet no women’s restrooms. Poor lighting also made parts of the plant feel unsafe.
When we insist on fixing those things, and on employee share ownership, we are not running a welfare program. We are raising the bar for the whole workforce, men included. When you improve conditions for the people who make your product and serve your customer, you get a better product and better service. That is the return.
A 2024 report by Mastercard Foundation and McKinsey estimated that young women’s fuller economic participation could create 23 million jobs and add up to $287 billion to Africa’s economy by 2030. This is a five percent boost to GDP.
Their more sobering finding was that young women’s contribution to Africa’s GDP has gone backward, from 18 percent in 2000 to 11 percent in 2022. So, while we congratulate ourselves on participation rates, the trend is running against us.
What should those of us who allocate capital do? Stop treating workforce development as someone else’s line item and write gender covenants into deal conditions from the outset rather than as afterthoughts. Earmark a defined share of deployment capital for skills.
Fund the things that convert training into credentials and credentials into progression: recognition of prior learning for informal technicians, micro-credentials tied to national qualification levels, paid attachments rather than unpaid ones, childcare at training institutions, safe transportation for field roles, and women-only cohorts with employer-guaranteed placement.
Give micro-distributors the working capital to move off commission-only tiers, because women exit informal green roles at disproportionately higher rates when there is no progression pathway.
And change what we measure. Not how many women, but where they sit: who receives technical training, who moves from frontline sales into installation and maintenance, who advances into management, who owns the suppliers, and who earns more.
Africa cannot finance infrastructure and leave the workforce to chance. We have one chance to build these value chains from something close to scratch.
If we invest in the women who will run them, in their technical skills, their credentials, their conditions, and their ownership, the green transition could be the most powerful engine of women’s economic empowerment this continent has ever had. If we do not, we will have spent a great deal of money hiring tens of millions of women into the bottom of a new economy that looks remarkably like the old one.
By Tokunboh Ishmael, Managing Director and co-founder of Alitheia Capital, and FSD Africa Board member.
