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Africa is on the brink of a demographic shift that could define its future. With rapid youth population growth and accelerating urbanization, nations across the continent face enormous pressure to expand education, transportation, and job opportunities. This moment highlights the delicate balance between tapping into a potential demographic dividend and avoiding a crisis of mass unemployment and economic stagnation.
I would say that the greatest challenge that we face is, on the one hand, massive urbanization partly associated with rapid growth in the youth population that we expect to see continuing over the next, many decades. And so we are seeing rural areas becoming depopulated. And for the communities living behind, the underdevelopment of our rural areas is extreme.
And so road transport is a major concern. So overall, massive urbanization, spurred by growth in young people. And as a consequence of that, we facing a combination of many challenges in the first instance, our ability to provide education for this burgeoning youth population, whether it is, school education or undergrad university education or in between the technical vocational education, college education, we simply are nowhere near the demand, for educational opportunities.
Parallel to that, of course, is the question of jobs. We are simply nowhere near the demand for jobs, given the massive oversupply in the labor market to the combination of low to medium and increasingly even high skilled young people. Which you will have noticed, ten, fifteen years ago, we had seen the Arab Spring sweeping through North Africa, and that was largely associated with this huge oversupply of university graduates and undersupply of jobs in the labor market.
And we expect to see that becoming even more significant in the next two to 3 to 4 decades. And so massive concern about the economy. And so whilst we see in a number of instances, East and West Africa in particular, significant growth rates, unfortunately we also see significant inflation rates at the same time, negating the growth, in many respects.
But nonetheless, we're seeing significant growth in parts of the economy, in the last decade in particular, in the area of property development and more latterly, we're seeing significant uptick in the mining sector as the global demand surges for critical minerals associated with renewables. On the one hand, that are also associated with very ordinary things such as, computers, mobile phones, materials for the military, equipment, materials for commercial airlines, and so on and so forth.
And so if I was to put it in a nutshell, then we're seeing massive youth unemployment becoming a significant concern because there appears to be inadequate innovation and reflection. At the policy level and then at a follow through level, in respect of seizing opportunities for this demographic dividend, I think there is still a significant risk that this demographic dividend could become a malthusian disaster for us.
And so that has to be managed very carefully. Access to education, on the one hand, and training and skills for work and on the other hand, better matching between educational institutions and our offerings and the labor market. At the same time, we do need significant intervention in the economies [of] north east, west, southern Africa. If we are going to be able to, to benefit from this demographic dividend.