The summit
On 11 and 12 June 2026, the World Bank Group held its 13th Youth Summit, at its Washington headquarters and online. The theme, FutureWorks: Designing Jobs for the Digital Age, focused on three areas: education and skills, entrepreneurship, and agriculture.
Delegates are selected on application. I took part online from Abidjan, including the FutureWorks Leadership Series with Makhtar Diop, Managing Director of the International Finance Corporation.
Why a business leader should care
A summit on jobs and digital technology may seem far from the daily work of a financial advisory firm. The opposite is true. I am an employer, and I advise employers. "What jobs tomorrow?" is not an abstract question: every business leader faces it when hiring, training or reorganising a team.
Three lessons
- Skills age faster than degrees. A degree is still a way in, but it says little about what someone will be able to do in five years. Hiring now means betting on the ability to learn.
- Digital technology shifts work more than it removes it. Production tasks, data entry, formatting, calculation, are being automated. Judgement, relationships and responsibility remain human. The real risk is for newcomers: if they no longer learn the trade through these repetitive tasks, they need another way to learn it.
- Entrepreneurship is an answer, not a miracle cure. Many young Africans start a business out of necessity. Creating a company has become easy; making it last remains hard. What matters is less the number of start-ups than their ability to grow and hire.
"A degree opens the door. The ability to learn decides what comes next."
Ange-Dorgeles BINDEMy view
Such gatherings can be criticised for staying at a distance from the ground: much reflection on the future of work, less on its actual conditions in economies dominated by the informal sector. A summit does not change a country in two days.
What it changes is how each of us sees our own responsibility. Mine, as a young business leader, is clear: train the people we hire, give them real responsibility early, and pass on what we learn. It is at that scale, one company at a time, that tomorrow's jobs are built.