Speeches
‘Investing in the Drivers of Inclusive Growth’: Transcript of Speech by President Tharman Shanmugaratnam at the University of Dar es Salaam, the United Republic of Tanzania on 9 June 2026
9 June 2026
Minister for Foreign Affairs and East Africa Cooperation, Mahmoud Thabit Kombo,
Your Cabinet Colleagues,
Vice Chancellor Professor William-Andey Lazaro Anangisye,
Excellencies,
Distinguished guests, Academics, and Students,
First, thank you very much, Minister Kombo, for your very thoughtful opening remarks, which were themselves a source of learning.
It is truly an honour for me to be here with my wife and delegation at the University of Dar es Salaam, which has nurtured generations of leaders in various fields, women and men who have brought Tanzania to where it is today, and those who now carry the promise of your country’s future. I am happy that this is a key feature of my state visit to Tanzania, at the invitation of President Samia Suluhu Hassan, with whom I had excellent discussions this morning.
We have embarked on a new phase of partnership between Tanzania and Singapore. It's a partnership where we seek to complement each other’s strengths. A partnership that creates new corridors in a world that's beset with uncertainty and rivalry. A partnership that builds trust and friendship as the basis of mutual prosperity.
Most fundamentally it is a partnership that reflects the belief that our two nations have held from the time we became independent, and that were expounded by our founding leaders, Julius Nyerere and Lee Kuan Yew. And that is the belief that a nation's wealth and dignity will be determined not by its financial resources or even its natural assets, but by the capabilities and unity of its people — capabilities and unity that are not handed to us by history, but which have to be continually developed and renewed at every stage of our nation's development.
That journey of development is now more complex and challenging, and no more so than in Africa. The World Bank projects that 500 million young Africans will reach working age over the next decade alone. If current patterns hold, only only about 165 million of them will find formal jobs, leaving a gap of about 335 million. A gap of that magnitude is unprecedented in any region. But It's not just a gap in numbers. It is potentially a gap that will be manifest in a loss of hope amongst young people and their sense of a future for themselves.
The creation of good jobs, therefore, is not just another chapter in a development plan, not just one of several objectives of a nation's development. Good jobs have to be the test of whether growth and development is succeeding and carries meaning for all people.
What this also means that it has to be the basic orientation of the whole of government, and the whole of society, to create good jobs. Every capacity in government, amongst enterprises, and in the whole of society, has to bend at the knee of creating good jobs for the population.
Education and training are of course fundamental capacities. Those who are involved in education and training will have to ask whether young people are acquiring not just credentials, but the skills that will hold them in good stead in their working lives — skills they can use in the job market, and that will enable them to acquire other skills as they progress through life.
But it is not just a matter for Ministries of Education, or Ministries of Labour or Manpower. The whole of government has now to be consumed by the mission of creating good jobs.
Infrastructure policy has to ask if roads, ports, power, and broadband are opening opportunities for enterprises to grow and hence for jobs to be created.
Trade and investment policy has to ask if a country is positioning itself in cross-border and global value chains, such as to create ladders for a continuing step up in productivity and incomes.
Digital strategies have to ask whether they create good jobs in every sector, from helping farmers anticipate the weather, know how much micronutrients and irrigation is needed in the soil, to helping firms small and large to reach markets and thrive in a new world economy; and to helping workers to continually upgrade themselves.
And macroeconomic and finance policies have to ask if we are maintaining market confidence in our currencies, and whether we are giving investors the sense that if they come in now, there will be stability and not unpredictable changes over time.
However, the starting point for Africa today is more challenging than other regions face, and certainly more challenging than when East Asia was at a comparable stage of development.
Besides the demographic challenge of a large youth bulge in your populations, we face step changes in the global environment. First, the rules and norms of global trade and investment have changed for the worse as we know, and are very different from when East Asia pursued industrialisation, from the 1960s to the 2010s.
Second, AI and related technologies will transform whole sectors of the economy. It will both disrupt and create. It will disrupt existing jobs, but also create new jobs. Africa and many developing countries may initially be at less risk of job disruption compared to the advanced countries. But the larger risk is that new jobs may not be created in the developing world. In other words, that a whole generation of youth lose out on that opportunity of being on a ladder of skills and incomes in a technology-enriched world.
Third, we face the present and growing implications of climate change. It affects all of us, wherever we are in the world, and most immediately those who are occupied in agriculture, which in Sub-Saharan Africa is about half of the labour force.
Yet these challenges for Africa also present opportunity, if they are accompanied by a step change in how we go about development, I believe we can succeed in Africa with bold and more urgent shifts in policies, regulations, and public-private partnerships.
And it is in the world's interest that Africa succeeds. It is in our interests for global peace, for global public health, and for global growth itself, because the creation of a large middle class in Africa is going to be a defining opportunity for the world economy over the next 25 years.
How might Africa transform challenges into opportunities? How do we convert disadvantage to advantage? I will highlight just a few points in the interest of brevity.
First, in education. The fact that Africa is starting from a less developed stage in higher education compared to other regions can be turned into an advantage. In Sub-Saharan Africa today, on average only 9-10% of young people are enrolled in post-secondary school education. In Europe and the US, it is 75-80%, and the more advanced economies of East Asia, well above 50%.
But a major problem faced around the world has been a mismatch between the knowledge and skills of graduates and the needs of the market. Too many graduates, trained in academic ways, are finding themselves without jobs or underemployed in the market, and frustrated in their ambitions.
Africa is not yet locked into a traditional model of higher education that is focused on academic learning. You can leapfrog to an education better to the jobs of the future, by expanding higher education through applied colleges and polytechnics and a high quality TVET (Technical and Vocational Education and Training) sector. In other words, you can create an education that is focused on capabilities rather than academic credentials.
A second way in which you can convert challenge to opportunity is in developing energy security and abundance. 600 million people in Africa do not have access to electricity. And in a world that will be transformed by AI, Africa starts with only 1% of the world's compute.
Africa will need vastly more energy over the next decade, and the next 25 years. This too is now an opportunity for leapfrogging: for achieving energy security and abundance by growing renewable energy and moving directly to a more diversified energy mix. Here too, Africa is not yet locked into traditional, fossil-based energy. And Africa has the solar, wind, and hydro-resources to be a major producer of renewable energy. So as you now double energy production to meet the needs of growing economies, and as you seek sustainability, the challenge will not be that of having to retire existing assets but of growing renewables and having a diversified mix of energy sources at a much earlier stage of development than any other region has had.
I should add that it will also be a major source of job creation. The International Energy Association has estimated that a million dollars spent on renewable energy production will yield three times as many jobs as in fossil fuel production. Growing renewables will be a means to both address climate change and to generate better livelihoods.
It does mean that we have to invest in a massive expansion in grids — transmission and distribution networks that are able to integrate intermittent solar and wind energy, and battery storage. This too, is an opportunity to create jobs through infrastructural development.
The public sector alone will not be able to finance this. It can only be undertaken by a major scale-up of public-private partnerships, together with bold support by the multilateral development institutions – the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the other Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs). Renewable energy and grids involve high upfront capital cost, but with low fuel costs that follow. Financing Africa’s energy revolution is a key priority, and is achievable.
Third, beyond just renewable energy, the whole green transition is a major opportunity for job creation in its own right. In fact, the larger potential than jobs in renewable energy, will be in those created by developing the bio-economy and nature-based solutions for addressing the climate challenge. They will also allow us to diversify livelihoods for rural populations. Developing bio inputs for agriculture; regenerating the land and biodiversity, managing the wetlands — all these create good jobs. So too, the jobs that can be created by greening every industry – from manufacturing to tourism – to meet the needs of more sustainable economies.
Fourth, Africa now has the opportunity of developing regional connectivity within Africa itself, and strengthening relations between regions, such as between East Asia and Africa. The starting point is again a disadvantage. Markets today in Africa are too fragmented, and often too small. They do not provide the opportunity to specialise at scale, and reap productivity growth, which is the only basis for raising incomes.
This too is a major opportunity. The African Continental Free Trade Area is a critical endeavour, and I would say that implementing its vision has to be made more urgent. The scale that can be achieved within an integrated African market is large. It will allow for agribusiness, manufacturing, finance, and a whole set of other industries to go up the value curve.
Cross-regional partnerships are also the solution for creating this scale, and that's why what President Samia Suluhu Hassan and I said about the prospect of a free trade agreement between the East African Community and Singapore is significant. It is about creating scale by linking up East Africa and Southeast Asia, not only to grow demand for products on both sides, but to allow firms and workers to move up on the learning curves through exports and achieve higher levels of productivity.
Finally, Africa does have the challenge and opportunity of strengthening governance and regulation. Policy stability, law and order, and the creation of transparent institutions are the ultimate enabler for long-term economic performance, better jobs, and inclusive development in every country.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) did a very interesting study recently. It estimated that if Sub-Saharan Africa was to close its gap in governance standards compared to other emerging regions by just 50%, it could lift in overall output in Africa by up to 20% in just five to 10 years. That is how significant governance and regulation is. It provides predictability, encourages investors and enterprises to create jobs, and it builds trust in a population. And it is not done by having to expand the government budget. Improvements in governance and regulation are not expensive; they are the ultimate way of getting economic and social benefit in a country without cost. In fact, they sometimes they lead to lesser expenditures because of greater efficiency.
I am optimistic about Africa. There is a new spirit of ambition, certainly as we see here in Tanzania and in your 2050 Vision. There is a youthfulness of spirit that you can feel in Africa, a youthfulness not just amongst the young, but those who are not so young.
And Africa, as I have highlighted, has the advantage of not having to be obsessed with what it should do with legacy assets. It can build for the future. By growing higher education and reorienting it to focus on capabilities rather than academic credentials; by leapfrogging in energy security through renewables; by engaging in substantial public-private partnerships to grow infrastructure for energy grids and for integration across the African continent; and by renewed and bolder efforts to strengthen governance and streamline regulations to provide predictability and confidence.
Africa can succeed, Tanzania will succeed, and it is in all our interests that you do so. Singapore in its modest way, will be a keen partner on this next phase of your development journey. Thank you very much once again for this opportunity to speak with you at this illustrious institution.