There was a time when a university degree came with an almost implicit guarantee: a desk, a payslip, and a place in the middle class. African parents sold cattle and made extraordinary sacrifices because higher education was seen as the surest escape route from poverty.

Today, that promise rings increasingly hollow. Across the continent, graduates are discovering that while their degrees are easier to obtain than ever before, jobs are not. Some spend years searching for formal employment and others cycle through temporary contracts, internships, and poorly paid gigs. Many eventually confront an uncomfortable reality, which is that the economy is simply not producing enough white-collar jobs to absorb the growing ranks of educated young people.

A study by South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council that tracked 500 graduates across 21 universities – nine in African countries and 12 in other countries – over five years found that only 16% of the sample moved smoothly from tertiary education into a job and remained in employment over the survey period.

In South Africa, graduate unemployment jumped from 5.8% in 2008 to 11.8% in 2023. However, when looking at young graduates aged 20 to 29 – a useful proxy for those newly entering the job market – the figure is even starker: 30.3%, or nearly one in three.

Meanwhile, in Nigeria, nearly one in four graduates is estimated to be unemployed, while it takes Kenyan graduates an average of five years to secure their first job.

Yet necessity has a habit of forcing innovation. Faced with shrinking opportunities in traditional employment, many young Africans are no longer asking where the jobs are. Instead, they are asking where the opportunities are.

The answer is emerging in places few policymakers, university career counsellors or ambitious graduates expected: agriculture. But not the agriculture of old, with images of hoes, dusty fields, and a subsistence life. Instead, it is agriculture as a technology-driven enterprise.

This was my key takeaway from a recent, beautifully written Al Jazeera news feature about Kenyan graduates who are turning to AI tools for farming instead of waiting for ever-elusive white-collar employment opportunities.

The story profiled two graduates whose lives embody Africa’s changing economic reality. Chepkorir Rotich left university more than a decade ago expecting to work as a business administrator. After years of chasing jobs and surviving on poorly paid contracts, she eventually found her footing on a farm in Kericho County. Today, she sells milk, vegetables, and poultry products, markets her produce through social media and runs a YouTube channel that shares farming knowledge with thousands of followers.

Another graduate, Geoffrey Kiprop, earned a degree in information technology (IT) in 2017 but has never secured formal employment. Instead of waiting indefinitely for an appointment letter, he built a mixed-farming enterprise that combines dairy, poultry, and crop production. By his own account, farming now generates more income than the contract IT work he occasionally undertook.

What makes their stories noteworthy is not that they ended up in agriculture, but how they practise it. Kiprop uses AI-powered applications to diagnose crop diseases from smartphone photographs, analyse soil nutrient deficiencies, monitor weather conditions, and manage livestock productivity. For her part, Rotich uses social media platforms to market her products and to build a personal brand around agriculture.

In short, the two young Kenyans are applying university-acquired skills to a sector many graduates would dismiss as beneath their qualifications.

Their experiences point to a broader opportunity that African policymakers would be wise to recognise. For years, agricultural experts have warned that the continent faces a looming demographic challenge in the countryside, with some estimating that farmers are on average 60 years old and will be retiring in less than a decade. While this figure is not universally accepted, there is little disagreement that young people associate agriculture with drudgery and low returns, regarding it as a profession of last resort.

The good news is that technology is transforming agriculture from a labour-intensive activity into a knowledge-intensive enterprise that young people will find appealing.

African governments would do well to pay attention. At a time when millions of graduates are struggling to find employment and concerns are mounting about who will replace an ageing generation of farmers, technology-enabled agriculture offers an opportunity to tackle both challenges simultaneously.