Militants and Mitigants: A Scoping Review of Graduate Employability Discourse in Africa

This study investigates the factors militating against graduate employability in Africa and maps corresponding mitigation strategies to inform curriculum reforms and sustainable labour market integration aligned with SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) and the African Union Agenda 2063. Following the Arksey and O’Malley (2005) five-step scoping review framework and the PRISMA-ScR guidelines (Tricco et al., 2018), a systematic search across six databases (PubMed, ProQuest, Sabinet, EBSCOhost, Google Scholar, and library assist) was conducted. Of the 381 initially identified publications, 49 published publications between 2015 and 2025 met the inclusion criteria. Qualitative data synthesis was conducted using ATLAS-ti v8 open coding software. Four principal deterrents to graduate employability were identified across Africa’s regions: skills mismatch (grounded in 13 sources), inadequate graduate competence (12), systemic failure including corruption and poor governance (9), and negative self-perception (3). These challenges persisted consistently across pre- and post- COVID-19 contexts, suggesting structural, rather than temporal causality. The study advances a continental framework linking colonial educational legacies, institutional dysfunction, and individual-level psychological barriers to graduate unemployment. It contributes to theoretical debates on human capital development, calls to decolonial education, and designing of sustainable labour market policies in the Global South. The findings call for urgent higher education curriculum reforms in African institutions, including the phasing out of redundant programmes, integration of experiential and entrepreneurial learning, strengthening university–industry partnerships, and scalable government investment in agriculture and technology sectors as viable graduate-absorbing economic pillars.