Madagascar Digital Agriculture Could Add 250,000 Jobs

The broader economic significance goes well beyond Madagascar. The World Bank estimates 230 million jobs across the continent will require digital skills by 2030, highlighting a structural mismatch between the pace of digitisation and the workforce available to support it. For policymakers, the issue is no longer simply expanding internet access; it is whether digital adoption can create productive work quickly enough to absorb fast-growing labour pools, especially among young people.

In Madagascar, the labour-market pressure is acute. Roughly 420,000 people enter the workforce each year, according to a World Bank document cited in the GSMA report, while about 1.5 million people aged 15 to 24 are neither in work, education nor training. Nearly 98.9% of employed young people work informally, suggesting that even when jobs exist, they often do not provide stable wages, formal contracts or the skills ladder investors and governments are looking for.

The GSMA’s report, “Madagascar Digital Economy: Policy reforms that will drive Madagascar’s digital future,” argues that digital agriculture could create demand not only for farm labour but also for software developers, agronomists, data specialists, trainers, logistics workers and operators of digital marketplaces. Madagascar’s agricultural digitalisation strategy for 2024-2028 points to matching platforms that would help connect producers and agricultural workers, potentially easing a longstanding labour-market friction in which farmers struggle to hire and workers struggle to find openings.

That matters economically because digital tools can improve productivity in a sector that remains central to food supply, rural incomes and export capacity. If digital platforms reduce delays in hiring, improve input distribution, strengthen traceability and cut waste in logistics, they can raise output without relying only on larger land use or physical capital spending. For a low-income economy with limited industrial depth, that can make agriculture a larger engine of both employment and formalisation.

But the opportunity is constrained by infrastructure and affordability. The GSMA says mobile broadband covers 66% of Madagascar’s population, yet mobile internet penetration was only 14.3% in 2025, and about a third of the rural population remains outside 4G coverage. Only 15% of rural households have electricity, while entry-level smartphones remain too expensive for many users. Those frictions limit how quickly digital services can scale and narrow the return on investment for platforms designed for farmers, workers and rural entrepreneurs.

The skills gap may be the hardest constraint of all. Nearly 70% of Malagasy young people do not study beyond primary school, and 19.3% of those aged 15 to 24 are illiterate, according to the World Bank data cited in the report. Employers already say they struggle to recruit workers with sufficient training in agriculture, information technology and energy. That means digital job creation will depend not just on apps and networks, but on education, vocational training and basic literacy.

For investors, the narrative is two-sided. The bull case is that digital agriculture and related services can unlock a large, underpenetrated market for telecom operators, device makers, software firms, training providers and platform businesses. The bear case is that low connectivity, weak power access and thin household purchasing power will keep adoption below the levels needed to justify rapid monetisation. In that sense, Madagascar looks like a microcosm of a wider African challenge: digital transformation is creating a new class of jobs, but the region still has to build the infrastructure and human capital to fill them.