President Joseph Nyuma Boakai says his administration has created more than 70,000 short- and medium-term jobs. In a country where steady work can mean school fees paid, food on the table, and a little dignity restored, that is not a small claim. Any government that puts people to work in hard times deserves to be heard.
But Liberians have also learned, often through bitter experience, that not all jobs lead to progress. Some keep you busy; others help you move up. And so the real question before the country is not whether jobs exist, but whether these are the kinds of jobs people can count on -- jobs that build skills, grow income, and open a path toward middle-income life.
The President was careful with his words. These were "short- and medium-term jobs," created mainly through infrastructure, agriculture, social protection, and small business activity. We appreciate the honesty. It tells us these jobs are largely tied to projects, programs, and seasons. They are important for relief. But relief is not the same thing as transformation.
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This is why public debate around the 70,000 figures has become sharp. Some citizens question whether the number includes pem-pem riders and other informal hustle jobs that have existed for more than two decades. Even if government did not intend that, the suspicion itself reveals a deeper frustration. Liberians are no longer impressed by numbers that do not change their economic position. A job that cannot grow into a business, a profession, or a stable livelihood may help today, but it rarely secures tomorrow.
This is not a dismissal of honest work. A motorcyclist earns. A market woman earns. A day laborer earns. Yet, with the exception of market women -- many of whom have put their children through college -- many of these activities have a low transformation value. They survive, but they do not scale. They come without insurance, credit, training, or productivity gains. They keep people busy but rarely move households into the middle class. If job creation stops there, then we are managing poverty, not overcoming it.
The ARREST Agenda rightly places agriculture at the center of national development. Food security matters, and farming remains the backbone of rural livelihoods. But here again, we must speak plainly. For many Liberians, agriculture is still about survival before it becomes about business. Farmers plant, harvest, and still lose money -- not because they are lazy or ignorant, but because they lack storage, processing, reliable buyers, and access to finance. Even large farms struggle with spoilage and price swings because they cannot preserve or add value to what they grow.
This is where job creation quietly breaks down. You can count farmers as "employed," but if nearly half of their harvest rots or sells at giveaway prices, the job does not lift income. It traps it. Without storage, processing, and market access, agriculture produces effort -- but not prosperity.
And this is where the national conversation needs to shift. Liberia does not only need more jobs; it needs better pathways. Pathways from farm to processor. From trader to manufacturer. From scratch to marketable skills and from youth hustle to enterprise. Those pathways are built with entrepreneurship and enabled by technology -- two areas that remain oddly underplayed in our development thinking.
Technology is not a luxury. It is how modern economies organize trust, markets, and scale. It helps farmers know prices before selling. It links producers to buyers. It enables digital payments, logistics coordination, storage tracking, and credit histories. Across the world, technology has turned small efforts into large systems. In Liberia, it remains treated as an add-on rather than a foundation.
Part of the discomfort is understandable. Technology demands accountability. It records transactions. It reduces discretion. It exposes inefficiencies and corruption. Systems that leave digital trails make it harder for things to disappear quietly. That reality makes some policymakers uneasy. But avoiding technology to preserve comfort only preserves stagnation.
The President has pointed to future initiatives, including the Youth Entrepreneurship and Investment Bank and a forthcoming National Employment Acceleration Strategy. These ideas matter. They suggest an awareness that Liberia's future cannot be built on public works alone. But the public will judge these efforts by results, not projections. Will young people gain access to capital without political connections? Will training lead to real markets? Will businesses be able to grow, hire others, and survive beyond one administration?
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Liberia is a young country. Its energy lives in the hands of young people who are already hustling -- coding, repairing phones, farming, driving, tailoring, trading, creating content, building small services out of nothing. What they lack is not effort, but structure: finance that makes sense, markets that are reachable, power that is reliable, and systems that reward initiative instead of connections.
This is where job creation must evolve. Emergency jobs stabilize families. Growth jobs build futures. Counting short-term work may calm the moment, but only entrepreneurship -- supported by technology, skills, and fair systems -- turns effort into wealth.
So the real test facing this administration is not how many jobs it can announce, but how many ladders it can build. Ladders that allow a farmer to become a processor, a rider to become a logistics operator, a coder to become a tech employer, and a trader to become a manufacturer. Until then, we risk counting jobs we cannot count on -- while the promise of middle-income life remains just out of reach for the very youth meant to inherit it.
