More entrepreneurs are committing to closing the skills gap in Africa’s future job market.
In 2015, an image of a young man, Tankiso Motaung, at a street corner in the middle of Sandton, Johannesburg, holding up a placard, went viral. On the sign were the words, “I have a BTech in electrical engineering. Please help. I need a job,” along with his contact number.
The following year, an image circulated on social media of Anthea Malwandle, a young chemical engineering graduate, standing by the traffic lights, similarly, begging for a job.
What is the future of work in a digitally-led world? Is it this dismal?
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2018 Future Of Jobs Report, reveals nearly 50% of companies expect digitization will lead to a reduction in their full-time workforce. It further estimates that by 2022, 75 million jobs globally would taper off as a consequence of digital business transformation.
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South Africa’s unemployment rate is already high. Motaung and Malwandle represent more than 50% of our youth that are unemployed. And according to Statistics South Africa, one out of three graduates will, likewise, enter the job market without any economic prospects.
But Nedbank economist, Isaac Matshego, is full of optimism. He is of the opinion that the initial job losses will be temporary.
“As humans get better acquainted and familiar with the new way of doing things and incorporating the new economic methods of production, we often see a net benefit to humanity overall,” he says.
More so, Matshego advocates that at the beginning, digitization actually requires human skills and so does the maintenance of the technology.
“That means we have to train our information technology staff,” he elaborates.
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The good news is that digital and other tech innovations will directly and indirectly produce new sources of work. The WEF report further suggests that 133 million new jobs may be created by 2022, thanks to industry 4.0.
But, for these opportunities to scale to the extent needed to address South Africa’s current employment crisis, there needs to be a strong supply of quality skills – spanning foundational skills like basic numeracy and literacy, through to advanced tech skills, according to Mark Schoeman, a manager of youth and technology at economic consulting firm Genesis Analytics.
“The first hurdle South Africa has to overcome is closing the skills gap in the short-term. There are an insufficient number of graduates with key skills in STEM being produced by educational pathways, and a qualification-job mismatch which sees graduates taking up work that does not reflect their qualification,” he says. Schoeman asserts this gap is an impediment to the country’s ability to realize new economic opportunities brought forth by technology.
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Government and private interventions have been made to ensure young people are training and learning critical skills to thrive in the changing world of work.
Heeding this call is WeThinkCode, one of the organizations fixated on future-proofing the youth. A non-profit, new-age technology school, WeThinkCode, led by Managing Director, Nyaradzai Samushanga, seeks to eradicate unemployment in the ‘tech’ economy by providing youth with skills sought after in the new world of work.
Headquartered in Johannesburg, the tuition-free school was founded in 2016 by three South Africans: Arlene Mulder, Yossi Hasson, Justinus Adriaanse and French citizen, Camille Agon. The institution enrols 430 students aged 17 – 35 years who are taught technical skills in software development including programming, graphics and algorithms.
“We do not measure success when students graduate. We measure success as placement at employment,” says Samushanga.
“All our graduates have been placed into permanent employment with a minimum entry-level salary of R20,000 ($1,408) per month… It is taking someone who could’ve fallen in between the cracks, and now they are a highly-skilled worker,” says Samushanga.
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More entrepreneurs are committing to the cause of closing the skills gap in Africa’s job market. Audrey Patricia Cheng, 25, the co-founder and CEO of Moringa School in Nairobi, Kenya, says: “We realized there was a massive gap in terms of access and also quality education. And we are seeing a massive rise in the number of jobs around technical skills because many companies are moving to the digital space.”
Since its inception in 2015, Moringa School has since trained close to 2,000 students with the necessary digital skills. Cheng is confident the continent is moving to a future where Africans would be creators of technology rather than just consumers.
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