The Lancet reports that global birth rates have dropped from around five children per woman in 1950 to 2.2 children in 2021 and is likely to continue to drop to 1.59 by 2100. While the rest of the world debates the advantages or disadvantages of these declining birth rates, Africa is facing the opposite issue, with birth rates remaining high. It is projected that by 2050, more than one in four people on earth will be Africans, and by 2100, more than half of all babies will be born in Sub-Saharan Africa.

A steadily increasing population could be bad or good, depending on the availability of resources and the nation’s ability to effectively manage that growth. In Africa, however, an increasing population poses issues like a rising unemployment rate. According to a World Bank report, by 2035, Africa’s working population is expected to grow to 70% or 450 million people, and without effective intervention towards unemployment rates, only 100 million jobs would be available to them. The point of all this data is to highlight a looming (or more dangerous) unemployment issue on the continent and also show Africa’s strength and potential as the labour force of the future.

At various times, there have been conversations about tech’s inability to solve Africa’s fundamental problems, including unemployment. These conversations have also included calls for innovators and founders to start building useful solutions particular to the African continent and its people—African tech for African problems. While certain barriers, including low but improving digitalisation rates, make this a seemingly difficult feat, job tech presents a good opportunity to bridge the unemployment gaps in Africa.

What is JobTech?

Jobtech is broadly defined to include startups across different clusters. In this Briter Bridges report, in partnership with Jobtech Alliance, they broke down job tech into five categories.

• Platforms for digitally delivered work: They facilitate the transaction and process of hiring people to get jobs done and delivered online or remotely—for example, a copywriter on Fiverr.
• Platforms for offline work facilitate the employment of mainly blue-collar workers by connecting them with available jobs. These platforms allow people to hire domestic workers, security workers, etc.
• Digital tools for worker enablement: These companies provide tools to manage and optimise their processes, from verification to payroll to handling legal issues.
• Digitising micro-enterprises: These startups are responsible for connecting the informal workforce with more formal opportunities via digital platforms.
• Tech-enabled skill building: These tools and software help prepare workers for employment by providing them with certifications and training.

So, jobtech could refer to tech startups that fall into any of these categories, provided the end goal is to help people get employed or manage their employment.

So, job tech here refers to the digital/technological platforms that help connect people with full-time or freelance jobs. Examples include platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, and even Andela, a Nigerian startup and unicorn that connects software engineers with positions globally.

Africa’s Jobtech Gap: Solutions

The Gap

Globally, there is a tech talent shortage, with 79% of CEOs concerned about the availability of talent. In November 2019, CNBC News reported that there were nearly 1 million open IT roles in the United States alone, with not enough talent to fill them. The economic implications of this shortage in the United States alone are up to a $162 billion revenue loss by 2030 if nothing is done to fix the gap. And yet, with efforts to upskill, reskill, and adjust requirements, the situation remains unchanged.

The Solution

In this comparison of Nigeria and India’s tech industries, data showed that Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) accounted for 60% of India’s service exports and was on its way to creating six million jobs by 2025. BPO is a subset of job tech that refers to outsourcing parts of a business’s functions to third-party individuals or companies. These functions could include IT services, customer service, marketing and sales, human resource management, etc.

Africa is currently home to 450 million working-age people and not enough jobs. With the adoption of remote work in 2020, more companies have become more open to hiring global talent. According to a Google and Accenture report in 2021, the number of developers on the continent rose from 690,000 to 716,000 between 2020 and 2021. While the working-age population globally may be thinning, it is only getting wider in Africa. This presents an opportunity for governments, founders, and investors to convert this increasing and available labour into skilled labour.

Opportunity Areas for Jobtech Innovations

Given the current gap and solution of outsourcing jobs to Africa, innovations have to revolve around preparing talent for those jobs. These are three important innovation areas for jobtech in Africa in the coming years:

• Startups that educate and train talent for the workforce: With a lot of edtech startups, the focus is on acquiring technical skills and training people to become software engineers, programmers, developers, and the likes. Equally important as these technical skills are non-technical ones such as customer service, marketing, sales, business analysis, etc. To ensure Africa has a large pool of qualified or skilled talents, more startups need to be created to cater to training people in valuable skills that extend beyond technical ones. In a list of the 10 most commonly outsourced jobs to the Philippines, the leading destination for all BPO transactions, virtual assistants, medical transcriptionists, digital marketers, call centre agents, graphic designers, and data analysts were some of the non-technical roles mentioned. Also, with the growth of artificial intelligence, related skills like prompt engineering and data cleaning are essential.
• Startups that help employers compliantly hire talent around the continent: These companies will be responsible for vetting talent and placing them in jobs around the world, ensuring employers are legally compliant in their affairs in the countries they hire from. These startups will also provide tools and software for employee management and payroll handling, as well as support to these businesses expanding and hiring across the continent.
• Startups that protect workers' rights: These companies will be a cross between legal tech and job tech by providing protection for employers and employees to help manage cross-border relationships and workers' rights. An example of a global hiring situation that could have benefited from the presence of legal protection was Open AI’s use of Africans to label and clean data that included graphic content such as murder and sexual abuse. This left many of the staff traumatised and for as little pay as less than $2 per hour. With an expansion of global hiring will come an increase in worker exploitation. Startups in this sect can ensure these cases are not the majority experience.

Possible Challenges to the Industry’s Growth

While the opportunity for Jobtech to help bridge the unemployment and global talent shortage gap exists, challenges could make it difficult to innovate in this area. Some of these are:

• Low internet presence: Although Africa has grown from only about four percent of the total internet users worldwide in 2009 to 13 percent in 2021, the continent’s internet penetration rates— 36% in 2021, according to the World Bank— remain below the global average of 66 percent and the lowest worldwide.  A lack of access to digitalisation caused by poverty, low digital skills, high data costs, and even poor network connections are some of the biggest challenges growth in this area will face. More significant efforts can be made by governments to equip the younger generation with training to improve their digital skills. A good example of this is how the Kenyan government has made it mandatory for programming to be taught in primary and secondary schools. There is also the option of building tech platforms that are accessible to even those in regions with poor internet connections, such as this Indian startup that built a food delivery app specifically for ‘the internet shutdown region of the world’ with only 2G internet services.
• Lack of effective regulation: Alongside a global talent boom would likely come exploitation issues, whether by foreign employers, startup founders, or, in some cases, even the government. Regulation is necessary in this area to protect the interests of key players in this industry, especially the workers. An example of such regulation is the European Union Teleworking Agreement for Social Security, which protects the social security coverage of remote or teleworkers with employers in the European Union.

In an X thread, startup investor Osaretin Victor Asemota wrote: ‘The next big thing in Africa is the seemingly mundane process of getting young Africans to work. Something the likes of Andela started about a decade ago, and we didn't realize how it led to a bump in available skills, ideas, and ventures. It wasn't the first time it happened. It is not just education but education + work. It is not only outsourcing or remote work but all types of work. There is all the talk of AI taking jobs, but for Africans, it will be a case of AI giving jobs.’ For a continent as abundant in people as Africa, it is about time to start capitalising on that by developing the people who will, in turn, contribute to the global economy.

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