Turning talent into skills through eLearning

Africa is suffering a crisis marked by the decreasing shelf life of skills – a situation that has forced companies to import expatriates instead of employing local experts, according to Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, a former Ghanaian minister of education.

Speaking at the plenary session of the 14th International Conference and Exhibition on ICT for Education, Training and Skills Development, or eLearning Africa 2019, held in the Ivorian economic capital, Abidjan, from 23-25 October, Spio-Garbrah said the problem will intensify as the world fully enters the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

He faulted African education systems and, in particular, universities and other tertiary institutions for failing to prepare the next generation of African skilled workers.

Quoting the recent International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa: Navigating uncertainty, Spio-Garbrah told delegates the African academic environment was not meeting the rapidly changing skills requirements and the need for lifelong learning.

Manual labour

“What it means is that, although by 2050 Africa is projected to have about one billion workers, notably the largest workforce in the world, if nothing will be done about it, most of those workers will only be in manual labour,” said Spio-Garbrah, who is the current chairman of the Accra-based African Business Centre for Developing Education.

Addressing the topic of “Turning talent into skills and skills into success”, the former minister said African countries are facing skills training challenges, taking into account that over 50% of the continent’s workforce is illiterate. He said African youth should not be forced to rely only upon their natural talents but should be properly skilled in new technologies that create jobs.

Bitange Ndemo, an associate professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Nairobi’s Business School, observed that, despite the opportunities of emerging technologies such as robotics and the internet of things (IoT) among others, there had been growing resistance to technologies in some African countries because of fear that automation will take jobs away.

“On the contrary, new technologies have the capacity to boost young people’s talents to create new jobs that never existed before and sometimes give rise to new industries,” said Ndemo.

According to Jef Staes, a Belgian expert on learning experiences and organisational behaviour, there are opportunities for Africa to leapfrog and catch up with the rest of the world. “But to achieve the objective, the continent would have to embrace technological advances of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” said the author of the best-selling book My Organisation is a Jungle.

Start-ups

Linda Nanan Vallée, executive director of the Abidjan-based Digital Youth Foundation (Fondation Jeunesse Numérique), urged African governments to establish mentorship programmes similar to those of her organisation which helped graduates to establish start-ups.

At Digital Youth Foundation, workshops to grow talent in digital skills are held to encourage students to study ICT. In the past five years, the number of young people studying ICT and digital entrepreneurship has increased in Côte d’Ivoire.

“One thing that we are proud of is the Ivorian Startup Bill which is currently before parliament and soon will become a law that will bring together the government, private sector and talented incubators to improve the technical start-ups ecosystem,” said Vallée, who is also a senior advisor on ICT at the Côte d’Ivoire’s Ministry of Digital Economy and Post.

According to Professor N’golo Aboudou Soro, the general secretary of Cote d’Ivoire’s National Commission for UNESCO, African countries must strive to make digital literacy a priority, as over 230 million jobs in Sub-Saharan Africa alone will require digital skills by 2030.

“This is an opportunity that should not be missed,” said Soro, who urged African countries not only to promote digital learning in schools but to turn such skills into successes that will enable school leavers and university graduates to initiate technical start-ups and create jobs.

According to the International Finance Corporation’s report, Digital Skills in Sub-Saharan Africa: Spotlight on Ghana, only 50% of countries in sub-Saharan Africa currently have computer studies as part of their school curriculum, compared to 85% of other countries globally, and on that level alone, the continent seems ill-equipped to make best use of its human capital, or prepared for the looming disruption to jobs and skills brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

According to the IMF, Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest internet penetration in the world, while the uptake of e-commerce and other digital services is burdened by poor digital infrastructure.

But as Spio-Garbrah points out, there seems to be no urgency towards reshaping the skills development agenda by improving young people’s talents through curriculum reforms in higher education and by encouraging adult distance e-learning initiatives.

In this regard, insufficient understanding of the disruptive changes under way in the continent’s labour market is likely to remain an obstacle to youth translating their latent talents into valuable skills.