Skills and employment: Africa’s HE sector is at a crossroads

How can African higher education systems create more opportunities for quality jobs? Can the global remote freelancing job market be transformed into decent work for Africans? Is there a growing talent pool in Africa that can accelerate the continent’s socio-economic development?

These are some of the questions that education experts attending the 23rd International Economic Forum on Africa 2024 tried to answer in Paris earlier in December. The forum was organised jointly by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Development Centre, African Sports & Creative Institute and the African Union Commission.

The OECD is an intergovernmental body with 38 member countries whose main agenda is stimulating economic progress and global trade.

In a webinar themed, ‘The Future of Education and Skills In Africa’, the experts appeared to agree that African higher education is at a crossroads as it is expected to provide in-demand job skills to a vast working-age population, which will double by 2050, accounting for 85% of the global increase.

Andreas Schleicher, the director for education and skills at the OECD, told participants that, if the productivity of Africa’s talent pool and the creation of decent jobs are to be realised, there is a need for investment early on in better foundational skills, at primary and secondary school level, before students proceed to the tertiary level.

However, according to Schleicher, there is a massive problem in Africa as most young people are not getting the required foundational skills, and access to quality higher education is scarce. “Improving young Africans’ educational proficiency is essential if any progress is going to be made,” he said.

Informal employment

Drawing from the analysis and policy recommendations of this year’s African Union-OECD Africa’s Development Dynamics report, the moderator of the webinar, Will Mbiakop, noted that 82% of African workers are in low informal employment, meaning no job security, benefits, or formal contracts.

“But now there is an urgent need for cutting-edge skills and new employment opportunities that can improve workers’ lives and boost economic productivity on the continent,” said Mbiakop.

Towards that goal, Stefania Giannini, the former assistant director-general for education at UNESCO and one of the webinar’s guest speakers, said Africa must invest better in higher education and skills development.

She told participants there should be political will to develop tertiary institutions capable of providing specialised knowledge to perform job-specific tasks, especially skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics or STEM fields, repairs, maintenance, graphic design, technical drawing and food production.

Changing skills’ demands

The webinar discussions revealed that African higher education institutions were lagging behind in training and upskilling workers. Although more than 80% of African youth in school aspire to work in high-skilled occupations, according to the Africa’s Development Dynamics report, only 8% get such jobs.

Unfortunately for Africa’s higher education, the demand for skills is changing fast and is hard to measure or predict. According to the report, most new skills’ demands arise from changing the task profiles of existing or emerging occupations and careers.

In this regard, another guest speaker, Hicham El Habti, the president of the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) in Morocco, urged colleagues in universities and technical institutions in Africa to radically change the current models of higher education and training and offer in-demand skills.

According to El Habti, African higher education should embark on institutional reforms, build collaborations and linkages at local, continental and global levels, and graduate students with recognised qualifications and skills to enhance their career development or support them to become entrepreneurs.

“We must learn to reward meritocracy and allow students to do what they can do best by providing scholarships and bursaries to those who could not afford full-cost tuition university fees,” said El Habti.

El Habti gave examples of how UM6P allows students to graduate with conventional degrees and recognises digital qualifications that students study independently using university internet facilities.

Artificial intelligence and green jobs

Most of the webinar’s guest speakers highlighted how artificial intelligence (AI) and green transitions could be an entry point to increasing productive employment and upskilling workers in Africa as, according to the Development Dynamics report, 70% of jobs in Africa will need digital skills by 2030.

Addressing the issue, Rosine Sori-Coulibaly, an economist and a former minister of foreign affairs in Burkina Faso, said African higher education should utilise AI to create new skill demands in every African country.

“We need people with intermediary skills in AI, and the market is telling us that our young people should take advantage of green energy and other green transitions,” said Sori-Coulibaly.

Dr Amel Karboul, a former Tunisian minister of tourism and currently the chief executive officer of The Education Outcomes Fund, called for wise investment in higher education in Africa and stressed that academic programmes should be aligned with job needs.

Karboul suggested that African higher education providers consider mounting super-intense one- or two-year AI training programmes and even shorter boot camps on coding and other specific digital skills to close the continent’s digital divide.

Through her experience providing digital skills to youths and linking them to jobs, Karboul said Africa can become an exporter of talent, considering African economic growth and friendly policies will not create jobs to absolve all the workers looking for employment by 2030 and beyond.

“The solution lies in the export of talent whereby skilled Africans can join the global freelancing market,” said Karboul.

However, to help new African workers join the remote freelancing digital market, Matina Razafimahefa, a Madagascan digital training provider, said African higher education should mainly offer skill sets relevant to the job market.

Razafimahefa, the founder of the Sayna platform [a Malagasy word for intelligence], said African higher education should embark on laying a firm foundation for a new generation of skilled professionals and entrepreneurs on the continent.

“Education that does not deliver job opportunities is more or less useless,” said Razafimahefa, whose organisation targets youths without traditional higher education or job opportunities and provides affordable coding, programming and digital literacy training in Madagascar.

According to Razafimahefa, the gig economy is a reality in Africa, and institutions of higher education should prepare themselves to educate independent freelance entrepreneurs. “Even the most marginalised young people, especially in rural areas, can thrive with the right digital tools and opportunities,” said Razafimahefa.

Contributing to the issue of new skills for a changing market for African skilled workers, Camelia Ntoutoume Leclercq, the Gabonese minister of education, stressed that, although there are opportunities for freelancing in AI and other digital-related work, people must graduate and earn qualifications and skills before they can become successful online remote workers.

Leclercq said online remote work for African workers would allow skills to remain in Africa, effectively averting the migration of tertiary-educated people.

According to the OECD migration datasets, highly skilled workers tend to leave Africa. For instance, in 2020, slightly over two million people, accounting for 47% of tertiary-educated persons born in East Africa, resided abroad in high-economy countries.

Although most of the webinar’s guest speakers agreed that quality education and skills development are key to Africa’s future, they were divided about how such an education could be delivered.

Schleicher felt most African countries were paying the high cost of low educational performance in foundational skills, as most young people in Africa were leaving primary and secondary education without the basic skills necessary to build on medium- and high-skilled careers.

The role of politics

According to Schleicher, the potential value of education is dormant in Africa, and it needs to be reawakened, not by throwing money at the problem, but by removing inefficiencies. “Poverty is not destiny, as some schools in other poor regions of the world are posting good foundational skills,” said Schleicher.

In her assessment of the way forward for African higher education and skills development, Karboul suggested that English language skills should be taught. She said French-speaking countries in Africa lag behind their English-speaking peers because most of the global remote digital market uses English.

Other takeaways from the webinar that undermine the future of higher education and skills in Africa include the radical shifts in education that occur whenever a new government comes to power in most African countries.

Speakers noted that, if higher education in Africa were to unlock the potential of the young African population, then there should be clear goals that are not driven by political passions.

Pressing problems also include armed conflicts by government and non-government actors, whose assault on higher education institutions are creating conditions in which students struggle to learn. Speakers also identified donor fatigue in supporting African education, poor coordination between private and public education providers, migration, gender inequalities and an increased population as challenges.

This means that, unless most of the shortcomings identified by the webinar guest speakers are addressed urgently, the aspirations of African higher education to build a talent pool to foster the continent’s much-needed future economic growth and sustainable development will be too hard to achieve.