OPPORTUNITIES FOR YOUTH IN THE DIGITAL AGE

About seven years ago, Joy Kendi decided to indulge her love for fashion and all things lifestyle. Still in university and living on a small student budget, she began to pay more attention to what international fashion bloggers were doing, and decided she could do it too since she already had the three things she needed to get started: passion, a camera phone, and access to the Internet.

Fast forward to today, and the young woman has amassed a following of 150,000 on Instagram and over 19,000 subscribers on YouTube. Now a brand ambassador for internationally recognised brands such as Ciroc and Samsung, Joy has over the last one year worked as a full time content creator, turning what began as a hobby into a thriving business.

Her advice to the young people who seek her out for mentorship?

“Think outside the box. With the Internet, you can do anything. You don’t have to be solving a big societal need – though you should if you can – all you need to do is fulfil a need.”

It sounds simple enough. But the real challenge lies in replicating her success across the millions of Kenyan youth looking for any kind of meaningful employment. A good number of them already spend upwards of six hours a day on social media anyway, so can the Internet give them what they’re looking for?

The pace of technological change has the potential to raise global income levels and improve the quality of life for populations around the world. In Sub-Saharan Africa, this change has become intimately intertwined with addressing youth unemployment by harnessing human innovation.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2018, technological advances such as ubiquity of high speed Internet and widespread adoption of big data analytics are set to dominate 2018-2022 as positive drivers of business growth.

With a continent of 1.3 billion people, over 50 per cent of whom are aged below 25 years, and the fastest Internet penetration growth rate (up 20 per cent compared to 2017, according to the annual Digital In 2018 report), Africa’s youthful population and rapid adoption of technology could place it at the centre of future global growth. But only if we give young people the opportunities they need to improve their lives.

The Internet specifically, has the potential to address prevailing youth unemployment challenges, creating valuable opportunities for economic prosperity and individual growth.

In Kenya for instance, where youth unemployment stands at about 30 per cent, affordable Internet access and smartphone penetration have served to create increasingly attractive self-employment opportunities for urban youth.

Digital progress is opening avenues through which young people cannot only create employment for themselves, but build sustainable businesses that are offering meaningful work to other young people. The Internet is for Africa’s youth, a powerful resource whose usefulness goes far beyond keeping them connected to family and friends: it’s increasingly becoming a source of livelihood.

Take the example of Sendy, the mobile-based package delivery and logistics start-up. Founded in 2014, the courier service has grown from three employees, including the CEO and Founder Meshack Alloys, to 75. Sendy contracts over 3,000 motorcycle riders and drivers to deliver parcels in Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa and Thika, and recently celebrated having signed up 5,000 businesses, including Safaricom, to its platform.

The successes of both Meshack and Joy offer a glimpse into the opportunities that can be unlocked by young people growing up in the digital age.

For Sub-Saharan Africa, the greatest long-term benefits of this age are likely to be found in the promotion of home-grown digital creators and designers, not just digital users. It’s a vision of the future that gives hope to what was once referred to as “the dark continent”, one whose rising population growth is considered both a blessing and a curse at the same time.

The key challenge then, for governments and the private sector, is to reshape the skills development agenda to prepare the youth for their exposure to the jobs landscape of the future, much of which will be digital. Urgent reskilling and up-skilling efforts are needed, focusing in particular on strengthening education that positions the youth favourably to embrace – and create – new technologies, and in so doing providing sustainable solutions to the challenge of youth unemployment.

It’s what Safaricom is doing through BLAZE, a youth network that has so far reached over 40,000 youth through the Be Your Own Boss mentorship summits, trained 2,000 youth and funded 28 youth-owned businesses through its annual creation camps.

These summits and camps are opening up youthful eyes to the Internet’s potential to create high quality employment, improve job quality and productivity, and shape the future of business and entire economies through the experiences of young people like Joy – who also happens to be a BLAZE mentor.

By seizing these opportunities, we can deliver the tools required for youth-led enterprises to create sustainable businesses, empower a generation of highly motivated, innovative youth, and in so doing, secure the future of a continent whose star is still rising.

First published on The Business Daily on 29th January 2019.