Global Courant 2023-04-17 17:37:43
On a macro scale, we all remember 2022 for different events, depending on what impacted us the most. Geopolitics fans will not forget the war between Russia and Ukraine, and football fans will not forget the World Cup. The same goes for technology: everyone remembers 2022 as a tech winter, when capital markets became more cautious about financing and we saw an unprecedented number of startups close. And if that wasn’t enough, we witnessed the Great Layoffs. Tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Twitter, among others, have laid off legions of techies. The wave of layoffs did not spare Africa’s young ship: more than 1000 techies in startups lost their jobs in 2022.
You would expect these statistics to deter young Africans from pursuing engineering careers. But that is not the case. What we’re seeing is the opposite: a year-over-year growth in interest. According to them Impact Report 2022When Ingressive for Good, a leading African ed-tech nonprofit, called for applications for its tech training programs, it received 257,100 applications. That was almost three times as many people who signed up in 2021. And it didn’t stop there. The grants awarded and trained young people have also more than doubled compared to 2021.
The effects of this growing interest are also visible in the general community of Ingressive for Good. The number of new members last year was more than the previous two years combined. The number of followers also grew by 170% on social media platforms, while the student community increased by 269% to 91,600 students.
Before 2022, most people only associated the tech industry with seemingly easy, high-paying jobs. But that is not the case. Last year was a harsh reminder that the tech industry can be volatile and building a career in it requires resilience and determination. What we saw in 2022 was a large-scale resistance to a bear market by African youth to become part of the continent’s burgeoning tech ecosystem. The other argument would be that techies went through the entire Gartner hype cycle in one year.
Image credit: F12.net
The reasons for this great interest among young people and the resulting impressive growth of Ingressive are not unknown. Firstly, there is a lot of unemployment in Africa. And according to the World Bank, young people makeup 60% of the continent’s unemployed population. Meanwhile, technology has a reputation for leaving (almost) no one behind. For example, the unemployment rate for tech occupations in the US stood at 2.3 percent in 2022, despite mass layoffs. With or without mass layoffs, the tech industry is still facing a talent shortage. In 2020, CNBC reported nearly 1 million unfilled tech positions with only 165,000 potential applicants. In the same year, 79 percent of CEOs was concerned about a shortage of technical talent worldwide, and 61 percent of HR professionals believed that a shortage of technical talent would be their biggest challenge in 2022.
The most effective plug for this gap is remote work, which allows companies to hire from anywhere. And so African youth are positioning themselves to be available to global opportunities by equipping themselves with in-demand technical skills.
The second reason is similar: African youth desire well-paid jobs, which are not sufficiently available outside of technology. In 2020, the World Bank reported that Sub-Saharan Africa had the highest poverty rates, with nearly 70 percent of the region’s population living below the $3.20 poverty line and nearly 90 percent below the $5.50 poverty line. Meanwhile, according to a report from Payscale, a tech employee earns 2x more salary than a colleague in a non-tech role, and the gap widens over time.
That is why the work of organizations like Ingressive for Good is so essential. Other organizations, such as ALX and AltSchool Africa, also focus on building tech talent for the market. Young people in Africa can be the answer to the global tech talent shortage, but they need to be trained to compete on that scale. And how well these young people compete will play a big part in Africa’s prosperity story.
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