By Solomon Muigai, Jobtech Alliance Ecosystem Lead

This is part of a two-part series about our approach to growing the jobtech ecosystem in Africa. The other article, about taking a collaborative approach, is here.

The Jobtech Alliance was founded as a community of jobtech entrepreneurs to share learnings about what to do and what not to do when building jobtech platforms in Africa. While we have grown and evolved, community continues to be the foundation of what we do. So far, it has reinforced our belief that to create real change in the jobtech space, we need to establish an enabling environment that helps grow and improve job opportunities at scale.

Community has allowed us to be more than just a venture support partner; it enables us to actively engage with and support the real experiences of jobtech platforms as they work to create much-needed jobs for the continent. And in an environment where there is an excess of worlds to immerse ourselves in, but a dearth of meaningful connections, a community for jobtech founders has created a sense of belonging and a platform to share learning experiences.

A Jobtech Alliance mixer in Uganda

It has been amazing to witness positive changes from the controversial ‘build it, and they shall come’ idea, with strong organic growth observed over the last few years. What began as a 41-person informal Zoom call in 2021 has evolved into a community of 1,500 ecosystem members, with 150+ Platform Members at its core, spanning more than 30 countries across Africa and beyond, truly transforming this into what we envisioned: an alliance.

Through our collective efforts, we have cultivated a rich knowledge base packed with 84 platform-centric learning resources that have reached roughly 58,000 unique consumers. This has helped foster strong engagement, with almost two-thirds of our community members reading our newsletter each month and half of our platform members attending our events.

Community Evolution

Like startups, communities go through a lifecycle —the seed phase (beginnings of the community, which includes designing and crafting the experience), growth phase (community starts to organically grow and engage), maturity (the community becomes well-established), and pollination (collaborative action and decentralized communities). 

We’re currently in the late stages of growth, approaching maturity.

As we move forward, we need to reflect on our learnings and implement a new set of principles that align with the evolving needs of our community.

What got us here won’t get us there

As our community has grown, we’ve learned critical lessons that are reshaping our approach.

1. The ‘community function’ is bigger than that of a ‘Community Lead’.
   
   • In the early days, it was easy for a Community Lead to service the community in its entirety. But as the community grows, the Community Lead becomes overstretched. Currently, the ratio would be 1 Community Lead to 1,500 community members.  To sustain this growth, the community, or ‘community as a function’, needs to increasingly become a shared responsibility across the organization and within the community.
     
2. A growing community broadens member interests, creating the need for alternate personalized spaces.
   
   • The diversity of our community is a reflection of the vastness of the jobtech ecosystem, which encompasses multiple verticals, as shown in our jobtech taxonomy. Entrepreneurs are working on different business models in different geographies at different stages. Additionally, our community includes a range of stakeholders, such as ESOs, researchers, and investors.

Diversity can be a double-edged sword; it offers a wealth of insights and possibilities, but it can also lead to feelings of isolation as the connections between members aren’t always obvious. As such, constant weaving in and out is necessary to determine possible synergies between jobtech platforms and the wider ecosystem of corporates, ESOs, and VCs, and other sectors. 

For example, entrepreneurs working with plumbers may benefit from learning vetting practices from entrepreneurs working with drivers but less so from entrepreneurs working with Web3 developers. Similarly, questions about fundraising for pre-seed startups are very different from those for growth-stage startups.

3. Founders are busy and don’t want to be a part of a community ‘for the sake of it’.
   
   • Founders are, as they should be, highly focused on outcomes and prioritize curated spaces where interactions can drive their business forward. This means ensuring members have more touchpoints that deliver targeted insights, foster meaningful connections, and provide opportunities for collaboration. In the long term, the goal is to strike a balance between strategic learning and transactional opportunities—where valuable connections lead not just to ideas but to outcomes that advance their companies.
     
     

Community 2.0

We see Community 2.0 as a set of core principles designed to implement our key learnings and drive the next phase of growth, where the focus is on enhancing the quality of engagement and strengthening connections within the community.

Principle #1 – Community as a Practice

Building community starts with creating a sense of belonging—that’s the baseline. But high-quality outcomes and positive ecosystem-level effects emerge when everyone is involved.

Taking an active role means shifting away from Community as a Service (CaaS), where value is primarily provided by a single entity, to Community as a Practice (CaaP), where value is co-created and is a result of everyone’s input.

“Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. In a nutshell, Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” (Wenger circa 2007)

In practice, it means members provide value to each other by raising their hands and contributing insights in their areas of expertise. I’m glad this is a common appreciation across the board, where each platform member, upon joining the community, not only states what they hope to gain but also makes an offer to contribute. Moving forward, we will embrace these offers more as a form of value exchange, ensuring that together, we are greater than the sum of our parts.

This also looks like centering our focus on shared learning, problem-solving, and collective improvement in Communities of Practice (CoP). In the Jobtech community, we already have three CoPs, namely:

• The Measurement in Jobtech Working Group – a sub-community of leading experts, thought leaders and funders seeking to better measure the impact of jobtech on users.
• Jobtech Investment Network (JIN) – a sub-community of angel, commercial, and philanthropic investors interested in learning about the jobtech sector with the goal of increasing smart funding.
• The Jobtech for Refugees CoP (co-steered with Na’amal) – a sub-community of members interested in sharing knowledge, experiences, and best practices related to job opportunities for refugees.
  

We want to build an enabling environment for such CoPs to mushroom within our community so that members can rally together, collaborate in a regular rhythm, and venture deeper into a specific vertical to achieve a common goal.

Principle #2 – Big Community / Small Community

As gardeners, our role is not only to see the community as a whole but to recognize and value the unique needs of each member, supporting their individual journeys and growth where possible.

To achieve this, we aim to tailor experiences to the unique needs of each member. This means understanding their specific interests through better ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) over the span of a member’s journey. Then connecting their learning and network needs to the most relevant resources and collaborators on an ongoing basis. 

As a result, members will begin receiving more tailored learning products suited to their specific stage of growth. It will also allow us to effortlessly connect members with others who are tackling similar challenges and wider ecosystem players interested in jobtech, fostering a spirit of collective action and harnessing the power of shared intelligence.

Principle #3 – Learning is Embedded into the Member Experience

An active community typically has many rhythms—peer-to-peer connections, thematic events—but we want our heartbeat to be rooted in learning. We don’t just mean research papers; we aim to provide a front-row seat to what’s working in real-time—whether it is business models, partnership development, how to create and improve jobs, product development, customer targeting, and more. 

As it stands, we have a ton of platform-centric learning products, including blog posts, landscape scans, and online courses, and we strongly believe that the content itself helps founders build better platform businesses.

Landscape scans produced by the Jobtech Alliance focused on identifying common business models, key players, trends and business opportunities across the jobtech industry.

As we continue to roll out more learning products, we will innovate to ensure these learning resources reach our members when they need them most. Part of this entails enhancing content discoverability so that our members can sift, filter, and find what best suits their needs. It also includes bundling resources into curated learning journeys and utilizing our tagging system to direct members accordingly in their respective journeys.

Principle #4 – Network Management

Navigating a diverse community is no small feat.

“Having intentional (warm introductions) and serendipitous (intuitive member directory) routes to member discovery will help platform members build valuable relationships and fully engage with the community.”

The member directory is the first step to knowing who’s who in the community, allowing members to perform a quick scan to identify relevant connections—potential partners or clients. But it’s not always easy to kickstart relationships, and possible valuable connections aren’t always obvious at first glance.

Jobtech platform members at the Africa Jobtech Summit in a structured networking session

This is why we take an active role in matchmaking—facilitating more one-on-one connections and curating spaces where members can meet their desired partners and explore possibilities. For example, we might connect an ecosystem member in the telco space with a platform member building an agent super app or connect an ecosystem member in the financial space with a jobtech platform simplifying access to health and retirement for gig workers, freelancers, and self-employed. The combinations are endless.

We believe this has the potential to unlock possible collaborations, partnerships, and even business.

Charting the Way Forward

With the help of our community members, we believe we can break siloed thinking by bringing a diversity of thought, expertise, and experience to the complex challenge of creating or improving jobs at scale.

Our role remains to foster an inclusive jobtech community of builders, investors, Entrepreneur Support Organisations (ESOs), corporates, and others cracking on the job creation problem. We see ourselves as gardeners, nurturing the community with valuable insights and fostering cross-pollination by acting as the “worker bee,” connecting members who need to collaborate and identifying potential synergies that will help us cultivate a thriving, interconnected ecosystem.

Community remains and will continue to be our pathway to leaving a positive dent in the Jobtech sector.

The author is the Jobtech Alliance Ecosystem Lead.

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