By Chris Maclay

Back in 2022, I wrote a blog about my one-year-old son, Callum. 

The Jobtech Alliance is roughly as old as he is, given that it emerged from a bunch of fruitful conversations with jobtech entrepreneurs like Sayo Folawiyo (Kandua) and Paul Breloff (Shortlist) during my time as a full-time dad and hip-hop beatmaker.

That blog described the first year of the Jobtech Alliance as ‘the year of shouting.’ Much like little Callum at the time, year one of an emerging ecosystem was focused on gaining attention. ‘Hey, check out this jobtech thing’, we shouted, ‘this is really important for the future of work.’ Through blogs, webinars, and meet-ups, we began to build awareness of the jobtech ecosystem’s potential to address youth employment in Africa.

Just like Callum, the emerging Jobtech Alliance managed to get attention; people started to realise that jobtech was ‘a thing,’ and that it really matters in reducing youth unemployment in Africa. While the first year of the Jobtech Alliance involved an informal and organic mix of blogs, webinars and meet-ups, in the second year we were fortunate to receive funding from the Dutch Challenge Fund for Youth Employment (CFYE), the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), the Small Foundation, and others. It was time to Walk, Run and Jump. We began to formalize our work, hosting a range of communities, providing Venture Support to platforms, running an investor network, and more.

Age three is when kids stop being ‘toddlers’ and start being, well, ‘kids.’ They achieve significant language, physical, social, and emotional development and start to understand who they really are. 

For the Jobtech Alliance, as we come to the end of a period of support from the Small Foundation and Wasafiri to help build our capacity as a systems change initiative, this blog summarizes what we’ve learned about ‘who we are,’ and how we can most effectively achieve our objective of “Catalysing an inclusive jobtech sector to create and improve jobs in Africa.” 

Our Systems Change Model

Our framework for thinking about systems change involves three levels:

– Behaviours: Principles for how we operate to ensure that our work has the greatest chance of achieving impact at a systemic level

– Practice: Activities that have the greatest potential to influence the ecosystem towards change.

– Systemic Impact: A broader vision of success that extends beyond direct actions.

Behaviours

Much like Callum in his first three years, we spent much of the equivalent period learning what behaviours enabled us to achieve our goals. We introduced our systems change principles a year ago, which were immediately hugely impactful in guiding the way we operate. For example, our principle of ‘Get everyone in. Do the work together’ fostered collaboration across the ecosystem, leading to impactful initiatives such as a YouTube series with The Flip, which reached over 28,000 viewers, and the development of a quality of work measurement tool with the International Labour Organisation.

However, our initial behaviours had some flaws. One was a lack of subtlety; ‘Have we forgotten anybody?’ suggested that inclusivity was an afterthought, rather than a leading principle. Some things we had learned needed to be incorporated; it wasn’t about ‘getting everyone in,’ it was about getting the right stakeholders that have the leverage to impact the system. Other key drivers of our behaviours were not represented, such as the need for bold experimentation and a commitment to learning as central tenets. We therefore revised our Principles:

Practice

Our core operational model has not changed drastically since we started walking:

Our original assumption that community and learning would form the foundation of our work has held true, and there has been a huge appetite for both. Our 93 learning products have reached 70,000 individuals, and we’ve hosted and promoted jobtech at 71 events with over 6,000 people. We’ve learned that maximising reach and impact requires collaboration with others.

One surprising development has been the emergence of a ‘community of communities’  from our community of 1,600 individuals, reflecting the diverse interests within the broader ecosystem:

• Platform Members: A network of 170+ jobtech platforms in Africa. CEOs and senior leaders participate in peer learning activities through a WhatsApp group and regular opportunities to share knowledge and resources.
• Jobtech Investment Network: A coalition of 50+ funding institutions (venture capital and philanthropic), interested in investing in jobtech platforms. These investors receive bi-monthly updates that include information on investable start-ups, sector insights, and tailored support to enhance their understanding of jobtech opportunities.
• Jobtech for Refugees Community of Practice: Focused on the intersection of jobtech and refugee support, this group of stakeholders includes humanitarian actors that collaborate bi-monthly on research and shared learning, contributing unique insights into vulnerable populations.
• Measurement in Jobtech Working Group: A small, expert-led community developing tools to measure jobtech’s impact, including a user-focused quality of work tool currently in piloting.

While community remains central to our work, we are transitioning toward a community-as-a-practice model, where community engagement is embedded across our team’s functions.

The one entirely new area of work since we started walking, driven by our systems change principle to ‘Consider the whole system and respond to emerging needs,’ is the introduction of the Demand Generation workstream. While conducting Venture Support, we recognised that we were providing commercial support with most of our platforms, particularly those in the digital work space who were targeting global employers. While we recognised that we could not provide Venture Support for every digital work provider on the continent, we needed to address this more systemically, which we are now exploring through a range of interventions.

While a systems change approach necessitates dealing with the enabling environment, we need to cultivate both immediate successes alongside long-term impact. Think about a tomato plant: 

Our work on the enabling environment concentrates on the soil. The ecosystem needs the right nutrients (community, learning), water (funding), potting (policies), etc. But if we’re not going to persuade any actors to keep watering the plants unless they can see the fruits of their work. We need some juicy tomatoes. 

Our Venture Support efforts focus on cultivating ‘juicy tomatoes’ – high-potential start-ups that demonstrate the tangible benefits of investing in jobtech. By providing tailored support (from product development to commercial strategy to market expansion) to over 30 companies to date, which collectively provide income opportunities for over 70,000 individual users, we’ve helped them to grow in ways that have created and improved quality jobs for 17,000+ users, half of whom are female.

Systemic Change

While we are busy tilling the soil and tending to the juicy tomatoes, we need to make sure that we’re keeping an eye on the whole plant. Is it growing deeper roots? Are the seeds in these tomatoes going to grow into new plants? True systemic change occurs when the ecosystem evolves due to collective contributions rather than direct interventions. It requires a shift in the system’s dynamics, akin to cultivating an entire field of thriving plants.

Measuring the contribution of your plant to the whole field is tricky to do. You can only do it if you look for it. We’ve articulated some of the areas that we expect to see systems change occuring (if we do our work right):

• Enhanced sectoral recognition, collaboration and learning: Greater sectoral recognition, collaboration and learning among jobtech stakeholders will drive sustainable solutions for inclusive job creation through jobtech platforms in Africa. 
• Increased innovation: Insight-generating venture support sparks innovation, replication of best practices and investment in the jobtech sector. 
• More action to improve outcomes of female users: Evidencing and amplifying the business case for women on jobtech platforms inspires funders, platforms, and other stakeholders to invest in solutions which improve female outcomes on platforms. 
• Increased global demand for African talent: Global connections and an enhanced reputation of African talent will increase global demand for African youth on jobtech platforms. 
• Increased funding into impactful and sustainable businesses: An informed and engaged jobtech investor network drives funding into impactful and sustainable businesses. 

Some of these areas we’re already seeing early successes around. Before 2021, as far as we’re aware, the term ‘jobtech’ had only been used by India-based Unitus Ventures in their investment thesis, and US-based education-to-employment newsletter, Gap Letter. But within Africa, we’re starting to see actors intentionally recognising the sector (see below from 54Collective (South Africa-based investors) incorporating ‘jobtech’ their sector map, CFYE (Dutch-based funder) integrating jobtech into their strategy, Sayna (Madagascar-based start-up) self-identifying as jobtech, to the Response Innovation Lab (refugee-focused humanitarian organization) mapping jobtech solutions in Uganda.

What’s Next: Building a Thriving Ecosystem

As the Jobtech Alliance enters its third year of development, similar to the growth and evolution of a three-year-old child, we anticipate further development – a growing maturity, strong opinions, and greater engagement with the rest of the world. While we will remain responsive to the ecosystem’s needs, several key priorities are already clear:

• Focusing on Agents of Change. We need to ensure that we’re bringing the right stakeholders into the ecosystem, and targeting the right ones with the right research. While we’ve so far taken an entirely ‘community’ approach, we need to take more of an advocacy approach, targeting key stakeholders who are not part of our community (and may never be part of our community) with information relevant to them.
• Balancing a Big Community with Tailored Engagement: As our community continues to grow and our learning content expands, we need to maintain the balance between leveraging a big crowd, and offering the tailored engagement to ensure that community members have the stuff that is most relevant to them. This will come from creating more subcommunities, proactive network management, and from using a tagging system to provide tailored learning content for each individual.
• Doubling Down on High-Impact Workstreams: Our work around global demand and the Jobtech Investment Network are going to be critical to our mission, and our gender-focused work really needs to double-down on demonstrating the business case for female engagement.
• Creating a Flywheel Between Learning, Venture Support, and Community Engagement We will focus our internal work to ensure that our learning informs our venture support and our community work, while they inform our learning and each other. 

We’re excited about the Jobtech Alliance – and this tomato tree – turning three. We’re starting to see healthier soil, and some of those tomatoes are starting to look juicy. Callum, incidentally, is now four, so I’m getting a head start in seeing what could come next. Plenty of tantrums ahead. Let’s just hope he doesn’t eat all the tomatoes.

Join Us in Growing the Ecosystem

We’re proud of the progress made, but there’s much more to do. Whether you’re a platform, funder, or policymaker, we invite you to join us in shaping a thriving jobtech ecosystem in Africa. Contact us to explore collaboration opportunities.

The author is Program Director for Mercy Corps at the Jobtech Alliance