By Chris Maclay

This is the second of a four-parter about job creation in Africa. It looks at specifically how digital work platforms need to create work for global companies rather than just selling it, and how we need to build up digital trade routes. Part 1 focuses on how jobtech platforms in Africa, when they’re at their best, are truly creating new jobs for Africa. Part 3 explains how we’re creating roles for Africans by partnering with Kenyan ICT agency, Elewa, and the regional development agency for the Eastern Netherlands. Part 4 asks which jobs are left in the digital work space in the age of AI.

We’ve written previously about the fact that jobtech platforms – when they’re at their very best – turn the non-consumption of labour into consumption. In that blog, we presented one of the simplest examples of this; outsourcing platforms. 

These platforms ‘create’ new work for Africa by identifying customers, packaging services in a way that is appealing to them, and managing the global delivery of those services or labour. 

This appealing example of ‘pure’ job creation on the African continent is one of the reasons why we’ve started looking at global demand generation as a strategic area of intervention in our systems change model. 

But while our initial hypothesis was that this workstream would be focused on helping African outsourcing providers to ‘sell’ into global markets, we’ve realised (unsurprisingly) that there’s a lot more subtlety here. This blog is a two-for-one insight festival, sharing two phenomena we’ve been observing: 

1. Outsourcing happens when African providers ‘create’ the work
2. Outsourcing grows when trade routes are built

While the latter comes in a context of particular irony with Trump’s tariff wars, it demonstrates that concerted effort can still build trade routes of digital labour.

‘Making’ the work rather than ‘selling’ the work

The Jobtech Alliance has worked with eight companies in the outsourcing space through our venture support program. Our venture support approach involves supporting businesses on whatever their biggest business pain points are, in order to unleash growth and job creation. Unsurprisingly, this has meant that we have conducted some form of commercial sprint with each one of them. This has varied from coaching CEOs on sales processes to developing strategies around impact sourcing, to helping companies to establish sales teams in global north markets. 

The latter of these strategies has been significantly employed by leading African outsourcing providers. We have realised over time, however, that the role of these teams in global markets was more subtle than just ‘sales’. AI data company Cloudfactory, for example, has created thousands of jobs within Kenya and has over 100 team members in the US. But this team is not simply a sales team; it is a customer success team. 

We’ve learned that the act of selling is rarely just selling. It’s often about designing a product that didn’t exist before, and a value proposition that feels native to a foreign market.

What does that really mean? Among other things, it means gaining an insight into demand, packaging that demand into ‘outsourcable work’, and maintaining customer satisfaction in delivery. To really sell digital work, you must first render it legible – understandable, contractable, and trustworthy – to clients thousands of miles away

Over the past few months, we’ve been collaborating with OostNL, the regional development agency for the Eastern Netherlands.

OostNL’s primary constituents are manufacturing companies on the border with Germany, which face a significant labour shortage in the ICT space (the Netherlands has a 3.8% unemployment rate—imagine!). 

Despite this labour shortage, there is not a huge latent demand for outsourcing. 

Indeed, these unfilled vacancies in their current form could not be done remotely from Africa. To fulfil these vacancies from Africa, we need to design and package the work for outsourcing. This means identifying which responsibilities necessarily need to be done from within the Netherlands and how other functions can adequately be packaged, managed, and delivered from Africa.

We’ve recently been helping iTalanta, a Kenya-based ICT outsourcing agency, to establish a commercial presence in the Eastern Netherlands. While this local registration enables them to sell to these companies as a ‘local entity’, their core model ‘creates’ the work (we cover in part 3 of this series): the first part of any Elewa engagement is the ‘architect’ stage, where the Kenya-based team works with clients to design the technical solution, project deliverables and plan for engagement. Once packaged, the service can then be delivered by engineers in Kenya (more on this in the third article in this series).

Source: ChatGPT

We’ve noticed this theme across many of our engagements in the digital work space. The core theme is not one of selling to an existing latent demand for outsourcing; it is creating the work itself for the African market.

Rwazi offers market intelligence about African consumers to US companies, by packaging the individual data points collected from tens of thousands of users across Africa in a way that is consumable by American clients. It translates the knowledge of thousands of Africans into a coherent, consumable insight product – tailored for global clients who’d never otherwise have access.

One of the Jobtech Alliance’s newest venture support portfolio companies, Robin, engages global SMEs to map their processes, to identify which functions need to stay within the organisation, and which functions can be outsourced to ‘AI+Humans’. Notably, the role of AI here – commonly seen as a threat to outsourcing – is what actually makes the work doable from Africa. With companies becoming willing to consider operating models that go beyond traditional locally staffed roles, by outsourcing to AI+humans, the leap has been made to outsource to Africa. In Robin’s model, AI doesn’t destroy African jobs – it creates the blueprint that makes them deliverable. As Phyl Georgiou, the founder of Robin, explains, “In the AI space today, the focus has shifted away from talent – what people are really looking for are outcomes. They want solutions that deliver measurable results. At Robin, our offering may appear as ‘AI agents,’ but in reality, it’s a combination of smart code and humans-in-the-loop. What we call the ‘architecture’ phase is really our way of uncovering the customer’s true needs—it’s a strategic step that allows us to design and deliver the right product.”

While we can, therefore, ‘create’ work by packaging labour effectively, it becomes even easier to sell when following established trade routes, as we’ll cover next.

Building trade routes rather than selling a product

Trade routes have driven the development of most economies and many societies over the course of thousands of years. From the 8th century CE, Arab traders built a range of trade routes primarily between North Africa and West Africa, facilitating the trade of goods like gold and salt across the Sahara Desert. At a similar time, the Silk Road led to the growth of major cities in Africa and the integration of much of West Africa into global trade.

Above: Trans-Saharan Gold and Sale Trade Routes. Source: Students of History

Digital labour travels not unlike traditional goods. It requires trust, visibility, and repeatable systems – just like any trade good crossing a border.

While we act like the waves of the internet know no borders, digital work still follows trade routes. For a job in Colorado to be delivered from Kigali, the US-based business will need to have a line of sight to the potential providers in Kigali. They need to be comfortable with the quality of service to satisfy their needs; to make all of this possible, they might need to have been recommended by a friend or peer.

Source: historian Vadime Elisseeff

In narratives around how outsourcing ecosystems emerged in contexts like India and the Philippines, commentators often talk about policies to drive investment in infrastructure and people, before opening the countries’ doors to the world, ready for business. They may then talk about efforts to grow demand across the world and the benefits of an established reputation reinforcing further growth. 

This overlooks the fact that many of these ecosystems emerged from quite specific trade routes.

61% of outsourcing to South Africa comes from the UK. 70% of outsourcing to the Philippines comes from North America. Yes, of course, there are comparative advantages in some of these locations – time difference, language, culture, etc – but it overlooks the organic way in which these trade routes can develop. A happy customer tells their collaborator in-market, and a new customer is created on this trade route. An outsourcing provider has success in one market and doubles down in selling there, and the trade route is thickened further. A trade route is built by a single transaction. It is thickened by a second. And with a dozen successful trades, it becomes a bridge. The same has been true with labour migration paths from Bangladesh and Pakistan to the Gulf and beyond.

It is often through diaspora that these trade routes organically form. The outsourcing sector in Bosnia was driven by Bosnians who had moved abroad during the war realising that they could get quality service at a lower price from people back home, and others returning after the war recognising the business opportunity to sell into the global market. An estimated 40% of outsourcing companies there were established by members of the diaspora.

While the diaspora does not make a market in itself, they can de-risk new trade routes for digital labour, demonstrating the viability of these exchanges. While these trade routes may initially be thin, they thicken as the market recognises early successes. These ‘sherpas of digital trade routes’ can therefore play critical roles in the emergence of new labour markets.

What does this all mean practically?

This blog provides some theories of market development for digital labour services in Africa, with some practical implications for actors operating in this space:

• For digital work providers, don’t just try to sell the promise of ‘African talent’, consider how that labour might be packaged to make it most consumable.
• For ecosystem actors interested in growing demand for outsourcing, consider doubling down around deeper, narrow individual trade routes. This could involve helping individual companies to establish new trade routes (and the diaspora could be a starting point!) and then working to thicken those trade routes. 

We’re working with actors in both these spaces, and would love to learn from more examples. If you’re operating in this space, please get in touch. If you’d like to learn more, watch this space!

If you’d like to learn more about creating trade routes, keep reading Part 3, which explains Why We Invested in Kenyan ICT outsourcing agency, iTalanta. 

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