By Chris Maclay

This is the first of a four-parter about job creation in Africa. It focuses on how jobtech platforms in Africa, when they’re at their best, are truly creating new jobs for Africa. Part 2 looks specifically at 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 3 explains how we’re creating roles for Africans by partnering with Kenyan ICT agency, iTalanta, and the regional development agency for the Eastern Netherlands. Part 4 asks which jobs are left to create in the digital work space in the age of AI.

If you look on Google, there are thousands of products related to Cristiano Ronaldo’s Siuuu football celebration. This celebration involves Cristiano performing a 180 degree turn while jumping into the air, landing with a full-body power stance demonstrating his absolute dominance of the sport. “Siuuu” chant the tens of thousands of fans when he does it.

Above: a remote-controlled Siuuu lamp. Tasteful.

Until Cristiano Ronaldo came along, there was no “latent demand for Siuuu”. Cristiano made it.

Closer to home in Africa, Efosa Omojo and Clay Christensen’s famous book The Prosperity Paradox, talks about Indomie’s creation of demand for ramen noodles in Nigeria. There had been no latent demand for ramen noodles before they arrived. Nigerians resolutely were into eba and egusi. But along came a great product with great branding and great pricing and they managed to turn non-consumption of ramen into consumption; Nigerians loved ramen noodles.

Indomie: Lovin’ it

Much of the narrative around youth employment and unemployment in Africa acts as if there is a bunch of latent demand for labor; that “if we could only better equip young people for all the jobs that exist” they would get jobs and we’d see a huge reduction in youth unemployment.

This narrative is of course nonsense. 

As labour economist Louise Fox and team have said, “Africa’s ‘youth employment’ crisis is actually a missing jobs’ crisis.” The problem of youth unemployment in Africa does not lie with the ‘underskilled’ youth themselves as the narrative would have it. If there were jobs, Africa’s hustler’s would be doing everything to get them. The problem lies in a lack of demand for labor. We can spend our whole lives trying to equip and connect young people to the opportunities that do exist, but those opportunities are going to continue to be too few for the growing youth population of Africa. While 10 to 12 million African youth enter the workforce each year in Sub-Saharan Africa, only 3.1 million formal sector jobs are created.

What we need to do is create jobs. 

A similar analysis can be applied to the jobtech sector. A common misconception is that jobtech platforms in Africa are primarily jobmatching platforms. Jobmatching platforms at their simplest are jobs boards which display vacancies available in a market and guide candidates on where to apply. More sophisticated job matching platforms offer more recruitment functions including vetting, algorithmic/AI-enabled shortlisting, and even training. 

While of course playing a critical role in the labour market, these jobmatching platforms are largely dealing with latent demand. The platforms may be improving the quality of the match or efficiency of the match, but the job was likely to happen regardless. Moving around chess pieces on the chessboard. Or as one collaborator cynically described (given the structural lack of formal sector jobs in Africa) “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic”.

The critique about jobmatching platforms is not entirely fair; the ability to find the right candidate at the right time and at the right cost could make an employer more likely to hire someone. If I knew that it would take me a year and a huge amount of cost to find someone for a particular role, I might not even bother. These platforms do therefore have some element of job creating potential. Just not much.

We need to look at where jobtech platforms are more job creating.

When I was COO at Lynk, the Kenyan gig matching platform for Blue collar workers, I was consistently asked whether our platform was creating new jobs or just moving them online. My answer was typically ‘about half-half’. While a plumbing job to fix a leaking pipe was likely to have happened off-platform if we hadn’t been around (it should be noted that we still believed our role was a good one – the plumber on our platform was likely to be paid more, have more protections, and deliver the work with better quality), we were confident that other jobs on our platform would not have happened without the platform’s existence:

For those who are familiar with Nairobi before Ngong Road’s redevelopment, the process of buying a piece of furniture from a Kenyan carpenter could be an incredibly frustrating undertaking. After negotiating your way through traffic, you’d need to negotiate your way to a reasonable price and specification for your piece of furniture. You’d then need to deal with an almost inevitable delay, unreliable wood quality meaning the products would often crack after a few weeks, and the hassle of having to navigate delays and quality control visits by yourself. It meant that many middle-class Kenyans would rather buy a Chinese import from a department store than a locally-produced artisan piece from a Kenyan carpenter. Maybe picking up a tasteful remote-controlled Siuuu lamp at the same time.

Ngong Road on a low-traffic day

Lynk offered a beautiful e-commerce experience, where customers could view different designs based on current trends, and customize their wood choice, varnish and size, and receive a guaranteed timeline for delivery as well as replacement guarantee if there was anything wrong. 

But the work was produced by those same carpenters on Ngong Road and beyond. We didn’t invent carpentry. We invented trust, design standardisation, and digital logistics around carpentry, and made the creative skills consumable. 

Lynk: I’ll have two of those please

What Lynk was really doing with its furniture segment, was therefore turning non-consumption of the work of a Kenyan carpenter into consumption of that labour.

At the Jobtech Alliance, one of the key criteria for selection for our venture support is a judgement on whether the platform is truly creating new opportunities for its users, or just moving transactions online. There are some common themes that we see in terms of how platforms can turn non-consumption into consumption:

When demand is coming from a global market. When a platform is bringing an outsourced job to Africa, or facilitating a trade of a physical good to the USA, or indeed facilitating the migration of our skilled solar installer to the EU, the consumption of this labor would simply not have occurred if it wasn’t for the platform. As we’ve written about elsewhere, the function of selling into global markets needs a proprietary insight to demand in those markets, and a wider role of ‘creating the work’ (as we’ll cover in the second part in this series).

When the platform is monetizing an un- or under monetized activity. The creative industries in Africa are hugely under-monetized. While the continent has a huge creative sector and appreciation of the creative arts, there historically haven’t been many opportunities to turn those skills into money. As we’ve written about elsewhere, Patreon did a remarkable job in the global North of enabling creators to monetize their true fans, and transacted over $200m in payments to creators last year. In Africa, platforms like Selar in Nigeria enable creators to earn money by firstly creating the rails for product creation, and then selling digital products to their fans directly, or through a network of owned affiliate marketers. Just by making these creative skills ‘consumable’, creators on the platform earned over USD$6m last year. Particularly interestingly, this includes NGN54m (USD$34k) in tips. Simply by creating a space for consumption, this was an extra $34k in consumption of labor that simply wouldn’t have happened without the platform.

When the platform is making labor better quality through training or quality control: While my introduction alluded to a general disinterest in jobmatching platforms, platforms can create jobs through effective training and placement, when the alternative is to import those skills (if you can’t find the necessary coding skills locally, you can easily find them on the online market) or to just give up (there would be no point launching a solar company if I knew there was no way to find or train solar installers). In Africa, more than just training, quality control and/or quality guarantees could also make customers more likely to consume labor from Africa. This is indeed one of the reasons why we are significantly more enthusiastic about managed service agencies in the ICT space rather than freelancing.

When the platform is making labor more consumable by packaging it better: Lynk’s furniture offering discussed above didn’t create an entirely new type of labor – anyone could have spent a sweaty Saturday on Ngong Road negotiating with a carpenter. Lynk just packaged what we knew to be a consumable unit of labor into something more consumable. Similarly, nano-influencer platforms like Wowzi make it newly possible for brands to engage and pay with small influencers to reach their followers. Without the platform, it would be entirely impossible to engage and contract dozens (or even hundreds) of micro-influencers.

Example: Creating jobs by packaging fractional labour. Here’s a hypothetical. Most small businesses in Kenya don’t have an accountant. Their finances sit on paper ledgers. It means they have very weak control of their finances, leaving them vulnerable to theft, poor decisions and tricky visits from the taxman. But they’re small companies – normally with less than 5 employees – and don’t have enough work or enough money to hire a full-time accountant. But they have enough budget and interest in hiring an accountant for, say, a quarter of the time (and budget). That service just doesn’t exist right now, outside of some small informal spaces. This model, called fractional labour, can turn the non-consumption of accountancy services into consumption. Now we just need a platform to do it!

When the platform is making labor more consumable by making it cheaper. This tends to be the one we’re least interested in as the Jobtech Alliance, though in truth, it’s probably one of the greatest driving forces of market creation in Africa. While Uber did package labor in a whole new way (moving away from a prevalence of metered taxis) and better quality (wait times of 2 minutes!?), it also made taxis significantly cheaper. While platforms that make labor cheaper can create whole new customer segments or consumption categories (Wowzi makes it possible for anyone to engage a ‘nano influencer’ to promote their brand), in segments where the labor is easily commoditized (from taxi driving to entry level transcription on Fiverr), it tends to just cause a race to the bottom. And when platforms compete on price alone, the result is worker insecurity, low margins, and platform churn.

In short: not all jobtech platforms are created equal, or rather, not all jobtech platforms create jobs equally. 

If you’re looking to invest in a jobtech platform with an impact thesis about job creation, or looking to set-up one yourself, ask yourself if the solution is really creating new labour markets like Indomie or Ronaldo, or just celebrating the digitization of the lights on the Titanic. Job creation isn’t about supply or ‘moving transactions online’. It’s about making labor consumable. And that is the jobtech platform’s true calling.

The second blog in this series dives deeper into two of the phenomena described above, and explores how jobs in the digital work and outsourcing industry are created by selling to global markets and packaging work for outsourcing. Keep reading here.

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