The US's Rockefeller Foundation and its partners have set aside $100 million - some R900 million - for investment in digital jobs in six countries on the African continent.
Its initiative, Digital Jobs Africa, will unfold over the next seven years with the goal of impacting the lives of one million people through job creation for high-potential, but disadvantaged youth in Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, and SA.
John Rockefeller Snr established The Rockefeller Foundation in 1913 to promote the well-being of humanity around the world. MD for its Africa office, Mamadou Biteye, writes that it has been working on the issue of youth employment in the "rapidly growing" ICT-enabled sectors for the last several years.
"The next phase of our work, Digital Jobs Africa, was launched yesterday. Building off of the foundation's work over the last three years, the initiative will leverage significant funds and support from other stakeholders with a nearly $100 million budget," writes Biteye.
Digital Jobs Africa will build on the foundation's work to connect the talent pool of low-income, high-potential youth in Africa to create sustainable employment opportunities through the development of a new field it calls impact sourcing.
The initiative aims to grow this sector and identify other opportunities for digital jobs by working and partnering with the private sector, writes Biteye. It will also work with local organisations to provide demand-led skills training that will prepare young people for digital jobs.
"These skills aren't only beneficial to obtaining employment in the short-term - skills like computational thinking, cognitive functioning and digital media literacy will be both commonplace and critical to compete for the jobs of tomorrow."
Its goals are to create a flourishing ecosystem for digital jobs and see that income-generating opportunities create a multiplier effect on well-being within workers' households and communities, says Biteye. "This is how we will reach one million lives."
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