Accelerating Digital Job Creation in Africa

1. Trends driving Africa’s Digital
Landscape:
1. A study by the World Economic Forum
notes that “effectively leveraging ICTs has
been shown to contribute to a 50 percent
increase in productivity”;
2. The number of mobile subscribers in Africa
doubled from 2010 to 2015 to almost one
billion mobile phone subscribers;
3. The internet bandwidth grew 30-fold
between 2008 and 2016.
Innovation INDABA: Accelerating Digital Job Creation in Africa
Since the year 2000, Rwanda has achieved the
following:
• ICT grew at 25 percent, while the rest of the
economy grew at about 7 percent.
• Phone and internet penetration is at about 70
percent and 28 percent respectively
• The country is well on its way to providing 4G
LTE coverage for 95 percent of Rwandans by
2017.
• Over 5,000 kilometers optic fiber have been laid
throughout the country.
Rwanda
• is the world’s fastest developing country,
• has annual growth rates of about 8%,
• is the second easiest place to do business on the
continent
• is the safest to walk at night in Africa and fifth
globally
• Africa is catching up fast with Europe and the US
in building the NEW Economy
• SAP created Africa Code Week to teach
software coding skills to young people from age
8 to 24.
• In 2015, the initiative reached 89,000 youth in
17 countries goal for 2016 is to train more than
150,000 youth across 30 countries
According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), if the Digital Economy is
harnessed fully in Africa, “an estimated 150 million new jobs could be created in
this sector for young Africans”
(WEF Report on “Shaping Africa’s Transformation”)