Africa Digital Media Foundation - creatives without borders

Across Africa, we have cripplingly high rates of youth unemployment, as a result of the youth bulge and a mismatch between skills, and the demands of the labour market. This problem is exacerbated for women and disadvantaged youth (from minorities, from low-income backgrounds), as they particularly lack access to digital media, to opportunities to learn and work, and to financing.

For young men and women across Africa who dream of earning an income from their passion for the creative arts, the Africa Digital Media Foundation (ADMF) is a non-profit organization that creates the enabling environment for young African creatives to turn their passion into a profession. Unlike other digital media organizations, we create and provide access to opportunities for youth who have talent but few resources or opportunities, to not only learn, but also earn, work, access financing, and get their work in front of a global audience. 

In Kenya, more than 17% of youth are unemployed. This problem is set to get worse, as the youth bulge is growing, with 500,000-800,000 youth entering the job market every year. This is compounded by a lack of skills amongst youth, especially digital, technical, and soft skills such as communications, customer service and business skills. 

This problem is exacerbated for women and disadvantaged youth, for example those from low-income backgrounds, and individuals with disabilities. They particularly lack access to digital media, to opportunities to learn and to work, and to financing. 

The digital era has created a massive opportunity to expand the creative ecosystem in East Africa. 90% of creative content consumed in Africa comes from outside of Africa, and young Africans do not have the skills and tools necessary to produce content for their own home audiences, and yet the creative arts offer huge potential for economic growth. As a result, creative entrepreneurs lack access to both investors and global markets, meaning that they do not generate the jobs their counterparts do elsewhere. Sadly, this also means that Africa’s contribution to the global creative and tech sector’s remains disproportionately low, leaving the African story largely untold.

We address the 20% of youth, aged 18-25, who find themselves unemployed and struggling to earn an income. For school leavers, we know that they need core skills to know what path they want to follow, and so we offer six-month foundation courses, to provide basic digital and marketable skills, and the confidence to pursue the next steps in their trajectory. 

For young professional graduates, our technical-focused curriculum offers them an edge in the job market. We call these ‘upskillers’ and to meet their needs we offer professional courses with flexi-hours, as well as two-year diplomas which go deeper in their field of study. 

For all young people looking to enter the job market, they ask for practical experience, to develop the soft skills that they know they need in today’s workplace. For this reason, we offer placements and pathways, as well as professional experiences during their studies.

We also know that many young people with enormous potential and willingness to work, and with stories to tell, do not have the resources to pursue further education, and so we offer scholarships as well as learn and work models where students can work for the organization in exchange for subsidized fees.

We have a mission to build a global hub for African creatives – with the clout to build the next Pixar, produce the next Black Panther and win the next Pulitzer.

Our long-term vision is millions of creative technology professionals and entrepreneurs creating content for profit and impact across the world.

WE ARE FUELLING A POWERFUL ECONOMIC FORCE -   

The Africa Digital Media Foundation believes that the continent’s creative industries have the potential to be an economic powerhouse: a creator of thousands of high-quality jobs, and powerful wealth-creating new markets. Investing in educating Africa’s future creative leaders isn’t an act of charity – it’s an investment we are convinced will drive direct returns. 

WE ARE CREATING HIGH-QUALITY, WORLD-CLASS CONTENT - 

We are working to create nothing short of world-class creative content from Africa: from film to music to apps to journalism. We don’t compromise on delivering industry-quality training, with the latest equipment and innovations to ensure that all ADMI alumni have the skills to create globally-competitive content, work across the globe, and exchange techniques and content with creatives across the world.

WE ARE TELLING A POSITIVE FUTURE-FACING STORY - 

We exist to give young people across Africa the tools to tell new, future-facing positive stories about Africa on a truly global stage. With a focus on cutting-edge innovations, technologies and jobs of the future, we have the potential to be a leading part of the global ‘Afrofuturist’ creative movement. 

What we are providing young African men and women with is skills, support and platforms for them to secure income and prosperous, gainful employment for the rest of their lives, and create content and creative work that tells important stories and share crucial messages that contribute to the development of their communities. All this while offering a window to the outside world, through opportunities for international travel, exchanges and mentoring through international learning partners.

Our solution offers a unique approach to tackling youth unemployment and the digital skills gap across Africa. We apply a classroom-based education approach with a heavy focus on coaching, counselling and planning each individual’s trajectory with them, to understand what they want to achieve, and how they can make an impact with their talents and ambitions. We actively listen to their needs, so that our training reflects these, whilst always pursuing sustainability in our business model and in our impact. Our innovation therefore lies in a holistic, sustainable approach to equipping youth with opportunities to succeed in the 21st century.  

It is not ambition or hard work that is lacking for youth to secure a stable, productive professional trajectory, but technical skills, soft skills, and linkages with opportunities. Most higher education institutions aim to provide certificates and qualifications, and continuously integrate new students to keep producing more and more graduates, but there is not a focus on ensuring they have the skills that will make them truly employable and ready for the workplace. For ADMI and ADMF this is just as important as the skills-based education youth receive. Our team of Student Success Advisors have a mission to support students in their skills advancement and their personal goal-setting. We also ensure that our teaching staff are leaders in their industry, so can share real-life experiences of how they have used digital resources and digital media to get to where they are in their careers.

The main challenge we tackle is the high rate of youth unemployment in Africa. This is one of the biggest obstacles facing young men and women, especially from disadvantaged, minority backgrounds. 

As ADMI and ADMF, we reach individuals through community outreach, digital media, and above the line marketing, so that they can benefit from our activities centred around:. 

1. INCLUSION: to ensure that Africa’s creative industries are inclusive, representative and accessible, through financing, scholarships and exchanges.Thus we capture the stories and potential of the whole continent, not just one strata of it. 

2. INVESTMENT: to ensure vital new creative entrepreneurs attract the investment for production and distribution.

3. INFLUENCE: to act as a force for advancing the policy changes needed to accelerate the growth of creative industries.

The measurable outputs:

1. Number of young men and women accessing scholarships. 

2. Proportion of students transitioning to employment, and time taken to secure employment

3. Number of businesses and jobs created by ADMF women and youth. 

4. Income over time of women and youth. 

We have provided scholarships to eight disadvantaged youth. Of our graduates, 93% are employed within six months, compared to an average of five years for the average Kenyan graduate (source: British Council, 2017). 

The outcomes of these activities are:

1. Large pool of well-trained creatives with practical global experience and soft skills.

2. Creative entrepreneurs scaling up businesses and generating employment.

Long-term, we envisage millions of women and youth successfully working as creative technology professionals and entrepreneurs creating content for profit and impact.

We currently have 482 young men and women, including 8 on a full scholarship. Since 2,133 we have provided digital skills to 2,133 young men and women.

In one year we aim to be providing for 650 active students

In five years we will have 1500 active students

Our goal within the next year is to double the number of students that we can enrol at any one time in our Nairobi campus, to 500, and provide them with additional courses in partnership with a U.K-based and U.S-based higher education institution. We already have one partnership with Europe’s top design and animation school, in France, Rubika, and will add two more prestigious partners in the United Kingdom and the United States, to ensure transferability of skills that we are imparting to young students, and also establish a wide-scale exchange program for young creatives. 

We also envisage offering 50 scholarships to disadvantaged youth from across Africa.. We aim for 100% of these youth to be absorbed into the workforce, or running their own businesses,, using their digital skills to generate an income and create impact. Those who create their own businesses will then go on to create further employment for other youth who have acquired such skills. 

Within five years, we aim to have campuses in West and Southern Africa, and have multilateral partnerships with higher education institutions in several European and North American countries, offering academic, learning and industry exchanges between these countries, for promising youth in the digital creative media space. 

We will have Africa-wide reach with our physical training facilities and industry placements, and international reach through learning partnerships and student exchanges.In this way we will be able to reach more than 1500 youth a year directly through our digital skills development.

The main barriers we currently face in achieving our growth goals are financial, legal, and cultural. These involve securing resources for rapid expansion, obtaining the necessary accreditation for our students, and the cultural attitudes and behaviours towards the arts. 

The financial barriers we face concern securing funds to expand our campus, and provide scholarships to youth. Blended financing, which is both profit and impact-focused, is still relatively new and difficult to justify in less economically developed countries, even though we strongly believe it is the key to sustainable development. 

The legal barriers we face concern the lack of certification options for TVET (technical and vocational education and training) institutions. There are very restrictive requirements for institutions to offer nationally recognised qualifications in Kenya, and this often leads institutions to pursue costly alternatives, through international partnerships, for example. 

Finally, the cultural barriers are at the societal level. The creative arts are still not widely considered to be a viable solution for economic growth and youth employment,by parents and decision-makers. There is a cultural bias against these professions, which nonetheless require a high level of technical skills which can only be mastered through technical training and industry-based practice.

We already have measures to overcome each of these barriers integrated in our model, so that we tackle them from an early stage and can mitigate their negative impact.

With regard to the financial barriers, we are seeking funding partners who share our exact vision of millions of young African creatives creating content for profit and for impact, so that we can collaboratively build the workforce we need to make that happen.

We are able to absorb for-profit investments through ADMI, as well as non-profit, philanthropic funding through the Foundation, as both organizations share the same vision, and can contribute to it in complementary ways, through a mix of scholarships, infrastructure development, equipment, and curriculum development. 

Concerning our certification options, we are looking to acquire the status necessary to provide a variety of certification options to our students, and international partnerships that are mutually beneficial and not costly, are our best solutions to date.

We also invest resources in overcoming the cultural barriers around digital media and youth unemployment. For this reason, ADMF pursues advocacy and awareness-raising, with communication targeted at parents and decision-makers, and participation in working groups and high-level stakeholder consultations.  

We have already proven that there is appetite and demand for international learning partnerships, through our successful collaboration with Rubika, Europe’s number 1 design and animation school, based in France. We have already designed a student and trainer learning exchange program, which we plan to expand into more ServiceNow markets, and we already have discussions ongoing with schools in other European and North American institutions. We have an existing partnership and pilot expansion project underway with Full Sail University in the United States, which we will be expanding in 2020.

The full-time staff at ADMI and ADMF comprises 36 individuals, all based in Nairobi, with almost exclusively Kenyan nationals (97%), made up of 58% women. 

We also have 53 faculty staff who are on a contract basis, depending on course content, their availability (given that they are also leaders in the field of digital expertise).

The ADMI and ADMF teams are steeped in experience relative to the creative and digital fields, whilst also boasting high-level business and social enterprise expertise. The group Directors are a dynamic duo, Laila Macharia and Wilfred Kiumu, with Laila Macharia coming from a background in law (pHd Stanford), and corporate banking and investment (director of ABSA and Centum Investments), whilst Wilfred has worked in film and television production for more than 20 years, and founded ADMI in 2011 to train new generations of youth who lack, like he did as a youngster, the resources and opportunities to pursue a driving passion. 

Our teams all have specific, top-level expertise that make them the best teams to carry this out: our Foundation is headed by a social enterprise and non-profit leader with experience across six countries; our Head of School has scaled a successful higher education institution in Kenya, and our Head of Finance and Operations has worked for world-renowned auditing and consultancy firms across Kenya and the United States. Everyone is united by their passion for youth employment and digital media. 

We also strongly believe in promoting from our skilled students, and so several staff are ADMI alumni, who now contribute to providing further generations of youth with the same opportunities they had. 

We currently have established partnerships with the following:

Rubika School of animation and design: a learning exchange partner with whom we have co-designed animation and video game design curricula, and who have delivered capacity building training of trainers to our trainers. We will also be conducting student exchanges between France and Kenya. 

Agence Francaise du Developpement (AFD): funding partner behind the learning partnership with Rubika.

Gulli: French-language animation television channel and content distributor, who will distribute our students’ content on international television channels.

Equity Group Foundation: providing scholarships to disadvantaged but highly talented youth.

Microsoft4Afrika: We are running a Nairobi -based AppFactory for talented ICT graduates, as a springboard to secure employment in the coding and development industry, with a pathway to employment with Microsoft.

Filmaid: conducting film and television production workshops and short courses to refugees in Kakuma and Daadab refugee camps. 

Full Sail University: a learning exchange partner with whom we partner for certification and are also piloting a U.S-based exchange project.

For young men and women across Africa who dream of earning an income from their passion for the creative arts, the Africa Digital Media Institute and Africa Digital Media Foundation form a social enterprise model that creates the opportunities enabling environment for these young African creatives to turn their passion into a profession. Unlike other digital media organizations, we create and provide access to opportunities for youth with talent to not only learn, but also earn, work, and access financing, and get the work of talented young people from even the most disadvantaged backgrounds in front of a global audience. 

Students and partners pay for education services and placement opportunities to acquire industry experience, and ADMI provides unparallelled, state-of-the-art digital media education and soft skills development, with the addition of counseling, coaching and learning support in a high=spec campus in Nairobi’s central business district. 

ADMI also receives some grant funding for scholarships, partnership development and infrastructure development and equipment purchase, to be able to offer the highest calibre teaching and equipment to youth from diverse backgrounds, including disadvantaged youth who otherwise would not be able to afford to pursue higher education.

Our model has already proven that it is financially sustainable, with student fees covering both fixed and variable costs above a certain number of students. However, in order to offer scholarships to disadvantaged youth, and to expand our campus and course offerings, we require additional funds, from grant-funding and debt.

The funding, mentorship and media opportunities will be invaluable during this crucial growth stage, as we gear up for scaling. We have a strong brand that we would like to develop outside of Kenya, and also foment partnerships in France, the United Kingdom and North America, to achieve our scaling objectives.

We are actively seeking learning partners (academic institutions) in France, the United Kingdom and North America, so that we can scale our student exchange program and also share curriculum content and certifications with international partners. 

We also constantly solicit employer and placement partners across Kenya, Africa, and internationally, to offer placements to students, so that they can put their digital skills into practice, for profit and for impact.