Emerging Leaders for Africa (ELA)

Young people on the world’s youngest continent have been lied to. More than half of them are without jobs and “going to school” doesn’t seem to make a difference. In Nigeria, half of university graduates are unemployed even though jobs exist. Instead, the mismatch between content taught in universities and the needs of employers leave graduates trapped and employers struggling to find talent.

Inspire Africa’s Emerging Leaders for Africa (ELA) program addresses this problem by equipping Nigerian undergraduates from low-income households with the skills to succeed in the modern workplace. ELA is a hyper-local professional development and career preparation accelerator program built of three core components: a digital and critical skills blended learning curriculum, guided career mentorship, and practical experience. Inspire Africa also facilitates students’ access to employers and employment by connecting them with partner companies.

In Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, nearly quarter of the population is unemployed and 20 percent are underemployed. For young people aged 15 to 35, the figures are even more grim: 55.4 percent of them are without full-time work and having a university degree does not seem to make a difference. In Nigeria, and across Africa, 50% of university students graduating annually are unemployed.

This is not for lack of jobs. Indeed, in Africa’s largest economy and around the world, employers complain of being unable to find candidates with the requisite skills to succeed in even the most entry-level positions. Rather, this education-to-employment gap exists because of the mismatch between the outdated skills taught in many universities and the ever-evolving talent needs of 21st-century employers. Far too many graduates today find themselves with costly diplomas and no direct connection to jobs. 

The effects of youth unemployment are insidious. Young adults who are unemployed early in their careers are more likely to be unemployed later in life, earn less money over the course of their lives, and suffer from poor mental health. Moreover, regions with low economic opportunities and high youth unemployment are the most susceptible to instability and extremism.

Inspire Africa’s solution to the youth and graduate unemployment crisis in Nigeria is its Emerging Leaders for Africa (ELA) program. ELA is a hyper-local professional development and career preparation program that equips Nigerian undergraduates from low-income households with the skills to succeed in the workplace. The ELA approach has three major components: digital and critical skills curriculum, guided career mentorship and practical experience. 

• In their third through final year in university, students undergo intensive training in technical and soft skills  through digital learning platforms. 

• During this period, students receive 1-on-1 virtual career coaching from an experienced human resources professional coach in Nigeria, who provides learning and job application support. Also, students are paired with Industry mentors in their career pathway to help them learn the intricacies of the industry and navigate workforce shifts.

• After this training, students embark on experiential learning activity that simulates the workplace by completing a team-based “Ignite Innovation Lab” consulting project virtual internship with a startup or NGO.

Throughout the entire process, Inspire Africa facilitates students’ access to employers and employment by connecting them with local partner companies through job fairs and discussion/panel events.

Our solution serves undergraduates and recent graduates, and local companies and employing organizations. However, it has the capacity to especially transform the life trajectories of the young people who participate. 

To better understand the exact needs on either side of the labor marketplace, we conducted over 100 stakeholder interviews with students, recent graduates, and employers. Our conversations revealed that many young people, despite their university education, have poor computer skills, including little knowledge of how to use Microsoft Suite. They also expressed extreme difficulty finding employment even 6 to 12 months after graduation. Often, this was, at least in part, because they had little access to internship/job application and interview preparation support. ELA directly addresses these challenges, teaching digital literacy and career preparedness, while serving as a bridge to employers.

On the other hand, employers expressed frustration with how hard it was to find young talent because many of the recent graduates who applied for their open positions lacked the business communication skills (written and verbal), problem-solving skills, and critical and analytical thinking required to work in a professional setting. ELA solves this problem for companies, and also reduces costs associated with hiring and training.

Our business model hinges on employer partnerships which allows us to transition our students from classroom-based learning to on-the-job learning of digital literacy and employability skills through internships, consulting projects and connections to full-time employment. We do this by identifying, training and placing talented underserved young adults in internship positions in high-growth and high-paying industries, which eventually translates to full-time jobs. By empowering these youth, ELA will spark a cultural mindset change of professional excellence that catalyzes Africa’s economic development and create an ecosystem of driven and competent graduates that can succeed in high-growth industries.

Our solution is a unique way of approaching and complementing university education in Africa, and particularly Nigeria. ELA  pairs simple, but effective technology with frequent feedback to create a support system for underprivileged university students trying to access the labor market. Often it's presumed that attending university in itself is enough, but this is simply not true. Unlike their wealthier counterparts, low-income students do not have the social capital and networks to find job opportunities. To address this gap, we combine lessons from world-quality higher education institutions with guided experiential learning to teach our students the exact digital and soft-skills that employers seek. Moreover, by partnering with employers we are able to stay abreast of their needs and easily adapt the curriculum to help students succeed. In this way, our model remains cost-effective, relevant, impactful, and scalable.

Organizations operating within the youth employment space similar to ours include SEO Africa, EduBridge, and WAVE Academy. SEO Africa is built off of the SEO model in the US and UK and similar programs like Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT) that are not as specific to the local context. EduBridge's Program begins later (final year of university) and also is based on a fee-model that is likely prohibitive to the lowest income learners. Finally, WAVE is focused primarily on vocational education and placing students primarily in retail and hospitality roles. As such, it has been able to achieve significant scale, but in today’s climate, even these jobs are arguably vulnerable. 

The Emerging Leaders for Africa program holds technology-enabled learning and practice at its core. For their 6-month intensive training, students will complete a structured set of courses through Coursera with other MOOC platforms incorporated where there are gaps in content or more rigorous courses are available. In a digitally-based blended learning model, they will interface with their teaching mentors and interview with employers via Zoom and work with their virtual internship project team members using a host of digital work tools (e.g. Slack). Incorporating technology into the program curriculum is essential to building a cohort of digitally-native young employees who will be able to access and achieve success in the jobs of the future.

The ELA is built on blended learning, MOOCs, and virtual mentorship. MOOCS have been shown to be an effective and scalable way to teach large groups of students a set of defined skills over the internet. When this is incorporated into a blended learning system, students are able to learn and engage with material at a pace that suits them and raise any questions they may have to instructors during their face-to-face sessions. As a result, students become more independent in their understanding of content, but are able to address gaps and feed their curiosity in the interactive sessions. Furthermore, people who leverage the internet, social media, online professional networks, knowledge management systems, and more for virtual mentorship are likely to be more aware of their surroundings, broaden their skillsets, and become more innovative. (Harvard Business Review: The Benefits of Virtual Mentors, 2016)

Inputs

• Full-time staff (for leadership, technology, curriculum design, strategic relations, application support, etc.)

• Part-time/Volunteer staff (e.g. career mentors, industry experts, time-bound projects)

• Partners and funders (employer partners, funding organizations, peer organizations, other networks) Specialized curriculum (comprised of existing educational materials and original content)

• Technology platforms for learning and teamwork

• Hardware and data for students in dire need

• Flexible operational budget that can be adapted as we learn

Activities

• Identify students who are most suitable for the program, given need and stage in university

• Take students through a rigorous career preparation program

• Organize weekly career coach calls, monthly mentor calls, and monthly industry expert events

• Engage students in 1-2 team-based consulting-style virtual internships with employers in their last two years in university 

• Create and adapt with original educational content with employers to supplement existing content 

• Host virtual career fairs where employers and students can interact with one another

Outputs

• For students, improved job readiness skills (technical and behavioral skills), increased access to career exposure (internships, professional webinars, and career fairs), and career preparation support (internship/job search support, application support, interview preparation, industry mentorship). 

• For employers, a go-to pool for young talent that is tried and trustworthy

Short-term Outcomes

• Internship and job matches between participating students and partner organizations

• For students, increases in the percentage of graduates leaving school with an employment offer, reductions in the length of time it takes to find a job post graduation

• For employers, reduction in hiring and training expenses, both financial and temporal

Long-term Outcomes

• For students, greater earning potential, more disposable income, and better mental health over the course of their lives

• For employers, increase in firm productivity and profitability

• For others, redirected investments in education from public and private higher education institutions towards ensuring their core curriculums remain relevant to work today

Impact

• Improved and more equitable socioeconomic growth and outcomes across the country due to a decrease in youth unemployment

Our solution is currently still in the prototype phase, and so we have not begun the intervention with any students yet. During our pilot phase and first year of operations (2021-2022), our intervention will serve 20 students. Our technology allows the solution to easily be scaled, so, with sufficient funding, e estimate that the Emerging Leaders for Africa program will have  a cohort of 100 students across multiple universities in a year. In five years, we expect to be able to serve as many as 1,000 students or more across multiple universities.

Within the next year, our main goal is to pilot the Emerging Leaders for Africa program from June 2021 to September 2022. To this end, over the next 8 months we will work to:  

• Establish a partnership with a local Lagos University and identify students who will participate in the program. 

• Finalize conversations with businesses and employing organizations to enter into formal partnerships. 

• Purchase licenses for existing online educational material that will be incorporated into the curriculum.

• Create original content specific to the local context to supplement externally sourced materials.

• Secure requisite funding to meet budgeted operational costs. 

• Establish monitoring and evaluation tools to assess the impact of programming for revision post-pilot.

Our five year goals are largely focused on demonstrating proof points and  achieving scalability. Within five years, we hope to:

• Expand the Emerging Leaders for Africa program to at least ten universities across Nigeria, benefiting directly, 1,000 students and 120 employers, and identify opportunities to roll programming out in at least one additional West African country e.g. Ghana.

• Achieve financial sustainability by solidifying the value proposition to employers, universities, and government.

• Build a strong alumni network that enables us to track and evaluate any lasting impacts of ELA beyond university graduation

As we continue to fine-tune our model, our main challenges center around (1) financing and (2) finalizing partnerships. 

Financing - In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of donor resources are naturally being directed to healthcare interventions, and so, we will need to be ingenuitive to identify funding sources focused on solidifying and preserving livelihoods as well. We continue to revisit the model and ask ourselves: 

How much should we spend on operational costs? What additional skill-sets do we need on our team? Which technological products, portals, and platforms make the most sense to use in our context?

Finalizing partnerships - Because the program is currently within its prototype phases, we anticipate some difficulty establishing formal partnerships, particularly with private sector employer organizations who may want proof of success before partnering. The main question we are asking ourselves in this arena is: How can we formulate and communicate our projected ROI (financial and social) to potential partners in the private, public, and non-profit sectors? Which granting organizations (ie. public sector entities) will our model appeal to most?

We are addressing our financing and finalizing partnerships problems in three main ways.

• First, we are creating as accurate a picture of the anticipated expenses to run our pilot program. We currently have a team of MBAs conducting budgetary analysis and constructing financial models to help us estimate exactly what our projected costs will be during the pilot and beyond. 

• Second, we are exploring all cost-saving measures. For example, we revised our model to incorporate a need-based system that we used to identify the students whom we would actually have to supply with a laptop and internet package and are approaching companies who might be willing to donate these learning materials as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives. 

Finally, we are casting a wide net as far as fundraising and partnership opportunities are concerned. We are first approaching our existing donors (for our other programs) but also looking beyond that to new opportunities, like this MIT Solve Challenge, and more. Our hope is that the ELA solution speaks for itself, but that the success of our prior programs help establish confidence in our ability to execute youth development interventions that create lasting impact.

Full-time staff: 3

Part-time staff: 10

Our team comprises a group of highly-talented and experienced individuals with diverse and relevant academic and professional experiences in social entrepreneurship, career coaching, education, technology, finance, consulting. Our core team members include:

Cynthia Mene (Nigeria): Founder, Inspire Africa, 6+ years in social entrepreneurship, youth education and entrepreneurship coaching. Founded 2 enterprises that scaled to impact 500 women and 2 million consumers. MSc Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Management, Imperial College Business School, London. 

Rahila Olarenwaju (Nigeria): Program Manager for Strategic Initiatives, Inspire Africa. B.A. Economics and International Relations, University of Maryland. Strategy and Operations Consultant, Deloitte. Built and led a financial literacy program serving 100+ low-income youth.

Joan Larbi (Ghana): Wharton MBA with prior experience in consulting and career counseling with McKinsey & Company, the  African Leadership Academy, and Teach For America.  Skilled in report and grant writing, program evaluation, and teaching. 

Jude Eziashi (Nigeria): Harvard MBA with prior experience in operations/manufacturing as a Process Engineer with  Exxon Mobil. Skilled in business strategy and financial modeling.

Akshay Goswami (India): CPA with 7+ years in client-facing finance roles as a Financial Analyst at Royal Dutch Shell. Skilled in financial reporting & budgeting, market research and business writing. MBA from Georgetown McDonough. 

Brice Fodouop (Ghana): Harvard MBA, with prior experience as academic coach in a career leadership program and Associate at Bain & Company.

Inspire Africa currently has three major groups of partners that support its existing programming and are committed to engaging with us on the Emerging Leaders Program pilot.

• The U.S Embassy and Consulate in Nigeria will be providing some funding resources for our pilot. In addition, some of the staff will serve as industry experts for our career and leadership training. The consulate Economic Officers are well-versed in trade and business opportunities in the country and able to provide a holistic overview of the fastest-growing sectors.

• Kimberly Clark, Vetsark limited, Plenty Waka, MyPharmacy, Tamy Consulting, TELNET, and Renmoney are all private sector employment partners who will be recruiting students for consulting project-style internships. These companies cut across several industries, including finance, consulting, healthcare, transport, agriculture, and consumer packaged goods. 

• Employees from Deloitte Nigeria, Goldman Sachs Nigeria, and Worka.ng will be serving as career mentors for our learners, guiding them as they learn about the industries that interest them and skills required to succeed within them. Worka is a job applicant testing and screening platform. 

Beneficiaries:

Our key beneficiaries are Nigerian undergraduate students and Nigerian employers. 

Social and Customer Value: 

Our value-proposition to Nigerian undergraduates is to provide a comprehensive set of career preparatory services that span skills-training, internship search and application support, experiential-learning, and interview preparation support. This addresses the severe challenge students face in attempting to navigate the labor market without dedicated career services offices, guided experiential-learning opportunities, or job-readiness courses in their universities. Our program creates societal impact by improving job placement rates and reducing youth unemployment. 

Our value-proposition to Nigerian employers is to provide a more stream-lined and less costly hiring process than what current recruitment channels offer. We provide a solution to the challenge of identifying strong talent for entry-level positions in financial services and business management, by training undergraduate students in job-readiness skills, tailored to these industries. When operating optimally, our program will provide employers with a scarce product, a pool of highly-trained human capital, in exchange for corporate sponsorships that facilitate program operations. 

Impact Measures: 

Our impact on students can be measured through comparing the job placement and unemployment rates of students who participate in our program, to students of similar demographics who do not participate in our program. 

Surplus:

All profits will be reinvested into program costs, which include staff salaries, online courses for students, and core technologies that facilitate program operations (e.g. Zoom and Canvas)

To fund pilot operations, we will raise donations and grants from the public and social sectors. To maintain funding from the public and social sectors, we intend to rigorously assess our program’s social impact return on investment. After our pilot concludes, we hope to begin our second year of operations with a mix of public, social, and private sector funding. Our program addresses a pain-point for private-sector stakeholders, because it seeks to provide employers with a pool of strong talent to recruit from. We hope to secure corporate partners upon demonstrating measurable impact during our pilot phase, and we hope to retain corporate partners through rigorously assessing the average cost of recruiting talent through our program versus the average cost firms incur from recruiting talent through traditional channels.

As we prepare to roll out this new program and expand Inspire Africa’s offerings, we are seeking to better understand how to most effectively refine and implement our solution. We want to know the best technology-enabled career preparation methods, and strategies and MIT Solve has a wide network of potential partners from which we can learn best practices. We are also hopeful that Solve membership will increase our exposure in and beyond Nigeria, helping us make connections with leading philanthropists, funding organizations, and corporate donors. We especially look forward to connecting with like-minded funders who can both support us financially and help us fine-tune our model and strengthen our infrastructure.

In this prototyping stage that we are in, sustainability is top of mind, both in terms of a sustainable financial model as well as sustainable problem-solution fit and execution. Therefore, our top needs are improving our funding and revenue model, recruiting talent, securing board members or advisors, and developing a marketing, media, and exposure plan. We believe that these three things are intimately connected. With more funding and a stronger revenue model we can execute the pilot properly providing students and employers with the full extent of services, as intended. Similarly, board members and advisors can help us refine our model and also support our fundraising and partnership efforts, while talent will help us implement and execute on our plan. Finally, developing a robust marketing, media, and exposure plan will allow us to attract more supports and demonstrate the social impact of our programming.

Organizations: Our program leverages Coursera to deliver courses focused on soft-skills (ie. critical thinking and business communication) and hard-skills (Excel, business analytics, financial accounting, and more). We would like to partner with Coursera to subsidize the cost of purchasing Coursera Plus accounts for each student in our pilot cohort of 20 students. We would also like to partner with Schoology/Canvas to subsidize our learning management costs. 

MIT Faculty or Initiatives: We would like to partner with MIT faculty experts from the Teaching and Learning Lab to help us design effective impact evaluation tools that isolate exogenous factors and identify how our program intervention affects skills-acquisition, job placement, and youth unemployment outcomes. We would also like to participate in an MIT Curriculum Design Workshop to improve our curriculum and educational technology/online tools. 

Solve Members: We would like to partner with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to receive grant-funding while delivering on one of the Foundation’s key objectives: enhance education through innovation.

Systems of patriarchal oppression and injustice are alive and well in Nigeria. Most recently a spate of rapes and gender-based violence committed against women has spurred a movement on and off social media called #WeAreTired. Specifically, officials have said that violence against women and children, especially domestic abuse, has tripled during the country’s coronavirus lockdown. Even during non-pandemic times, often lack of economic opportunities, in addition to lasting and complex patriarchal sociocultural norms, prevent women from achieving the financial independence needed to escape such abusive environments. 

As a female- and youth-led organization, it is incredibly important to us that Inspire Africa’s Emerging Leaders for Africa program serves all the needs of young university-aged women when it comes to transitioning from school into the workplace. According to 2019 World Bank data, only 13% of female employment in Nigeria was wage or salary-earning compared to 23% of male employment. The ELA is already designed to ensure that it is 50% female, which would already transformatively empower young women with technology. However, if granted the Innovation for Women Prize, we would create special wrap-around programming for female participants, including but not limited to learning material on developing presence and confidence and navigating the corporate world as a woman, and female mentor-led all-female small support groups. In 2018, we organized an Ignite Entrepreneurship Program exclusively for young female entrepreneurs and are confident, that we can deliver similarly impactful program for the young female students that would be a part of ELA.

The ELA program is directly targeted at the world’s future workers: university students transitioning into the workforce. We are committed to preparing today’s students--and tomorrow’s workers—to address the world’s most pressing problems. If granted the prize, we would use it to supplement funding for our pilot to be launched later this year, with particular focus on identifying strong technology-based learning systems to support our programming.