Enugu HCDL App

Every job is gradually becoming digital. 

Sadly, the African youth that will be fit for this future of work couldn’t access the required digital skills due to poor quality and expensive internet service. And aside from the actual cost of accessing premium technology skill training itself, an average young African pays 5 times more on the internet to watch training videos. 

This makes it difficult for most youth to access the training, thereby leaving the socioeconomically low people behind. So irrespective of your income level, location, and family background, we make premium tech skill training and tech jobs accessible to you.

Our HCDL App in the hands of any youth will give you access to funds to kickstart your digital skill training. The system provides learners with the dongle to access structured digital learning programs. Our vision is to ensure that 30 million youths have access to digital skill training.

To attain continental balance and absorb the youth entering the workforce, Africa needs to create 12 million-15 million jobs annually. Yet about 3.5 million of the scarcely created entry-level job vacancies go unfilled each year due to skill gap. Data from African Development Bank reveals that 2 out of every 3 African graduates remain unemployed. 

This directly points that for African organizations to thrive in this digital economy, there must be an intentional Human Capital Development. 

Yet, learning premium technology skills is difficult and expensive for an average young African: aside from the cost of the program, it costs 5 times more to upskill remotely due to inaccessible quality internet availability. This stress has forced more than 85% to abandon virtual training.

This program compounds to make hiring talent difficult and expensive for organizations. A report by Mckinsey buttressed this, "75% of employers find it hard to fill roles that are critical to the growth of their business while the employment rate in Africa is on the rise due to the skill gap." This is a wicked problem for our continent, Sub-Saharan Africa as it wastes our jobs and affects about 200 million young people.

We developed the HCDL App to give young Africans access to zero-interest loans for their capacity development. In less than 3 minutes with few clicks, you’ve fully registered for your premium technology skill training, and expect your learning dongle to get to you in 24 hours or less. This is also available via USSD.

Once that dongle gets to you as African youth, you can access over 5o well-structured and curated digital and soft skill training with no dependence on the internet.

We have a team of distributed knowledge experts that co-creates digital skill training with industry experts in the form of videos, text notes, and checklists, and a support system that helps incentivize learning completion.

The HCDL App is designed for young African to access funds for learning technology skills. The solution serves recent graduates and job-seekers between the ages of 18- 35 years. All our over 58 initiatives are focus on people within this age bracket so that they can access human capacity development and job search support. 

Our product gives young Africans the opportunity to access zero-interest loans that will fetch them the premium digital skill training dongle so that they can be equipped with the capacity to access jobs and create jobs that will transform their lives.

With this solution, we have trained over 7500 young people in skills areas such as Data Analytics, Product Management, Programming and Coding, Artificial Intelligence, and Design. 

Since 2019, we’ve created over 7,000 direct and indirect jobs through partnerships with our 58 hiring companies. Over 50% of our alumni are able to work remotely and create better lives for themselves and their communities. 

In Africa, the educational system has not kept the same pace with the changing nature of work, thereby posing difficulty for employers to find the right technical talents. A McKinsey report highlighted that 60% of new graduates are not adequately prepared for the world of work.

To keep up with the digital workforce, 21st-century human capital development must be heavily invested in. Our solution provides access to funds to help young Africans get the required premium technology skill training with zero dependence on the internet. This digital inclusion will narrow the job gap for mismatching due to location.

With the HCDL App, up to 11,000 young Africans have accessed this zero-interest loan for skill acquisition, training with private sector anchors, and access to jobs and entrepreneurial support. We have created over 7,000 jobs, disbursing over $500,000 in HCDL Loans with an 85% recovery rate. Under the Enugu Learning Initiative, we have provided digital capacity development skills to over 35,000 job seekers, entrepreneurs, and MSMEs.

Also, our partnership with Jobberman Nigeria to create a job matching system for employers and trainers with mandatory soft/employability skills training and technical training has grown to 20,000 users. 

Considering our established products and users, you consider ourselves to be a grown company that’s actively looking to scale.

Our core innovation is driven by two layers: Technology and Learning Pedagogy:

Our technology:

From our HCDL App and in a few clicks, you can access loans and support to pay for any of your desired premium technology skills training. This automatically applies to your training kit which gets shipped to you in less than 24 hours.

During your classes, there is a screen recording tool that automatically records learners’ activity as they study and works on their capstone project. This helps us understand the learner’s level of conceptual understanding and applicability.

Also, is the AI-powered information generation interface that pulls the screen recorded data and graphically interprets the students’ work process into an understandable format. It furthers into a human-based interpretation platform that eases decision-making and adequate assessment guidance.

The Learning Pedagogy:

During your training, we assign a learning buddy to you and then add you to a support community that interacts with you on a social media platform. And because our learnings are based on projects, you will work on projects to reinforce learning. 

Our solution currently serves up to 11,000 people. The vision is to serve additional 20,000 people by the close of 2021.

Our success is measured by the impact our work has on the lives of youths and SMEs in the State. We have developed an internal methodology for collecting data to measure and report the success of our graduates. This measurement informs the impact of our work ultimately.

Firstly, we measure the transition into new roles by collecting the data of how our graduates are reporting to have moved from the unemployment status to employed. Usually, there is a 4-month duration between the time our students get into our program and when they gain new employment. To date, we have achieved a 65% success rate at pairing our talents to job roles and also accomplished 90% enterprise transformation for our business clients.

We are also measuring success by how much our learning programs are closing skill gaps. Usually, we bench standards against 3 major performance metrics.

First, are the difference between the skill level of the participants before the training and post-training, the completion of the capstone project and the remarks of business leaders who are evaluating the capstone, and finally, the on-the-job performance that we deploy 5 months after the completion of our training program.

Finally, our newest success and impact measurement is by evaluating the overall performance of emerging sector businesses that are hiring our talents.

The Enugu SME Center is an Agency under the Enugu State Government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Chinelo Nwosu

Christian Okoli

Emeka Innocent Madu

Michael Ikechukwu Ihenacho

Chidimma Ugwuanyi

Nwaoke Lilian

Salem Emmanuel

Bright Nweke

Sodiq Ajala

Prior to this time, most of our staff at the Enugu SME Agency are affected by this problem of digital inclusion. But now we all have a proven track record in the areas of financial development and education technology. 

The CEO has 9 years of experience in business administration (Insurance and Finance) and working on numerous private and public projects.

Currently, we are focused on Job Creation through the Human Capital Development Loan Program under Enugu Jobs, Access to Credit (Enugu Loans) and Capacity Development Programs (Enugu Learning), and Access to Grants and Business Support Services. 

Under Enugu Jobs, we created a Loan-for-Jobs Product called Human Capital Development for youth, underemployed and unemployed to access intensive digital upskilling training from private sector anchor firms across various capacities. 

In all sectors. These newly evolved Human Capital then get retained by the private sector anchors or supported entrepreneurially. We recover the loan from their training through small monthly deductions over a period of time (either via salaries or sales). 

These loans are ZERO Interest Loans. Pretty much your determination is your collateral. We were able to create over 7,000 jobs in 2020, at the height of COVID with programs in technology, auto mechanics, digital marketing, fashion, creative industry, vocation skills, amongst others. 

The Enugu SME Agency core team shares the same reality. We all, at the very early stage of our lives, experienced the African type of unemployment. 

Today, the Agency is led by a leadership team of 5, a full staff of 4, and a program and operations team of 30. 

Prior to starting the Enugu SME Center, the Director and top Technical Staffs have worked together on multiple projects.  

Our approach to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive leadership team is that our team members have the 100% option of working from anywhere. We ensured that everyone jumps on a stand-p every day to discuss moving the project forward, and how our individual tasks for the day will help achieve that. Our team comprises 55% male and 45% female. 

The company is led by a CEO with 9 years of finance and insurance experts, the CMO has more than 4 years of experience in B2C, the Technical Lead has 5 years of experience in Education Technology and Instructional Design. The Programme Director has an MBA and also 5 years of experience lecturing at the University. Our CTO is an ex-technology entrepreneur and an AI engineer.

Being a Solver will avail us the platform to learn some global practices and connect with experts that will help us manage our growing community. Having trained more than 11,000 youths, and our student base is increasing at a 5% weekly rate. Just this year, we have reached about 2000 youths.

The Solver team will also provide us the opportunity to access resources and supports that we can leverage to accelerate our growth.

We need more training and mentoring on our business model. We want to be able to devise more ways to help people develop their human capacity. And we’re looking to get expert advice on how to improve our tech security and database.

A strategic partnership for us at this point would be with networks of technology hubs, incubators, and accelerators in the United States. An important part of our work is globalizing our employers' network to give more global employment opportunities to young people that are passing through our learning programs in Africa.

One of the major ways to explore this is by developing more strategic relationships with organizations that are hubs to technology startups and scaleups in the US. This gives us the platform to provide the service of distributed engineering teams to them.

The African population continues to rise. Aside from having the highest fertility rate of 4.7, which is the highest in the world, our median age is 19. Africa’s labor force will have increased to more than 600 million by 2030 and predicted data highlighted that by 2050, Africa will account for 23% of the global workforce. Which will be the largest in the world.

The big deal now is that every job is gradually becoming digital. 

Sadly, the African youth that will be fit for this future of work couldn’t access the required digital skills due to poor quality and expensive internet service. And aside from the actual cost of accessing premium technology skill training itself, an average young African pays 5 times more on the internet to watch their training videos. 

This makes it difficult for most youth to access the training, thereby leaving the socioeconomically low people behind. So irrespective of your income level, location, and family background, we make premium tech skill training and tech jobs accessible to you.

Our HCDL App in the hands of any youth will give you access to funds to kickstart your digital skill training. The system provides learners with the dongle to access structured digital learning programs. Our vision is to ensure that 30 million youths have access to digital skill training.