Closing the digital skills gap in Africa

Africa is currently facing an alarming digital skills gap that is hindering the continent’s socioeconomic development, innovation, and job creation while fueling deepening systemic inequalities including a major gender digital divide and rampant youth unemployment. With 40% of the African population currently under 15 and an expected 850 million people under 30 by 2050, providing the African youth with decent employment opportunities is a challenge of paramount importance to the continent's social, economic, and political health. Yet, it is far from being resolved: while 10 to 12 million youth on the continent enter the workforce each year, only 3.1 million jobs are created. As the growth of digital activity is accelerating and job market demand for digital skills has become widespread in the continent, supporting the development of a robust digital economy in Africa is increasingly seen as a potentially successful pathway to counter large-scale underemployment. However, African countries score between 1.8 and 5 on the Digital Skills Gap Index, far below the global average of 6, with a staggering number of 12 African countries ranking among the world’s 20 countries with the weakest digital skills. One key obstacle to African countries’ ability to reap the benefits of their huge pool of young talent in the digital economy era is a major skills mismatch between education and the labor market. Traditional educational systems lack the resources and capacity to deliver adequate digital training to the African youth, starting with primary and secondary education: 50% of African countries do not offer computer training as part of their curriculum. Moreover, not only are universities in STEM fields extremely scarce in Africa (only 25 African universities rank among the top 500 globally), but the quality of the few that do exist is dramatically lower than in the rest of the world. Higher education institutions have failed to adapt educational programs to a rapidly shifting economy: the new highly specialized technical skills industries are now actively seeking have not yet been incorporated into the curricula, no substantial soft skills training is provided, and too few partnerships have been developed with industries and private sector actors to offer students opportunities for the early, real-world work experience that most recruiters require. As a result, only 11% of Africa’s tertiary education graduates have formal digital training and those who do often fail to meet employers’ actual needs when confronted with the reality of the job market. If the continent is to ensure that the 650 million workers needed to meet the massive demand for digital services are effectively (re)trained in digital skills, complementary and alternative solutions must be implemented at scale. Solutions such as digital TVET and dedicated job placement platforms have contributed to facilitating youth access to digital skills and decent work opportunities. However, TVET programs remain limited in number, reach, and scalability potential, while job placement platforms struggle to solve the network gap, hence failing to address the needs of the underserved and more vulnerable, particularly women.

GOMYCODE's mission is to accelerate the continent’s transition to the digital economy by leveraging digital skill-building to support African youth’s social and economic inclusion. We provide three main educational products: (1) short-term (3 months) digital upskilling and (2) longer-term (6 months) reskilling programs in the most in-demand digital skills: web development, cybersecurity, data science, marketing, and design; as well as (3) access to international certifications in high demand in key tech fields such as Creative Design (Adobe), Marketing (Meta), Data (Microsoft Power BI & CompTIA Data), Web development (React JS), Quality assurance (ISTQB), Project Management (PSM I & II) and Cybersecurity (CompTIA Security). While they can be purchased by anyone, these certifications are made available for free to all our students as part of their course package.

Our educational model is based on a hybrid learning approach: half of the course is facilitated by a dedicated instructor during group workshops (5-10 students per group) in one of our physical or online locations. Instructors go through a rigorous selection process in which their technical skills are carefully assessed using the digital skills assessment tool on the “Talent platform”, our job matching and recruitment management platform. The other half of the course is self-paced and managed through “Learn”, our in-house LMS. “Learn” allows instructors to easily design their courses and interact with their students in groups or one-to-one mentoring sessions. Students can access an online library of resources in their local language, submit individual assignments and group projects, use the Slack integration to engage with the GOMYCODE community and benefit from a personalized GenAI course assistant (AI Tutor "ACE") that answers their questions in their local dialect. Course content is updated monthly to reflect new technological or market trends, which we identify by closely monitoring market data and by collecting current and upcoming recruitment needs from our network of corporate partners.

As part of our efforts to facilitate access to decent employment opportunities, we created in 2022 the Career Department, an internal job placement infrastructure dedicated to the professional integration of GOMYCODE students. This department mobilizes dedicated human and digital resources to develop and maintain our network of 100+ corporate and organizational partners, collect hiring needs, generate job offers, and provide HR departments with technical assistance throughout the recruitment process - from skills identification to candidates' final selection - 70% of which is currently managed through the "Talent Platform". Career advisors guide students in their job search, using the platform to assess their skills, match them with relevant job postings, and provide individualized support during and after the recruitment process. Regular follow-ups are conducted with the employer up to 6 months after the start of the employment contract to collect feedback on the candidate's performance and address any issue that may arise. At the employer's request, GOMYCODE may provide candidates with additional personalized support from a dedicated coach.

GOMYCODE’s key target population is primarily medium to high-skilled youth (18-35) living in urban areas with limited financial resources. They are either unemployed and seeking a professional opportunity in tech, or currently (unhappily) employed and looking to transition to a more promising, higher-income career in tech. These young graduates have usually fallen victim to the discrepancy between educational outcomes and the skills needed by the private sector. In Sub-Saharan Africa, over 32% of tertiary and 35% of secondary education graduates (age 25-29) are NEETs (Not in Education, Employment, or Training). Women are disproportionately affected: according to ILO data from seven countries of Sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya, Senegal, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Ghana, and Ethiopia), young adult women had higher NEET rates than young adult men did at every level of education. Unemployment is not the only consequence of this skills mismatch: access to decent employment is also a major challenge, with skilled youth often finding themselves in jobs that do not match their qualifications, offer salaries below their expectations, or even do not match their area of expertise or preferred specialty. As a result, young graduates often fall prey to precarious living conditions and social isolation, endangering both their physical and mental health. Skilled African youth increasingly turn to self-employment and entrepreneurship to circumvent the lack of more “conventional" options, with 1 in 5 working-age Africans starting a new business and more than three-quarters of the youth planning to start one within five years. Although this trend has fueled the increase of entrepreneurial activity and a spur of innovation across the continent, such employment paths bear greater risk and require a set of demanding technical and soft skills, which can be quite time and resource-consuming to attempt building through the traditional educational channels.

In a rapidly evolving labor market, skills-based learning can deliver “the very specific know-how needed to enter a new job or progress in a career” (Coursera, 2022). GOMYCODE’s obsession with aligning its educational products with the most relevant market trends and its focus on leveraging technology to provide a seamless, competency-based learning experience, allows learners to build highly relevant technical skills and dramatically increase their competitiveness in the job market. In turn, the Career Department's skills-based hiring practices facilitated by the skills assessment and matching tools on the "Talent Platform" act as a catalyst for greater, more equitable access to professional opportunities for all youth, leveling the playing field for the underserved by greatly reducing the risk of human - notably gender - bias interfering with hiring decisions. 

In addition, our hands-on pedagogical approach, with active and project-based learning at its core, develops and strengthens students’ resourcefulness, critical thinking, and problem-solving abilities - skills crucial to job seekers and aspiring entrepreneurs alike. The blended model of digitally enabled self-paced learning and instructor-led workshops further allows students to become autonomous learners while regularly interacting with and learning from their peers, thereby building up their human and social capital and minimizing the risk of social isolation.

Beyond their cumulated technical expertise, stellar academic backgrounds, and wealth of professional experience in education, social innovation, and strategic management, members of the founding and executive team have an astute understanding of the complexities of the issues at play and a firm commitment to a data-driven, community-centered, factual yet bold approach to addressing them. The founders created GOMYCODE to respond to an issue they had witnessed first-hand: the lack of adequate and affordable digital education in Tunisia, resulting in an ocean of untapped talent, stagnant growth, and limited innovation. Their approach to building the business has historically been focused on being attentive to the voices of the like-minded young people who came through their doors. They nurtured close relationships with their early adopters, conducting hours of customer interviews to gain a deep understanding of their needs and wants, listening to their frustration with a challenging post-revolution economic climate, their hopes of pursuing a tech career, and their concerns about the perceived irrelevance of their academic training to what the tech job market appeared to require. These conversations allowed the founders to confirm the scope and urgency of the problem they had perceived, inspiring them to tackle it at scale. A few years later, as the company had grown into a fairly successful business, they actively sought ways to serve the youth beyond their standard commercial offering. By 2023, they had managed to raise about 1M€ from international cooperation donors to fund free reskilling digital training and job placement programs for more than 2,500 underprivileged unemployed youth in Tunisia. 

The centricity of the community’s needs in the founders’ priorities has transpired in every aspect of the business. From a product perspective, from its earliest stages, the “Learn” platform had built-in tools to collect feedback from users, from overall satisfaction levels to specific requests, comments, and suggestions, which were regularly analyzed and discussed among the team to come up with actionable strategies to relieve pain points and optimize positive impact. The recruitment of the new CPO in 2022 has driven this vision even further. A profoundly curious individual with an unwavering passion for African tech and extensive experience living, working, and traveling across the continent, they introduced increasingly sophisticated, digitally-enabled customer feedback loops allowing for deeper, highly accurate insights into customers’ specific expectations, informing strategies to adapt to students' learning preferences, achieve cultural sensitivity, overcome language barriers, evaluate the success or failure of methodological approaches and commercial offering, keep instructors motivated, stimulate community engagement, and improve time and resource management while sticking to strict quality standards. Regarding operational strategy, as GOMYCODE expanded to new geographies, the company adopted a horizontal, decentralized model of governance, whereas a central team provides a strategic orientation, including company-wide values, standards, policies, and guidelines, while locally hired managers, recruited in part because of their strong connection with the local community, are given the freedom to manage their space’s operations, engage their communities, and respond to customers’ needs in the way they see fit.

Since its creation in 2017, GOMYCODE has launched 40 spaces in 9 countries (Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Kenya), and has trained more than 35,000 people, among whom 55% of women, in high-demand, market-aligned digital skills, with an average job placement rate of 67%. 

GOMYCODE started by introducing weekend courses for high school and university students to teach them how to build a tech product. We then moved on to conducting full-time programs to help unemployed graduates access tech-related employment opportunities. The success of these courses allowed us to expand the model to 3 new cities in Tunisia. With the introduction of the hybrid model and the optimization of the physical space, we were able to diversify our course offering to new learning tracks including design, digital marketing, and security. After launching our model in 6 new countries, reaching 12 locations, and raising USD 7M in Series A in 2022, we introduced the 100% online hackerspace model, which represents about 20% of our sales today. 2023 marked a new expansion into the African market, as we expanded to over 30 new cities and 3 new countries. 

As of 2023, we have achieved the following :

• USD 7M raised in Series A round
• 250 full-time team members, 50 full time and +1500 part-time instructor
• Massive investment in our physical infrastructure, reaching 40 locations in 2023
• Built-in systems to manage student experience and support for over +4000 active students
• A predictable student acquisition model based on funnel performance
• A fully integrated LMS to manage the training at scale and cut friction
• Demonstrated capacity & tech to: 
  • Manage unlimited online rollout across 10 online locations
  • Manage over +1500 instructors
  • Onboard +3000 students monthly
• Built a successful model with 90% B2C / 10% B2B
• 10,100 students trained in 2023
  • Graduation Rate: 70%
  • NPS Experience: 65%
  • NPS Instructor: 75%
  • DAU: 1,800 
  • WAU: 3,500
  • MAU: 7,500
  • Average Session on Learn: 65 minutes

We are very excited about the opportunity to join the MIT Solve community. As we move forward into the scaling phase of the business, the support we would receive from Solve would prove invaluable in helping us address the challenges we are currently facing  :

1. Business model: we are dedicated to having a significant impact on African youth’s access to “good jobs” in the tech and digital industry. We would be very interested in receiving support to strengthen the Career department, including structuring and streamlining organizational processes and developing a future-proof, sustainable business model for our job placement services. 

2. Market/ sales strategy: 2023 marked the opening of 30 additional locations in 3 new countries. Although we have developed a predictable customer acquisition model and successfully deployed effective retention strategies, penetrating new markets poses inevitable challenges. Our new locally sourced General Managers could benefit from technical assistance and advisory from knowledgeable Solve partners in removing potential market-specific barriers.

4. Impact measurement: we would greatly welcome support in designing a robust (social) impact assessment system to complement our existing monitoring and evaluation practices. 

5. Financial advisory: advisory services to strengthen the team's capacity to develop and implement company-wide accounting and budgetary practices.

6. Marketing: technical assistance to design and implement a solid marketing strategy and company-wide messaging, branding, and content marketing.

Our solution is innovative in three main ways :

1. Hybrid education methodology: although not entirely novel, the concepts of blended and active learning have not yet been implemented at this scale. In our dynamic, rapidly changing world, the students’ most valuable resource is not knowledge itself, but their capacity to learn, think independently, and be socially resilient. The basis of our learning model is thus to push students, on the one hand, to become independent learners, and on the other hand to assimilate knowledge more efficiently by systematically applying it in concrete situations, often in interaction with their peers - by working on concrete group projects or individual assignments in which they can develop and experiment their ability to design, build and ship a tech product. 

This is why our methodology, called "hybrid", is founded on two pillars:

• Self-paced learning: 50% of the student's educational experience takes place on our e-learning platform "Learn". Students can (re)discover the course's key concepts, and progress in their learning by practicing, autonomously, outside the hours of face-to-face training. 

• Instructor-facilitated Live discussions and training sessions: in groups and individually, with a qualified instructor, allowing the student to explore the course content in detail, ask questions, and deepen their learning. 

2. Leveraging technology for greater impact: we have built a gamified multiplatform that provides a seamless user experience for instructors, students, and operation managers alike. This has allowed us to boost instructors' motivation and retention rate, increase students' graduation rate and overall satisfaction levels, and greatly cut operational friction. The introduction of the Talent platform has allowed us to achieve greater impact by connecting our educational products with concrete, impactful job placement services. 

3. Frugal and scalable: one major challenge facing educational providers is the costs associated with the need for physical infrastructure. We have managed to devise a frugal, reproducible, and scalable model without compromising the quality of our products, or the comfort of our students, instructors, and staff. 

Our international reach as well as proactive partnership-building approach could result in fruitful collaborations with other private educational providers to stimulate job creation and encourage a more systematic offering of internships and apprenticeships, as well as with public institutions to work collaboratively to incorporate new in-demand skills in the curricula and educational programs. 

We believe that if we : 

Activities: (1) provide African youth with relevant, high-quality educational products powered by technology ; (2) actively work with potential recruiters seeking tech talent to identify their hiring needs, connect them with job seekers from our students' community by matching their needs with candidates with the relevant skill sets, and provide the latter with individualized support in resume and interview preparation; and (3) provide continued support and opportunities for life long learning to recruits during the first months of their employment, THEN

Outputs: (1) Young African job seekers will be (re)trained in digital and interpersonal skills and better equipped to find a job that matches their skill set; and (2) recruits will receive adequate support to facilitate their integration into their new working environment which will encourage employers to retain them, THEN

Outcomes: (1) Young African job seekers will find a tech-related job that matches their profile, and (2) recruits will remain employed or active in the job market; THEN

Impact: Improvement of youth employment rate in the African digital economy.

We have two key impact goals : 

(1) Improving African youth's access to relevant, high-quality, affordable digital training: We believe that access to relevant, quality education not only is a human right and one essential pillar of individual and collective freedom; it is also the key to unlocking many of the personal and global blockages to sustainable wellbeing, and ultimately development. This is why our training focuses on building in-demand technical skills while developing one’s aptitudes - independent self-learning, critical thinking, and problem-solving, collaboration, teamwork, clear and effective communication, curiosity, and grit. 

Specific indicators we are monitoring closely include the total number of students enrolled, the total number of scholarship students, the attendance rate of paying students, the attendance rate of scholarship students, the graduation rate of paying and scholarship students, the dropout rate of paying and scholarship student, and certification exam success rate. All indicators are disaggregated by gender and geography. 

(2) Providing African youth with decent employment opportunities in the tech industry. We are dedicated to fighting youth unemployment in Africa and are actively working with our network of corporate partners to facilitate students' access to jobs in the tech industry. 

Specific indicators we are monitoring closely include the overall placement rate within 3 months after the end of the training and up to 6 months after the employment start date; salary evolutions after one year in employment; improvement in perceived life conditions after 3 and 6 months. All indicators are disaggregated by gender, geography, and type of employment contract.

Our solution offers three main technological components :

- The "Talent platform" (software): a skills testing and skills-based hiring platform ; 

- The "Learn" platform (software + GenAI + Slack integration): a fully integrated Learning Management System for instructors, students, and operation managers. Available as an app and mobile friendly. An IA Tutor (ACE) serves as a proxy for the instructor and answers students' questions in their local language. 

- The Community (Slack integration): The students and alumni community is managed with Slack, and we have programmed automatic translations of messages in the language of the reader. 

Full-time staff: 300

• C-suite: 4
• Ops : 50
• Sales: 110
• Marketing: 10
• G&A: 10
• Instructors: 80
• Central R&D / Product..: 40

Part-time staff: 1500 (instructors)

Contractors: 15 (miscellaneous)

We have been working on GOMYCODE since August 2016, for almost 8 years. 

Our governance structure is effectively quite diverse: our team is decentralized and spans across 9 countries, with each country team being locally sourced. Over 55% of all staff are women, and 50% of leadership positions are held by women. We provide equal pay and fair treatment for all and do strive to consciously account for systemic inequalities those of our community members who may be identified or identify themselves as part of a marginalized group may face. Although we do not have yet a formalized diversity, gender, and inclusion policy, our goal moving forward is to take a more systematic approach to these issues.

Our revenue model is mainly built on a tuition-based educational product offering (short and longer-term training programs, sales of international certifications), with 90% of our revenue generated by B2C sales, and the remaining 10% by B2B sales, which is a challenging model in Africa. Yet, this model has allowed us to grow from a small startup in 2017 to a successful scale-up today. We attribute our success first and foremost to the quality and relevance of the educational content we provide and the active learning approach we promote. We believe African consumers have put their trust in us because we provide strong value for a very affordable pricing point - our prices range on average from USD 300 to USD 700, while university prices range from USD 2000 to USD 4000 - making access to quality education and decent employment opportunities possible. This is made possible by our operational model. The blended education methodology at the core of our model enables us to optimize the use of our physical infrastructure and human resources without affecting the quality of the content we deliver or our students' learning experience. The cohort-based system allows for active student rotation, which in turn lets us welcome a larger number of learners at the same time. As we are both a virtual and physical community, our communication channels are diversified enough (from online to field marketing) to provide us with a wide yet targeted reach. 

To date, we have been able to generate significant revenue from our sales. 

Additional revenue sources include external funding by international cooperation partners which we raised for training and job placement programs for underserved unemployed youth in Tunisia. Donors included Expertise France, USAID, Drosos Foundation, Hivos, and The Challenge Fund for Youth Employment (CFYE). 

We have also raised two fundraising rounds: a USD 850k Seed round in October 2020, and a USD 7M Series A round in January 2022 from recognized investors and seasoned business angels.