In the Ghanian capital of Accra, Abigail is one of thousands of young women working in the city’s bustling marketplace. Each day, she spends long hours selling produce in the hopes of making enough money to feed her family. On a good day, Abigail earns roughly USD $3.00.
Yet, this does not stop her from making the arduous journey, seven days per week, just to reach the crowded marketplace. Once there, she may only receive a few customers over the course of the day. As Abigail struggles to support her family, she dreams of a better future, not only for herself but for her children – one where they will have educational opportunities, access to dignified work opportunities, and the ability to earn a living wage.
In 2035, there will be more young Africans entering the workforce each year than in the rest of the world combined. Millions of new job opportunities are urgently needed for people like Abigail, her peers, and her family to thrive. At the same time, countries across Africa – and around the world – are rapidly investing in and expanding digital public infrastructure (DPI). This begs the question: how can we maximize DPI investments to ensure that it also delivers for economic growth and new job opportunities.
Digitalization can drive opportunity. But it also risks exacerbating inequality.
In the coming decades, Africa is set to become the youngest and most populous continent. Yet, the World Bank reports that inequality across Africa remains among the highest in the world. Why are people like Abigail struggling even though there are nine African countries – including Senegal, Ethiopia, and the Gambia – among the fastest growing global economies?
Her experience highlights four critical challenges facing the continent:
- Jobless growth: Africa is experiencing economic growth without proportional job creation. According to the International Labor Organization, nearly 83% of employment remains in the informal sector, characterized by low wages, poor working conditions, and limited skill development.
- Digital divide: An estimated 63% of Africans remain effectively offline, with women and rural communities disproportionately affected. Even where broadband exists, barriers like affordability and lack of relevant content prevent meaningful access.
- Digital skills gap: Of the world’s 20 countries with the weakest digital skills, 12 are in Africa. Only 11% of tertiary education graduates have formal digital training, creating a cycle of dependency on foreign expertise and inability to fully capitalize on the global growth of the digital economy.
- Data inequity: With limited internet participation, African languages, cultures, and information needs remain underrepresented online. This data divide threatens to accelerate existing inequalities, particularly with the rise of AI and machine learning.
When built on open standards and protocols, DPI can power economic opportunity and job growth.
DPI emerges as a powerful tool that can help solve for these pressing challenges. Unlike traditional digital investments, DPI focuses on creating interconnected digital foundations—like digital IDs, payment systems, and data exchanges—that can be customized to meet local needs.
Countries like India have already demonstrated the remarkable potential of this approach. By coupling digital ID and payment systems, India achieved over 80% financial inclusion in six years — compared to the 46 years it would have taken without these foundations. A study by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Dalberg revealed that by 2030, DPI could accelerate low- and middle-income countries’ combined GDP to $19.2 trillion, achieving this goal two to three years faster than otherwise possible.
To drive intentional job growth, we need to develop DPI that uses open standards, software, and protocols. These approaches make significantly easier for local companies to implement and customize DPI systems, rather than paying foreign companies to do this work.
What does this job-intensive DPI look like in practice? Here are three key factors:
- Implementing source code that is freely available to customize and use, allowing governments to ensure that software meets local needs;
- Engaging local private-sector partners who are primed to partner with the government as systems integrators;
- Designing systems with protocols that facilitate interoperability and make it easy for private sector innovators to turn the data generated by DPI into useful services that help communities.
For people like Abigail and her children, these impacts could be life-changing. They would not only provide her with access to new digital tools and services to grow her business and ease her economic burden, but they would also create the foundations that would allow her children to get relevant digital skills and access meaningful work opportunities.
The job creation potential is significant, as these two country examples show.
- Rwanda’s public-facing data exchange platform, Irembo, has driven 7,000 jobs in the form of agents across the country – many of whom are college students and local entrepreneurs.
- Bangladesh’s 9,000 Digital Centers across the country have resulted in 16,000, jobs – of which over 35 percent are held by young women.
We need to shift the needle to job-maximizing DPI – by building committed multistakeholder coalitions.
Realizing this potential requires collaboration. Governments, donors, tech companies, and educational institutions must work together to:
- Increase the availability of job-extensive DPI, such as data exchange platforms and verifiable credentials for people to prove their education and skills, which in turn increases demand for local skills.
- Equip students and job seekers with internships, credentials, and matching to ensure they are workforce ready to design, maintain, and build on top of open DPI systems.
- Accelerate the ability of companies and entrepreneurs to build new innovations on open DPI that solve real problems for people, which in turn increase relevant work opportunities.
At the Digital Impact Alliance, we are committed to finding ways to leverage our current work to promote job-intensive DPI. For example:
- Following our work on the DPG Charter, which led to a white paper on Co-Creating Our Digital Future, we will launch a Digital Dialogue in 2025 to engage a panel of experts around designing 2-3 concrete solutions for making open-source, digital public goods an increasingly viable option for DPI.
- Through our new partnership in Nigeria with Co-Creation Hub and Data Science Nigeria, we will engage public and private sector innovators in developing AI solutions build on top DPI (digital identity, registry and credentialing, and data sharing). These innovations will create jobs while also enhancing service delivery to citizens.
- As part of our 2025 learning agenda, we will continue to deep dive into how trusted data sharing can unlock data that innovators can use to create both services and economic opportunities – in sectors including climate and health.
The time to invest in Africa’s digital workforce is now. We need to build national, regional, and global coalitions of diverse stakeholders to ensure that DPI is designed to deliver job growth.
How can you help? Whether you are a policymaker, a technology provider, or an educator, your involvement is crucial. Together, we can shape a future where Africa’s digital workforce thrives. Get in touch – email us at info@dial.global to discuss opportunities for collaboration.
