Denis Opudo
High level of unemployment and low level of skilled personnel are some of the problems Africa is fighting against in the 21st century. Many startups have come up to narrow the wide gap caused by insufficient jobs in the region. Some organizations also offer training programs for various skills required in job markets.
Afringa is an online platform that aims at offering bedrock for the integrated and united African business landscape. The startup was launched by Victor Gerhard Thien. The launch came after working as a management consultant for 8 years. The platform aims at ensuring that all job candidates from countries like Rwanda secure jobs in some African sates such as Botswana or Tanzania. The platform’s main goal is to equip Africans with jobs, skills, and education. The three are the only path to a good business environment in Africa. Furthermore, the platform aims at linking informal workers to formal jobs via education.
The platform currently has 300 users who have public online careers. This helps them to network and boost the visibility across Africa. It also helps them to increase their carrier exposure across Africa borders. The platform’s database is increasing every day. Afringa aims at raising revenue via job advertisement paid by Africa. They will also raise money from multimedia cooperation. The platform will take over the whole hiring process for companies as a way of job advertisement. This will help it offer the right African candidate with good qualifications. There will be a low nominal annual fee for anyone wishing to apply for a job advertisement on the platform. The move will keep off fake applicants.
The platform works in a different way from Linkedln. Afringa addresses Individual further education and job application with fake qualification. These two are not handled by Linkedln. Some of the job applicants are not genuine. This makes the hiring process complicated, expensive and long. However, the platform wants to bring awareness to job market’s minimum requirements. It then provides applicants with automatic recommendations for further education. Furthermore, the platform will analyze existing career profiles. It will then offer further recommendations for further education. This will take place in a physical location based on the present location of the job candidate. In case the candidates are in rural areas they will be recommended for e-learning courses.
By 2035, 100 million Africans are expected to join the formal labor force. There is a market size of 677 million Africans in the working age population. Approximately, 25% of the number are working in the formal economy. This leads to 1.7 million job changes annually and creation of 4 million new formal jobs annually.
