Grace Ashiru
The Smart Africa Digital Academy (SADA), which is Smart Africa’s capacity-building arm, has collaborated with the government of Benin to establish a national digital academy.
This demonstrates the initiative’s drive to increase digital skills across the African continent. This happened when the Smart Africa Alliance and Benin’s ministry of digital affairs and digitalization signed a memorandum of understanding. Part of this agreement is that SADA will provide specific capacity-building interventions related to the country’s priorities in the ICT sector.
SADA was launched in Benin after Rwanda, Ghana, and the Republic of Congo. The creation and implementation of this initiative across the continent come against the backdrop of a massive digital skills gap in an ever-changing digital world.
SADA was made because Benin and Africa don’t have enough people with digital skills.SADA Benin will incorporate a variety of programs, including advanced training in information and communications technology (ICT) via a training of trainers’ methodology, executive training, and teachers’ skills.
In the same week, SADA launches 40 master trainers who will be trained in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity as part of the SADA Benin framework. To make this project more significant, they will teach other local trainers.
Aurélie Adam Soulé, the minister of digital affairs and digitalization, said, “SADA is an instrument, a platform that will allow us to take new initiatives and strengthen the initiatives that the Republic of Benin has already taken within the framework of its action program and to open perspectives on other areas of cooperation and capacity building.”Signing this MoU is a crucial step for me to take to scale up.”
As a pan-African learning ecosystem, SADA wants to help Africans get better digital skills, find jobs, and meet their needs for new talent.
The National Digital Academy will support the distinctively defined digital skills priority needs at the national level. The National Digital Academy will support the distinctively defined digital skills priority needs at the national level. Additionally, similar national digital academies will soon be established in the countries of Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Tunisia, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as Sierra Leone and Djibouti.
In addition, SADA is launching two new programs to equip African youth, entrepreneurs, and people in general with the digital skills necessary to succeed in the global technology ecosystem. The SADA for Youth and Entrepreneurs will help raise the digital technology competency of African youth, which will, in turn, help reduce young unemployment and increase the skills of African youth to engage in digital business. The SADA Digital Literacy program will assist all people in Africa in becoming digitally literate.
About three thousand policymakers and decision-makers from twenty-six different nations have received training from SADA since the program’s launch in August 2020. The training focused on subjects connected to digital transformation and new technologies.
This includes, among other things, use cases for artificial intelligence, the digital economy, 5G connectivity, data protection and privacy, and policies for rural broadband.
The goal is to have trained more than 22,000 people by 2023.
