According to AfDB, this Technological progress provides a golden opportunity for emerging and developing economies to grow faster and attain higher levels of prosperity in a shorter span of time. However, there are fears that technologies could potentially displace human labor, widen income inequality, and further increase the share of informal or contingent work. Current disruptive technology changes, however, raise concerns that this time could be different, especially as Africa’s unemployment rate keeps sky rocketing.
Africa’s employment challenge is essentially a youth employment challenge. Of the 73 million jobs created between 2000 and 2008, only 22 percent were filled by youth (AfDB, 2017). The rate of unemployment among youth is estimated to be double that of adults in most African countries (AfDB, 2017).
Each year, 10 million to 12 million youths, mostly educated, enter the workforce, yet only 3 million formal jobs are created annually (AfDB, 2017). Second, many youths are ill-prepared to fill the few openings because they often do not have the skills required by employers (AfDB, 2015) due either to the poor quality of their education or to specialization in subject areas (such as arts and humanities) other than those that employers demand (such as science, technology, and mathematics—STEM). Third, youth do not have the social capital, networks, and experience to compete with adults in the labor market (AfDB, 2015).
In Nigeria, the story is the same, according to Tradingeconomics, unemployment Rate in Nigeria increased to 23.10 percent in the third quarter of 2018 from 22.70 percent in the second quarter of 2018. Unemployment Rate in Nigeria averaged 12.31 percent from 2006 until 2018, reaching an all time high of 23.10 percent in the third quarter of 2018 and a record low of 5.10 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010.
Historically, technological progress has not created technological unemployment, rather new technologies have eliminated some jobs and substituted for some tasks formerly performed by humans, but they have also enabled the creation of many new jobs powered by growing incomes and the emergence of new occupations This is why our learning arm, Orodata Learn Academy has created ‘The Future of Work Classes’ alongside its Business Intelligence and Data Science Classes, an all-encompassing learning path, to empower young people and organizations with skills and abilities on new technologies, to help cushion this inevitable impact of technological change on the future of work.