By far the greatest untapped resource in Africa isn’t oil, gold, or fertile land it is people. Young, hungry, ambitious people. Every year, millions of them pour into job markets that don’t have nearly enough to offer. The continent’s so-called “youth bulge” is both a ticking time bomb and an unprecedented opportunity.
But what if the answer to this coming crisis doesn’t lie in factories or foreign aid, but in something as unglamorous as picking up the phone?
Call centres and more broadly, business process outsourcing (BPO) have long been a major force in countries like India and the Philippines. From answering customer complaints to processing insurance claims and moderating content on social media, BPOs have created millions of jobs by handling the administrative overflow of Western corporations. Now, that opportunity may finally be shifting south.
Mercy Mugure, a Kenyan entrepreneur, was one of the early believers. Back in 2006, she co-founded Adept Technologies, one of Kenya’s first BPO companies, inspired by the meteoric rise of India’s outsourcing industry. “We thought: why not us?” she recalls. Her hope was simply to use the digital economy to create meaningful jobs for Kenyans.
Kenya’s government is beginning to take notice. In Nairobi, tech parks are being built. Training programs are being funded. Partnerships are forming between public universities and outsourcing firms. Rwanda, ever the efficiency-focused outlier, is quietly positioning itself as a hub for high-quality digital labor. It’s not a full-scale boom yet. But it's something to become excited about
Africa has often been asked to follow the West’s development path, industrialize, urbanize, export. But what if the continent skipped that playbook? What if, instead of assembly lines, Africa’s economic engine ran on headphones and keyboards?
It won’t be easy. The competition is fierce. Policy must evolve. Infrastructure must improve. And above all, African governments must move with urgency, not caution. But the opportunity is real. The digital economy is hungry, and Africa is ready to feed it.