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Womandla Foundation, a South African upskilling non-profit, has partnered with the International Association of Volunteer Effort and IBM SkillsBuild to launch Phase Two of Reskilling Revolution Africa in South Africa. The initiative aims to equip women and young people with future-ready skills as automation continues to reshape entry-level work. The International Association of Volunteer Effort is a global network that promotes volunteering for social change, while IBM SkillsBuild is a free digital learning platform. “At IBM, we believe that access to technology skills is a catalyst for inclusive economic growth,” John Matogo, corporate social responsibility leader for IBM Middle East and Africa, said at the launch on Thursday. Reskilling Revolution Africa, endorsed by the African Union in 2023, piloted its first phase from late 2024 in Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa, reaching about 30,000 young people. Participants enrol through local NGOs, complete curated learning pathways on IBM SkillsBuild, spanning digital literacy, AI, cybersecurity, entrepreneurship and soft skills, and earn globally recognised certificates. The model combines self-paced online courses with mentorship, volunteering and community projects to build practical experience and employability. Phase Two, now being rolled out in South Africa by the Womandla Foundation, expands course offerings such as AI and green skills. Cohorts run 8–10 weeks with mentoring and post-training support to translate credentials into jobs, entrepreneurship or further study. South Africa’s youth unemployment rate for ages 15–24 sits near 59%, one of the highest globally. While job losses in South Africa linked to AI and automation are still only estimates, the reality is that some workers are being laid off, and freelancers are struggling to find new work. It is difficult to tell whether these retrenchments are driven by AI, cost-cutting, or offshoring, since current studies do not clearly isolate the causes in the South African context. But in the US, white-collar automation layoffs surged in 2025, a trend expected to diffuse globally and could soon intensify South Africa’s employment challenges. South Africa faces heightened risk in sectors such as business‑process outsourcing (BPO) and call centres, where automation technologies are advancing quickly, but human labour still carries much of the workload. As these global trends take hold, the country is under growing pressure to plan strategically, finding ways to safeguard its workforce and prepare for the disruptions ahead. “We should pay less attention to predicting job loss numbers and focus more on building adaptive learning ecosystems fast enough to keep up with technological change,” Sam Gqomo, the founder of Womandla Foundation, said. She said the foundation offers about 36 free learning paths in entrepreneurship, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), and creative industries, from beginner to advanced. “This collaboration demonstrates what becomes possible when technology, volunteering and purpose-driven partnerships align,” said Samuel Turay, Africa Senior Program Manager from IAVE. “Together, we are creating practical pathways that empower people to participate meaningfully in the economy.” Khadija Richards, head of impact at Womandla, described the AI transition as less of a threat than a structural turning point for Africa’s labour market. “Africa is the youngest continent in the world,” she said. “ Young people are already digitally adaptive, entrepreneurial and comfortable navigating change,” she said. “When AI moves quickly, youth are often the first to experiment with it.” She said automation will primarily transform, not erase, sectors built on repetitive tasks such as administration, retail operations, and routine data work. But new layers of employment are emerging above them, including AI supervision and optimisation, customer-experience design, digital operations management, tech-enabled supply chains, and platform entrepreneurship. “Automation is not only changing jobs; it’s changing how young South Africans imagine work itself. Lots of young people want a career portfolio, a job, a side hustle, a gig, a family business and the current education infrastructure is not friendly to that,” Gqomo added. A recurring theme across the Reskilling Revolution initiative is misalignment: education and policy cycles move in years, while AI capability cycles move in months. “The key gap is alignment, not ability,” Richards said. “African youth are creative, resilient and adaptive. The system must ensure early AI fluency, applied learning, and recognition of alternative credentials.” Policies are slow to catch up, and this affects jobs. Short training programs and certificates are not taken seriously in many hiring systems. That makes it harder for young people who taught themselves or learned informally to move up, even though employers are asking for exactly those skills. But that upside depends on infrastructure and policy catching up: connectivity access, devices, inclusive STEM pipelines, and recognition of non-traditional learning pathways. South Africa now faces a structural choice familiar across emerging economies: whether automation widens inequality or catalyses productivity growth. Without intervention, AI adoption could concentrate opportunity among already-connected urban youth while displacing routine workers. With targeted policy, rural digital hubs, broadband expansion, and skills-based hiring incentives, the same technologies could expand participation. “Africa’s youth are not behind the AI curve,” Richards said. “The real question is whether systems will empower youth to shape the new jobs.”
Read MoreThere are few investments more treacherous than buying land in Nigeria. In 2017, Ndifreke Ikpoku paid ₦23 million ($13,000) for what appeared to be a legitimate plot on the outskirts of Port Harcourt, a growing urban city in the country. The documents checked out—until they didn’t. On closer inspection, the “asset” he believed would cement his place in Nigeria’s aspirational middle-class was little more than paperwork for land that had already been sold multiple times over. He lost the money—and the pride that comes with being a landowner in Nigeria—but not his resolve. That loss would become the foundation of a startup. Alongside Nnamdi Uba, Ikpoku set out to tackle one of the country’s most entrenched property-market failures: ownership verification. They founded Sytemap, formerly HouseAfrica, a startup that digitises land records on the blockchain to reduce fraud and double allocation. In Nigeria’s property market, fraud is not an anomaly; it is a structural feature. Developers sell more plots than exist. Agents market land that has quietly changed hands. Double allocation, where multiple buyers are issued rights to the same parcel, is common. Verifying title status often requires physically visiting a registry, navigating opaque bureaucracy, and dealing with incomplete records. The risks are particularly acute in Lagos, where peri-urban estates are spreading rapidly, and land can change hands several times before formal registration is complete. While laws, such as the Lagos State Lands Registration Law (2015) and the Land Use Act (1978), seek to legitimise the property market for homebuyers in the state and the country at large, the gap often lies in enforcement. Poor record management and inconsistent oversight create fertile ground for fraud. In August 2025, the federal government launched a digital portal allowing homebuyers to track, report, and monitor housing fraud—an acknowledgment of how deeply the problem runs. “The main reason we started [Sytemap] was because he [Ikpoku] lost a huge amount of money buying real estate,” Uba, Sytemap’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), said. “We realised we couldn’t solve it by just sharing risk. The problem was structural. What was missing was infrastructure.” In 2019, the startup launched as “HouseAfrica” with an initial ambition to enable fractional property ownership on blockchain rails. The premise, said Uba, was that ten people could own a property and share rental income transparently. But almost immediately, Ikpoku and Uba encountered a deeper obstacle. “We were having a lot of questions then,” Uba said. “What of the [land] title? What if something happens? How can we verify these properties? These are infrastructure issues that were already affecting us. If the underlying land is not verified, you cannot fractionalise it safely.” Before they could tokenise ownership, they had to solve verification. That realisation eventually led to what is now Sytemap and to the creation of what the founders describe as a digital map directory for real estate in Lagos State. The registry that stalled The founders’ first instinct was to work with the government. They said they partnered with the Nigerian Mortgage Refinance Company (NMRC), an institution that provides liquidity in the mortgage market, and signed agreements with the Nigerian Institution of Surveyors. They explored integrating a blockchain-based land registry with Kaduna State, a north-western state in Nigeria, as a pilot. “We wanted to launch a blockchain-based land registry as the infrastructure that can help us to do fractional ownership,” said Uba. “If we have a blockchain registry, we can clearly tell people, go here and verify.” Then the pandemic arrived; the bureaucratic processes slowed further. “We stayed the whole lot of 2020 without achieving one single thing,” said Uba. By 2021, the founders concluded that waiting for state integration would stall the company indefinitely. They began asking a different question: who already controls structured land records? The answer was private developers. The map directory solution Real estate developers in Lagos typically buy large parcels of land and subdivide them into plots. Internally, they maintain allocation records, site plans, and buyer registers. In effect, each developer operates a small, private registry. Plot configuration often depends on the developer’s intended use—residential, commercial, or mixed-use—and must comply with planning standards before allocation begins. Instead of digitising the state registry, Sytemap decided to digitise those mini-registries and connect them into a single mapped system. “What we did was to drop other features and pick only the real estate companies,” said Uba. “Developers buy acres of land and divide it into smaller plots again, which means they have access to land records. They are mini-registries. Our solution can help them to achieve what they want to do, but in a structured way.” The core product that emerged is what the company calls a map directory. It is a satellite-backed digital representation of estates across Lagos and, soon, other states. Each estate is mapped, each plot geo-referenced, and every allocation is recorded against a specific coordinate on the map. Ikpoku said Sytemap uses Google Maps as a base map and infuses other maps to enhance the embedded features on its platform. The digitised data on the map (the mapped properties) is obtained from real estate companies, who, at the point of onboarding, have government-approved estate development layouts. “You are not going to buy audio land,” said Ikpoku. “What you are buying is what you are seeing [on the map]. We do not just digitise property because a developer gives it to us. We verify that they own it and that it is there. Then we place it on the map with satellite imagery that tells you exactly where this property is.” According to Ajayi Akinwumi, a Lagos-based surveyor, large estates in the city are typically mapped using differential global positioning system (DGPS) equipment to achieve high positional accuracy before plots are formally demarcated on the ground. “After capturing the plots, you still have to do layout and physically divide each plot,” he said. “It is not something satellite imagery alone can determine.” Yet, Sytemap says its proprietary map directory serves three functions. First, it visualises supply.
Read MoreMTN Nigeria, the country’s largest telecom operator, generated more revenue in 2025 reported ₦5.20 trillion ($3.82 billion) in revenue for the year, according to its full-year financial results. This is the highest ever recorded in Nigeria’s telecom sector, up from ₦3.36 trillion ($2.47 billion) in 2024. Backed by a 51.87% share of Nigeria’s 179.41 million active mobile subscriptions, MTN’s revenue nearly matched the entire telecommunications industry’s ₦5.30 trillion ($3.89 billion) revenue in 2023, according to data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC). The company also restored positive retained earnings and shareholders’ equity and has proposed a final dividend of ₦15 ($0.011) per share, after announcing an interim dividend of ₦5 ($0.004) in September 2025, bringing the total dividend for the year to ₦20 ($0.015). “2025 marked a significant turning point in our business performance and resumption of dividend payments,” Karl Toriola, MTN Nigeria chief executive officer, said. “In the period, we returned to profitability, generated stronger free cash flow, and restored positive retained earnings and shareholders’ funds.” MTN’s performance marks a sharp turnaround after years of economic pressure that pushed telecom operators into losses, as currency devaluation eroded dollar-denominated earnings and reduced average revenue per user (ARPU) from $3.08 in 2023 to $1.89 in 2024. Improved macroeconomic conditions in 2025, including a more stable naira and regulatory approval for market-reflective pricing, helped unlock revenue growth for operators in the industry. Airtel Africa’s revenue grew 28.3% in reported currency to $4.67 billion during the period, with Nigeria leading performance through a 50.6% expansion in constant-currency revenue. For MTN, revenue growth of 54.93% translated into a profit after tax of ₦1.11 trillion ($816.29 million), reversing the ₦400.44 billion ($294.48 million) loss recorded a year earlier. How Data Price Hikes Rescued MTN’s Bottom Line After securing regulatory approval to double data tariffs in Jan 2025, MTN Nigeria swung from a massive deficit to its highest-ever profit. The Profit Swing 2025 Revenue Drivers 2024 (Loss) -₦400.4 Billion 2025 (Profit) +₦1.11 Trillion By transitioning to market-reflective pricing, MTN entirely erased its 2024 losses, restoring dividend payments for shareholders. Total 2025 Revenue ₦5.20 Trillion Data (53.4%) Voice & Fintech (46.6%) Data (Up 74.5% YoY) Voice, Fintech & Other Following the doubling of data tariffs and a sustained surge in internet usage, data is now unequivocally MTN’s largest revenue engine. Source: MTN Full-Year Financial Results (2025) TechCabal Data demand drives growth After more than a decade of lobbying for cost-reflective pricing amid rising operating costs, telecom operators secured regulatory approval for tariff increases on January 20, 2025. Since then, the average price of 1GB of data has doubled to about ₦575 ($0.42), up from ₦287.5 ($0.21). The increase coincided with surging internet usage across Nigeria, driven by streaming, remote work, fintech adoption, and social media consumption. Nigeria’s annual data consumption rose 35.7% to 13.25 million terabytes in 2025, pushing average monthly usage per subscriber to 89.42GB, compared with 70.09GB from the previous year. Data has now become MTN’s single largest revenue driver, contributing 53.39% of total earnings and growing 74.58% year-on-year. Voice revenue also expanded by 49.54%, showing continued resilience despite the shift toward internet-based communication. Fintech revenue is up 79.68%. Since launching operations in Nigeria in 2001, MTN has evolved from a mobile operator into a critical piece of national digital infrastructure and is now one of the country’s most profitable companies.
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