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When fifth-grader Salome Tayengwa wanted to help relieve crisis levels of congestion at hospitals in her country of Zimbabwe, she used Python to create a database of common diseases. People accessing the information trove, titled The Patient Helper, input their symptoms to get information and a recommendation.
The Patient Helper earned Salome, who attends school in Harare, Zimbabwe, the first Broadcom Coding with Commitment award, which honors a student or team of students from a group known to be underrepresented in science fair competitions, Paula Golden, president of the Broadcom Foundation, told EE Times.
For Broadcom and other information and communications tech (ICT) companies, the African continent’s 1.4 billion people represent a huge untapped market to buy and use their technology. But the bigger prize may lie in encouraging Salome and her fellow African youth to become programmers, analysts, chip designers, and other ICT wage earners to fill the global shortage of workers in the industry.
That’s at least in part because the world’s second-largest continent possesses a demographic dividend: Its population is the youngest worldwide, according to Statista. In 2021, about 40% of Africans, or 560 million people, were 15 years old or younger. Although the median age on the continent has been increasing annually, it remains low at about 20 years.
By 2100, UNICEF projects that 1.1 billion youth under 18 will be living in Africa, accounting for almost half (47%) of the world population of children at that time.
In addition to supporting Coding with Commitment with partner and science fair sponsor Society for Science, Broadcom also has a philanthropic alliance with Communiversity of South Africa, which has taught coding to more than 1,500 youth in 10 years.
In the United States, filling the shortage of qualified tech workers became more urgent this year with the CHIPS and Science Act, whose aim is to support domestic economic development in high-tech industries. In addition to taxpayer money, businesses have invested $150 billion in American semiconductor manufacturing since January 2021, according to the White House.
All the efforts to grow domestic tech manufacturing comes as IT executives told Gartner talent shortages are the No. 1 barrier—ahead of cost and security—to the adoption of 64% of emerging tech, according to the executive-guidance company’s “2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap Survey.”
“To meet any of the technological challenges in the next 15 years, we don’t have enough people who know how to do what’s necessary to fill the workforce globally,” Golden said.
Failure to entice young people like Salome, both abroad and domestically, into high-tech careers in the digital industries would have dire consequences for companies like Broadcom, she said.
“If we’re bringing home all of these exciting new jobs that are part of the CHIPS money, we need to get those kids digitally literate—yesterday,” she said. “This is a very serious concern.”
Other companies’ Africa-focused programs target a mix of governments, developer communities, and ICT career preparations for youth.
AI disrupting job market
Intel has partnered with Smart Africa, an alliance that includes 31 countries on the continent, to promote socioeconomic development through affordable broadband and use of ICT. Intel and Smart Africa will provide education and skills development for policy makers, IT specialists, and students.
“We intend to prepare our decision-makers and workforce for the technologies of the future, and this is a step toward that,” Smart Africa CEO Lacina Koné said in prepared remarks.
Stakes are high for Koné’s goals.
“At the World Economic Forum… they say that 84 million jobs will fade away because AI is bringing disruption to the job market,” Nuno Martins, senior director for Intel’s digital readiness programs in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, told EE Times. “But 97 million new jobs will rise (that are) more related with data science and AI, in particular. We want to train the next generation of technologists, of innovators.”
Another Intel-led program, Project N50, is designed to increase digital capacity in African countries. The company and close to 90 partners, including Dell Technologies, FreedomFi, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, and SchoolToGo, are on a mission to help with community-identified needs, such as education.
“Almost 100% of the time, education is No. 1, followed very closely by health care and agriculture,” Dan Gutwein, one of N50’s founders who is the senior director of education for Intel’s network and edge solutions group, told EE Times.
In one community that cited a need for educational resources, Project N50 uploaded 2,500 videos and 5,000 lesson plans, all approved by the Ministry of Education, to the local content distribution network.
“Instantly, you’re going to get an increase in participation from that—because now kids can access content, and teachers can access content to help them teach,” Gutwein said.
Reaching out to non-traditional talent
Meanwhile, Nvidia is equipping governments and developer communities in 10 African countries with data science training and technology to enable more informed policymaking and hasten how resources are allocated.
“It’s the idea as to how do we increase compute capabilities around data science and artificial intelligence in emerging markets,” Geoffrey Levene, director of worldwide AI initiatives at Nvidia, told EE Times. “This is a start to show how we can work with the data teams at the national statistical offices.”
The company is also teaming up with local universities, research institutes, and data science communities in those countries to foster developers who can extract insights from census data and other information sources for those policymakers and statisticians.
Nvidia hopes that, as it is helping to add capabilities in many emerging markets, they “end up with more developers and engineers in those markets to help advance our platform,” Levene said. “I would love to see a day when we are seeing more startups and more people who are programmers” in emerging markets.
In a program titled United AI Alliance, Nvidia joined with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data to provide help initially to Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. Planned for future outreach are Guinea, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, and Togo.
Also in Africa, Nvidia Inception is a virtual incubator for startups, and its Emerging Chapters program engages with grassroots developer communities.
“A lot of young talent is on sort of non-traditional pathways,” Wei Xiao, head of developer relations, cross-geo at Nvidia, told EE Times. “They pick up artificial intelligence skills through community-driven boot camps or webinars. So that’s why we choose to work with developer communities to scale our outreach.”
