Job Growth is More than Digital Job Growth

[mouakter14]

The siren song of the tech-driven economy can be hard to resist. After all, the developments humanity has made in recent years are astounding. To take one ubiquitous example: Smartphones can now have up to 1 TB of storage while fitting easily in our pockets, while in the 1990s, PCs the size of a suitcase typically offered just a gigabyte of storage. And of course, those smartphones connect us all to perhaps the most transformative technological development of our time: the internet.

In some ways, the world is smaller than ever, truly becoming a connected global village. But “more connected” doesn’t mean “completely connected,” and the real world remains full of the same “offline” challenges that have impacted our daily lives for millennia. Romanticizing the extent of tech’s reach and limiting our focus to the digital realm often sacrifices growth and development outside of the tech economy, leaving entrepreneurs who aren’t connected behind and excluding enterprises that can have a major impact on job creation in emerging markets and marginalized communities. When we block out the siren’s song, how can we leverage the power of the digital economy to give non-digital entrepreneurs the first break they need, meeting people where they are — with or without technology?



The Need for Both Online and Offline Opportunity
As of 2021, 2.9 billion people remain offline globally — 96% of whom laos whatsapp number data live in the developing world — which amounts to around 37% of the world’s population. Not even the regions with the highest internet penetration, like northern Europe, are completely online. In Africa specifically, the digital divide is even wider: Only 33% of the population was using the internet as of 2021, meaning an estimated 871 million people are not realizing the benefits of digital connectivity on the continent. In East Africa, the internet penetration rate is estimated at 23.9%, and mobile internet access, while growing rapidly, is not enough to completely bridge this divide. The GSMA has found that people living in rural areas across low- and middle-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa are 54% less likely to use mobile internet than their urban counterparts.

At the Leila Janah Foundation we aim to help create more employment opportunities for marginalized and rural communities by supporting microentrepreneurs, and our anchor program, the Give Work Challenge (GWC), primarily lives online. The program is delivered in the form of a pitch competition, with versions open to both established enterprises and new businesses founded by low-income entrepreneurs in Kenya and Uganda, the countries where the Foundation operates. The entrepreneurs who win this pitch competition receive cash grants to help expand their businesses, hire staff, and purchase raw materials and equipment, along with ongoing support to help them overcome the challenges of growing their business, including expert mentorship.

In running the Challenge, we’ve noted a disparity between startups that can access funding through digital programs like the GWC, and those that are excluded from this sort of opportunity due to their lack of internet access. And we’ve realized that we can only successfully address this disparity by shedding our preconceived ideas of accessibility. To that end, we’ve had to become deeply familiar with the often-rural communities that have no access to digital grant opportunities — the kind of communities that would never hear about the GWC, but that still have businesses with potential to make great impact at scale.

[yadaysrdone]

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