An increasing number of tech skills learning platforms are available on the Internet, across social media, and search engines.
Many offer graduates and non-graduates opportunities to learn various tech skills and earn in foreign currencies in three to six months.
Unsurprisingly, as more graduates are released into the job market, the number of self-acclaimed experts in technical skills unable to find jobs to prove these skills compounds.
A Microsoft projection suggests that 149 million new jobs will be added to the technology sector by 2025.
An equally vast number of digital talent in Africa is being left out of the wave of global remote jobs available to the rest of the world.
In 2023, Paul and Andrew Eze launched Remote4Africa to connect Africa’s growing digital workforce to the world’s remote job opportunities. Before this, they founded Ngcareers, a platform for Nigerian job seekers to find vacancies across the country, which was acquired by Jobberman in 2020.
“A lot of job sites in Africa are on-site focused and many individuals would prefer having hybrid or remote jobs that give them flexibility, coupled with the fact that Africa has a growing young population of talent that may not fit into the traditional on-site working framework,” Paul Eze, Co-founder and CEO at Remote4Africa, tells Techpoint Africa.
So, unlike Ngcareers, which listed all types of job vacancies in Nigeria, Remote4Africa centres Africa’s burgeoning talent pool and offers a remote-only platform that vets every job listing for authenticity and ensures that the opportunities are genuinely open to applicants across the continent.
“We realised that there was really no platform focused on bringing together all of the remote job opportunities that Africans can apply for. Some of them used FlexJobs and some of the other Western job platforms that carried remote jobs, but as an African, you could find a lot of jobs that are restricted to people living in the United States. So based on that, we started Remote4Africa to aggregate and vet remote jobs and make them available for Africans,” Eze says.
Since launch, the platform has grown rapidly. With nearly 200,000 users across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa and over 16,000 job listings posted to date, Remote4Africa is already becoming one of the continent’s most trusted resources for flexible work. This is portrayed by its position in the search results for “remote jobs in Africa,” where it ranks among the top three results.
Remote4Africa’s operations and business model
Remote4Africa has a team of dedicated people committed to ensuring that the right job meets the right people. Eze explains that the company indexes and crawls several career and company websites, and it has a team that vets every job to ensure that it is open to Africans before posting it on the platform.
Companies in need of African talent also post job listings on the site to reach thousands of users. Remote4Africa vets these companies to ensure that they are legitimate. The platform currently has over 600 companies that have published jobs.
Remote4Africa is entirely bootstrapped by its founders and is already self-sustaining. The startup’s business model allows it to provide job seekers with unlimited resources. Job seekers can sign up for free, set up their job preferences, and receive tailored listings via email twice a week.
However, its main revenue stream comes from its premium membership offering for jobseekers priced at $2.98 monthly, $5.80 quarterly, and $13.20 annually, with equivalents in local currencies. Premium members receive unlimited access to all job listings and exclusive career resources.
Additional features for employers are in development, which will diversify revenue while continuing to focus on job seekers’ needs.
Strategic partnerships for more impact
Remote4Africa is forming strategic partnerships with training organisations like AltSchool, Genesis, the Kenyan Private Sector Alliance, and CafeOne. These partnerships will help bridge the gap between the numerous upskilling platforms available to Africans and job accessibility by connecting Africans who have acquired digital skills to real job opportunities.
“We are partnering with AltSchool on a few things, primarily to help their graduating talents access opportunities,” Eze says.
He adds that while Remote4Africa offers limited upskilling opportunities via masterclasses on Telegram, the startup is not trying to make an edtech play by duplicating what edtechs are doing. By staying out of the education space and instead focusing on job access, Remote4Africa positions itself as a critical link between training and employment.
“So instead of being that platform that does courses and jobs, we want to focus on the jobs and partner with the companies that are doing in-depth courses. So for us, it’s like partnering with the guys that are trying to create tangible programmes that impact the skills of our time. And then those persons want to connect to the opportunities,” Eze tells Techpoint Africa.
With this clarity of purpose, combined with the founders’ experience, the platform’s organic traction, and the rising global demand for remote workers in Africa’s young population, Remote4Africa is positioned to play a significant role in the future of African work.
The company’s goal is to reach one million users across all regions in Africa. With its advantage of ensuring the jobs it projects are targeted at Africans and the continent’s increasing tech population, this goal may not be far off.
