The Smart Africa Alliance has launched the Smart Africa Digital Academy (SADA) aimed at bridging African countries digital skills gap with its first in-country launch in Congo.
SADA is a pan-African dynamic learning ecosystem with that seeks to improve digital skills qualifications, employability, and meet the emerging talent needs of African citizens.
SADA started operation in 2020 and has since trained over 2000 policy and decision-makers across 26 countries in trending digital transformation topics including Artificial Intelligence Use Cases, 5G Connectivity, Data Protection & Privacy, Rural Broadband Policies, Security Technologies, Regulatory and Innovative Sandboxing Environments, Data Centers and Cloud, Digital Identity for Underserved, ePayment, etc. The objective is to reach over 22000 trained beneficiaries by 2023, supported by the SADA In-country implementation wave.
Addressing the audience during the launch in Congo, The CEO of Smart Africa, Lacina Koné commented: “Skilling a billion citizens may seems an impossible task. As a multi-stakeholder coalition, SADA will achieve this through the powers of ownership, collaboration, and partnership to define a sustainable environment for skills development. We call for all our country members state, private sector, development partners and any interested stakeholder to support the SADA initiative to join this ambitious yet achievable programme”.
The company seeks to complement existing platforms, content, and initiatives by bringing together a cross section of players within the capacity building ecosystem. So far, SADA has collaborated with the International Telecommunication Union, the World Bank, GIZ, IEEE, GSMA, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, HPE, Google, Ericsson, Rohdes & Schwartz, to name a few.
Having obtained initial funding from the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in collaboration with the World bank to implement the AReg4DT
SADA will focus on implementing National Digital Academies to support the uniquely identified digital skills priority needs at the national level. The current countries for implementation are Benin, Burkina Faso, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Rwanda, and Tunisia.
SADA in Congo will be run with the African Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CARIA) in the capital city Brazzaville focusing on Policy Makers, Youth and Professionals.
Additional countries are expected to launch their National Digital Academies in the next coming months.
