By:Reuters

Husk Power Systems, which deploys mini-grids running on solar energy, started working in Nigeria in 2020. Its first task was to begin building its local team by hiring experienced senior managers.

“That itself was a challenge, and the challenge got compounded because the renewable sector in Nigeria at the time practically did not exist,” says Manoj Sinha, Husk’s CEO. “Nobody that we hired, even until recently, came with a renewables background.”

Husk found a similar picture for lower-level technical roles as it sought to extend mini-grids in rural areas. “There is no skill set,” says Sinha. “Forget about green energy – there's no skill set, even for basic electrical and civil and mechanical work.”

The extent of the green skills gap in Africa varies from country to country, but there is no doubt that the continent faces a huge task in preparing its future workforce for opportunities in green industries.

“The gap is enormous,” says Makena Ireri, director for demand, jobs and livelihoods at the non-profit Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP). She points out that the skills gap applies not just to the supply side of green infrastructure, but to the demand side, in industries that will make use of green technologies.

For Africa, creating millions of green jobs on the supply side, and potentially hundreds of millions on the demand side, represents both a challenge and an opportunity. “We have to start mapping out that future, showing it to young people, and showing it beyond our typical circles in urban areas,” Ireri says.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) reports that there were 324,000 renewable energy jobs in Africa in 2023 a tiny fraction of the worldwide total of 16.2 million.

One factor in Africa’s struggle to accelerate green industrial development is that the level of technical skills training is generally poor across the continent, especially outside a handful of higher-income countries.

Cheick-Oumar Sylla, director for North Africa and the Horn of Africa at the International Finance Corporation, suggests that Egypt, an emerging leader in solar and wind development, still needs to integrate solar and wind skills into existing education and training programmes.

In most other African countries, Sylla says that basic technical training, foundational engineering skills and increasing awareness of regulatory standards are the pressing priorities.

Vito Saluto is head of ESG at UAE-based AMEA Power, which is developing multiple renewable energy projects in Africa. He agrees that a grassroots approach that incorporates community training and NGO-led programmes is needed across most of the continent. “If concessional funding for such education and training initiatives can be secured,” he says, “these programmes could significantly increase the number of local professionals fully equipped with green skills and on-the-job experience.”

Around 10-12 million youths enter the labour force each year in Africa, yet only about three million new jobs are created annually. And employment challenges are getting bigger all the time, with Africa’s population set to double by 2050.

But governments have been slow to wake up to the scale of the task. In South Africa, for example, “you have huge challenges at the basic education level, you have huge challenges at the tertiary education level, you have huge challenges at the vocational education level,” says Chipo Hamukoma, a senior associate at GEAPP. She notes that the curricula at technical training colleges are often out of date.

In Nigeria, meanwhile, practical skills training is practically absent in colleges, says Sinha of Husk. “When we recruit, we barely recruit fresh out of college, because what we get is pretty raw talent that we have to retrain anyway.” He suggests that African governments could learn from India’s industrial training institutes, which help deliver a pipeline of trained personnel with mechanical skills.

FSD Africa, a UK-funded financial development agency, published a report in July, stating that Africa can create 3.3 million green jobs by 2030, of which 1.7 million will be in solar energy. It predicts that 10% of these jobs will require a university education and 30% will rely on technical or vocational training.

The reality in most African countries is that the onus is on companies themselves to provide training for this emerging workforce. The need to train the workforce is an additional cost, notes Marco Serena, chief sustainable impact officer at the Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG), a donor-funded finance institution. It is, he says, “almost a given”, that developers will need to bring in personnel from other regions to train local workers, especially in African countries, where renewable energy is most nascent.

While this represents something of a burden for green industries, it does put innovative companies in a position to help unlock market opportunities and unleash Africa’s immense economic potential.

Indeed, almost five years after entering Nigeria, Sinha says that Husk has now built a 200-strong local team. The company relied on its Indian personnel to train the first members of its workforce; now some of these Nigerian workers have become trainers themselves for more recently recruited staff.

Husk has avoided employing expatriate staff permanently in Nigeria. Local people, says Sinha, “have to be trained to come to par with where we want them to be – and we have to invest in that process”

There is wariness within Africa’s green industries about repeating the mistakes made in other sectors. In recent decades, large-scale infrastructure projects in Africa have often relied on foreign migrant workers, despite widespread unemployment and under-employment in the domestic workforce. Chinese-funded construction projects in Africa, for example, typically rely heavily on Chinese personnel.

Ultimately, Sinha believes companies cannot be successful if they take such shortcuts. And, now that Husk has made progress in skilling-up its local team, it is increasing the pace of its activities. Whereas the company was installing only one mini-grid a month, on average, in its early days, it is now seeing six-seven such projects go live each month in Nigeria.

Many other companies are also finding that investment in training soon pays off. “With the right support and opportunities, local labour forces quickly develop the necessary skills to build and maintain world-class renewable energy installations”, says Suama Abiatar, social performance manager for Norwegian solar energy company Scatec in South Africa.

She adds that expanding local training programmes, including through industry-academic partnerships and knowledge transfer involving international experts, will help to accelerate local skills development.

Green energy job opportunities extend well beyond renewable energy generation. Although few electric vehicles are present on Africa’s roads today, apart from in a handful of cities such as Nairobi, the industry is poised to take-off over the next decade. The RMI, a non-profit group, released a report earlier this month suggesting that electric models could account for 60% of new motorcycle sales in Nigeria by 2040.

Kelly Carlin, a manager in RMI's carbon-free transportation programme, says that ensuring some EV manufacturing and assembly takes place within the country will help Nigeria maximise the economic benefits of the sector. “The opportunity immediately is with that last link in the supply chain, and growing after-sales service jobs,” he says.

Indeed, electric motorcycle companies in Kenya and Rwanda already prefer to carry out assembly locally, so they can add customised features to frames imported from Asia.

And the green jobs revolution gives Africa the chance to avoid the gender disparities typically seen in more traditional industries on the continent.

IRENA data shows that 38% of solar energy jobs, and 32% of all renewable jobs in Africa, are held by women, some 10% higher than women’s representation in the wider energy industry.

One of the companies that PIDG has invested in is a Zimbabwean electric tricycle company, Mobility for Africa, that mainly serves women in rural areas. These emerging industries offer an opportunity to “leapfrog the gender gap” says Serena. He adds that PIDG is prioritising women in training for mechanic and technician roles.

GEAPP’s Ireri agrees that green industrialisation provides a huge opportunity for women. She notes that injecting green energy into agriculture – which is already dominated by women in Africa – can help revolutionise the sector through technologies such as solar-powered cold storage, making jobs more productive and dignified.

GEAPP argues for proactive support in skills training for women and youths, as well as fossil fuel workers that are losing their jobs. In South Africa, it runs a training centre at a decommissioned coal-fired power plant to help workers reskill.

While jobs losses in the coal industry are a sensitive issue in the country, a 2023 report published by PwC, states that nascent industries in South Africa, such as green hydrogen production, are poised to create more jobs in their value chains than are lost in fossil fuel industries.

“One of the things that's been so powerful is to be in those communities that are facing coal plant and coal mine closures, and to see the hope that comes from gaining skills in a new industry,” says Hamukoma. “By providing skills, you're providing a lens and a ladder to a future alternative.”