By Tracey Swart, Head of GBS & Digital Opportunities at Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator
Across Africa, investment in digital skills is accelerating. Governments, development partners, employers and training providers are all trying to prepare young people for opportunities in Global Business Services (GBS), Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), IT-enabled services and other parts of the digital economy.
But training people is only part of the challenge.
The harder question is what happens after training: whether employers are actually hiring for those skills, whether training programmes are responding quickly enough to changing demand, whether policy supports investment, and whether young people can move into jobs that offer not only an entry point but also income growth, stability and career progression.
This is where sector-level coordination becomes increasingly important.
A strong sector body sits between employers, government, skills providers, investors and workers. It can identify shared constraints that no individual employer can solve alone, translate employer demand into better skills pipelines, provide policymakers with credible industry data and create common standards around inclusion and job quality.
The experience of Africa’s emerging GBS sector suggests that this coordinating layer may be one of the missing links between producing skills and producing jobs.
South Africa shows what coordinated sector growth can look like
South Africa provides one of the continent’s clearest examples.
Business Process Enabling South Africa (BPESA), the national industry body for the GBS sector, reported that companies serving international markets created 26,346 new jobs in 2025, the sector’s strongest annual result since 2018. Almost 23,800 of those jobs — about 90% — were filled by young people.[1]
The longer-term expansion is also significant. Data supplied by BPESA and cited by Harambee indicates that South Africa had generated 186,005 international GBS jobs cumulatively by the end of 2025.
It would be too simplistic, however, to attribute that growth to a sector body alone.
There is no counterfactual evaluation that can tell us precisely how many jobs would or would not have existed without BPESA. Employer investment, global outsourcing demand, South Africa’s labour pool, cost competitiveness, infrastructure and government policy all matter.
The more useful question is whether there are identifiable mechanisms through which sector coordination helps those conditions produce employment.
There are.
BPESA has worked with South Africa’s Department of Trade, Industry and Competition on the GBS incentive environment, produced regular labour-market and job-creation intelligence and developed sector-wide skills strategies intended to connect training more closely to employer demand.
Those functions matter because employers and training providers are rarely working with identical information. An individual company knows its own recruitment requirements. A training organisation knows its learners. Government sees national policy objectives. A sector body can potentially connect those views and identify where the system is failing.
Skills must follow demand, not yesterday’s jobs
This becomes especially important when skills are changing quickly.
One of the persistent risks in employment programmes is training young people for jobs that employers needed yesterday rather than for the roles they are likely to recruit for 12 or 24 months from now.
Sector bodies can help reduce that lag by maintaining direct relationships with employers, conducting establishment and employer surveys, monitoring vacancy and job-posting data and tracking how individual job families are changing.
In GBS, this is particularly important because demand is not determined only by domestic conditions. International clients deciding where to locate customer service, finance, back-office, technology and other operations can change hiring requirements rapidly.
Skills systems therefore need a continuous feedback loop.
Training should not begin with the question: “What courses can we provide?”
It should begin with: “Where is credible employer demand developing, what capabilities will those jobs require, and what prevents young people from accessing them?”
That difference may determine whether a training programme ends with a certificate or with employment.
Rwanda is building the ecosystem earlier
Rwanda demonstrates how the model can be applied in an emerging GBS destination rather than only in a mature one.
According to Germany’s Invest for Jobs programme, Rwanda’s GBS sector expanded from two companies in 2019 to 38 in 2024, employing more than 3,500 people by the end of 2024. Nearly half of those workers were women.[2]
The Rwanda GBS Growth Initiative now says the country is home to more than 40 GBS providers.
The importance of Rwanda is not simply the number of firms. It is that ecosystem-building is taking place while the sector itself is still developing.
The GBS Growth Initiative brings together investment promotion, talent development and policy advocacy. This allows issues such as investor requirements, skills gaps and regulatory barriers to be addressed at sector level instead of forcing each company to solve the same problems independently.
Rwanda’s National Employment and Skills Strategy 2024–2029 also identifies GBS and BPO as areas for sustainable employment creation. The strategy includes a target of 30,000 jobs in GBS/BPO and 50,000 in ICT during the strategy period.[3]
This should be distinguished from a separate 20,000-job ambition developed by GBS ecosystem partners towards 2030. The figures come from different planning processes, but both point to the same requirement: a talent pipeline cannot be built separately from an investment and employer-demand pipeline.
AI makes coordination more urgent
Artificial intelligence adds another layer of urgency.
Entry-level GBS roles have historically provided an important first step into formal employment for young people. Yet many of the tasks concentrated in these jobs — basic data entry, simple processing and routine customer interactions — are also among those most exposed to automation.
Harambee research published in 2026 found that more than 40% of tasks in African BPO and IT-enabled services may be susceptible to automation, while also concluding that augmentation and productivity improvement could have a larger overall impact than outright job replacement.[4]
BPESA’s 2026 AI white paper also presents a transition scenario rather than a simple job-loss story.[5] In additional responses provided to AfricaBusiness.com, Swart cited the report’s estimates that around 44,000 roles in higher-risk categories could be displaced by 2030, while approximately 155,000 existing roles could be transformed and 41,000 new roles created.
These are forecasts, not predetermined outcomes.
Their importance lies in what they imply for workforce planning.
If roles are being redesigned around human-AI collaboration, training curricula cannot remain static. Sector bodies need to continuously reassess which tasks are disappearing, which jobs are changing and which new occupations are emerging.
That means introducing AI literacy and technical capabilities, but also ethical and responsible AI use, problem-solving, communication, judgement and the skills required to work effectively alongside automated systems.
It also means protecting the first-job pathway.
If automation removes too many of the simple tasks through which inexperienced workers traditionally enter an industry, companies and sector bodies will need to deliberately redesign entry-level roles so young people can still acquire the experience needed to progress.
Job numbers are not enough
Another lesson is that sector success cannot be measured only by the number of positions created.
A job may provide an entry point without providing a sustainable career.
Harambee’s research into decent work in South Africa’s GBS sector draws on a survey of 751 young people placed into GBS roles in 2023.[4] It points to strong labour-market retention despite considerable movement between individual employers and jobs.
That distinction matters.
Churn is not always evidence that an employment pathway has failed. A young person may leave one contact-centre position to join another employer at a higher level, or use initial GBS experience to enter banking, telecommunications, retail or another formal-sector occupation.
In responses provided for this article, Harambee said its tracking found that among young people who moved on from their original placement, 31% moved to another GBS employer and a further 30% entered other formal-sector jobs.
The broader implication is that the first job can become an anchor into the formal economy.
Sector bodies should therefore measure wages, benefits, six- and 12-month retention, progression into higher-value roles, access to training, safeguarding and the resolution of workplace complaints alongside headline job numbers.
Those outcomes should also be disaggregated by gender, disability and geography.
Growth is more meaningful if the people who were previously excluded from opportunity are able not only to enter a sector but to progress within it.
Inclusion works better when it is designed into the system
South Africa’s GBS experience is notable for its concentration of young workers and women.
BPESA has reported that around 90% of new hires are young people, while inclusive sourcing has increasingly become part of the industry’s recruitment model.[1]
There are also examples where coordination can remove barriers that individual employers would struggle to address alone.
In Rwanda, for example, the GBS Growth Initiative has worked with government institutions on access to talent and employment pathways, while in South Africa sector-level work has sought to expand GBS opportunities beyond the largest established urban centres.
This matters because inclusion should not be treated as an outcome that is expected to emerge automatically from economic growth.
It can be designed into how employers recruit, how training is funded, where investment is promoted and how sector performance is measured.
Sector bodies also need governance
There is an obvious risk in giving an industry body a central coordinating role: it can become little more than a lobbying organisation for its largest members.
Effective sector bodies therefore need their own governance safeguards.
A useful model combines employer participation with government engagement, transparent publication of sector intelligence and diversified funding.
Funding is particularly important. Early-stage sector bodies in emerging markets may depend heavily on development partners because the industry is not yet large enough to sustain meaningful membership fees. As a sector matures, the model can move towards a combination of membership income, project or administration fees and development or government funding.
Dependence on any single source creates risk.
A sector body funded almost entirely by government can become vulnerable to political priorities. One dependent on a small number of large employers may struggle to represent the broader ecosystem. Permanent reliance on donors can make long-term sustainability uncertain.
Diversified funding, credible governance and transparent evidence are therefore not administrative details. They are part of what makes coordination legitimate.
Beyond GBS
The principle extends well beyond outsourcing.
Renewable energy, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare and the creative economy all face versions of the same coordination problem.
Employers know part of the skills picture. Training institutions know another part. Government controls policy levers. Investors respond to market conditions. Workers experience the consequences when these systems fail to connect.
A sector body adds the most value where employers have a reason to cooperate, skills requirements are changing quickly and shared problems cannot efficiently be solved company by company.
The South African GBS model cannot simply be copied everywhere. Its incentive framework, scale and more than two decades of institutional development are specific to its own history.
But other elements are transferable: shared labour-market intelligence, credible governance, demand-led skills planning, investment promotion, inclusive hiring standards and structured dialogue between business and government.
The growth of Rwanda’s GBS ecosystem suggests that this replication has already begun.
Africa does not suffer from a shortage of young people willing to learn. Nor does it lack training initiatives.
The bigger challenge is building economic systems in which skills, investment and actual employer demand meet.
If the continent wants digital-sector growth to translate into employment at scale, it cannot focus only on creating more training.
It also needs to build the institutions that connect training to jobs.
Sources and Information
[1] BPESA — South Africa GBS job creation, 2025
BPESA reported 26,346 new international GBS jobs in 2025, with roughly 90% taken up by young people.
BPESA: Business services job opportunities on the rise
[2] Invest for Jobs / GIZ — Rwanda Global Business Services Growth Initiative
The programme reports growth from two GBS companies in 2019 to 38 in 2024, with more than 3,500 people employed at the end of 2024.
Invest for Jobs: Rwanda GBS Growth Initiative
[3] Government of Rwanda — National Employment and Skills Strategy 2024–2029
The strategy prioritises GBS/BPO and ICT as areas for skills development and employment creation.
Rwanda National Employment and Skills Strategy 2024–2029
[4] Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator — GBS, digital work and job quality research
Harambee reports that its decent-work research drew on 751 young people placed into GBS roles and that separate research found more than 40% of current BPO/ITES tasks susceptible to automation.
Harambee: Facing the Future of GBS and Digital Work
[5] BPESA — AI’s Impact on South Africa’s Global Business Services Sector, 2026
BPESA AI White Paper 2026
[6] Harambee — Sector Growth, Youth Jobs & Inclusion: The Role of GBS & Digital Sector Bodies
The June 2026 learning brief examines BPESA, Rwanda’s GBS Growth Initiative and international sector-body models.
Harambee: The Role of GBS & Digital Sector Bodies
Author
Tracey Swart is Head of GBS & Digital Opportunities at Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator.