John Roome emphasises that Africa’s only viable growth path is a green economy, combining resilience to climate change with opportunities for inclusive development. He highlights renewable energy, smart urban planning and sustainable agriculture as areas that can deliver a “double or triple win” by reducing emissions, creating jobs and improving quality of life. Achieving this requires policy reform, new technical and financial skills and closer collaboration between governments, businesses and training providers.
Research suggests the green economy could generate up to 100 million jobs by 2050, with millions more by 2030 across energy, agriculture and infrastructure. Education must adapt to equip young people with flexible, practical skills and entrepreneurial capacity, especially for small and medium enterprises. Banks are beginning to support skills financing, recognising that stronger capacity reduces lending risk. Roome stresses the importance of managing transitions from fossil fuel industries, providing safety nets for displaced workers and building resilience into training systems. He concludes that Africa faces a huge opportunity, but success depends on collective action among policymakers, financiers, investors and trainers, with urgency to act now rather than later.
Hi everyone. My name is John Roome and I’m really excited to be here today to talk about an incredibly important topic, namely skills for the green economy in Africa. But let’s start by stepping back to talk a little bit about why the green economy is so important for Africa. There’s a lot of research and a lot of thinking has been going into this topic. And the emerging sense is that a green economic growth path is indeed the only growth path for Africa and indeed an attractive one. What do we mean by a green economic growth path?
First and most obvious, how does Africa grow to be resilient to the climate change that’s coming? Buildings that are cooler, less flooding and agricultural crops that can survive changes in weather. But more importantly, we’re seeing that there is new technology coming in that gives us what I would call at least a double win, if not a triple win. By moving towards renewable energy, solar panels, batteries, one can roll out electricity faster than one had been able to do before and cheaper. So we get a lower carbon, more resilient network that also provides energy opportunities. Likewise, smart urban planning can make cities more liveable, less exposed to climate change and create jobs. New transport solutions such as e-bikes can allow us to reduce carbon emissions and improve transport services. And metro services such as trains and trams can do the same thing. So there is a clear win-win opportunity.
In some countries in Africa, decarbonisation from a historically strong focus on fossil fuels is also important, but this green opportunity, this green growth path, can give us a huge opportunity in Africa. Now, in order to deliver on these opportunities is going to require changes in policy, but also in skills.
These skills might be at the leadership level. How do country policymakers make decisions that will allow green economy to thrive? But also what are the skills that are needed to bring the public sector and the private sector together? What do the financial sector need to do in order to develop new skills to develop new financial products? What kinds of technical skills are needed? For example, solar panel installation, wind turbine manufacturers. And in agriculture, different kinds of agronomic skills are going to be needed. These are going to be critical for the future, but at the same time, provide a job opportunity.
So for Africa, this is absolutely critical. I’ve talked about the opportunity. A number of research has been produced over last few years by FSD Africa, Systemic and the World Bank that points to a huge job creation opportunity. It’s been estimated that in Africa, the green economy could produce as much as 100 million jobs by 2050. And this is absolutely critical, because as it is, every year in Africa, between 10 and 12 million young people are coming onto the market. So these green jobs will provide a huge opportunity.
The second thing is that even in the short term, this could produce, say by 2030, say 3 million jobs across Africa. The important thing is that these are spread across a range of sectors. One immediately thinks of energy, as it might produce as much as half of these jobs, solar panels, batteries, installation, wind, these sorts of things. But the rest is also spread across other sectors as much as 20–25% could come from agriculture, could come from nature-based solutions and forest protection. So there’s a range of sectors that are covered. If one thinks about urban, half the urban infrastructure that will be needed by 2050 has yet to be constructed in Africa. That’s going to require engineers, bricklayers, materials experts, architects—a whole range of different people with skills from incredibly high level to trade skills. All these skills will be needed in order to drive this agenda.
So, I think one of the key messages is there’s a large number of jobs, there’s going to be a large number of skills to be developed. They come at all levels of skill and indeed across a wide range of sectors. It’s not necessarily concentrated.
The other thing to note is that it’s not possible at the moment to predict exactly which skills and exactly which sectors will need the jobs when this will have to be developed collaboratively over a period of time and to learn and understand as we go, but also to build resilience and flexibility in these skills so that people can move from one sector to another, from one skill to a related skill as these green opportunities develop.
If we’re going to do this, we’re going to have to do things quite differently in Africa. Part of it’s related to skills, but part of it is also related to broader green policy and economic policies.
The first block would be that countries are going to need to implement policies that stimulate the green economy, that stimulate investments in new technology, that stimulate investments in green agriculture. And there’s a range of policy options that are needed in order to do that. But these need will require policy makers to make a decision, financiers to be able to adapt and investors to be able to respond and then to plan for different kinds of skills in an appropriate way.
Which takes us to the second block: skills and training. The first thing that’s immediately obvious is that we’re talking about some sets of skills which just didn’t exist in the past, such as battery maintenance and wind turbine manufacturing. In addition, these skills that we’re going to need are not necessarily the kinds of things that are best delivered in a university, technical college or Technikon kind of training environment. They’re going to require a lot of interface between the deliverers of those services and on the job training. And so there’s going to have to be much closer alignment between the people creating the jobs, the people providing work opportunities, and the people providing the technical training, which will require much closer relationships between the providers of training and the demands of training that we’ve seen in the past.
The third piece that’s particularly important is that a lot of these jobs are going to be in small and medium scale enterprises and many in the informal sector. And so a model that is based on large corporations doing training in a structured kind of way may or may not be appropriate for all of these skills. And so finding ways to train up workers so that they can serve the small and medium enterprises and in informal sector is going to be an important part of how we deal with this.
A big block of this is going to be about finance because somehow these skills are going to need to be financed. Sometimes this can be done on the demand side through the energy companies, through the agriculture companies. But this is mainly good for things that are particularly focused on their short-term needs. At the same time, they will need to be financing for more cross-cutting issues. So there will be a need for increased public financing. So I think there’s lots of opportunities on the financing side and I can talk a little bit more about that later.
The fourth piece is that there are a range of cross-cutting things that I think we will have to think about in terms of addressing these issues. First one I’ve touched on already, building on small and medium enterprises and the informal sector. For Africa, this is going to be a critical section of how we think about these skills. Second issue is around transition. As much as there are big opportunities in the new green economy, there are going to be some sectors in the old fossil fuel industries where people are going to lose their jobs. And so having an explicit policy to manage that transition and to see how we can help people move from older, browner fossil jobs into greener, more technology-intensive jobs over a period of time. And then we’re going to have to be able to also provide safety nets for those people that are not able to transition. People that built up skills, for example, in the coal sector, it’s through no fault of their own that their skills are going to need to change. They’re going to need to find new jobs. And so providing a safety net for those people that are vulnerable to these kinds of changes are important.
And then finally, I think it’s not only on skills development for jobs that are important, even at the high school level, I think we’re going to have to see changes in approaches to education. Education that allows students still while they’re in high school to build up some of these technical skills, to build resilience and flexibility on their careers, to develop skills that will allow them not to plan on a single career over the next 40 years, as people have been able to do in the past, but to develop the skills and the mindset and the attributes and the thinking that will allow them to adapt over a period of time as we move into the future.
So what is happening in Africa and what are we seeing as emerging solutions? I think that what we are seeing is the emergence of a lot of new industries. So you’re seeing wind turbine manufacturers, solar manufacturers, e-motorbikes that involve both technical skills and business development skills. And so we’re seeing small entrepreneurs coming in and developing these skills and stepping forward for their immediate needs. However, I don’t think that what we’re seeing at this point in time is going to be enough to deliver on what’s needed without a significant scale up.
So the first thing, as I talked about earlier, is that this is going to take a large number of coalitions of people to work together to develop these solutions for training, policymakers, providers of training and demanders of training. And what we’re beginning to see scattered across Africa are cases where people are realising what this challenge is. They’re starting to come together. They’re starting this process of discussion to try and develop new ways of doing training, increase partnerships between companies and service providers.
The other place that I’m noticing promising seeds of change are from a number of the big banks. So a number of banks across Africa, largely in South Africa, but also across other countries in Africa have realised that in order to take advantage of the green economy, small companies, medium sized companies are going to need the skills in order to deliver. And if those companies have the skills, the risk profile of those companies borrowing money for these developments, for these new enterprises, for these new opportunities from the banks will go down. And so it’s in the interests of the banks to help develop these skills and to help finance these skills.
And so we’re beginning to see a number of financial institutions thinking about how they can blend or bring together or package financing for the traditional equipment, land, the kinds of things they’re financing. But at the same time, financing the skills development and providing the technical knowledge and linkages so that small and medium enterprises entering these green economies will have financing for the capacity development at the same time and also access to good practices and good opportunities and providers of technical training services. I think all of these are examples where we’re seeing people becoming aware of the opportunity and starting to take advantage of them in very exciting way.
Very simply, a final thought. This is a huge opportunity. It’s going be a challenge to deliver on it. And it’s going take people working together in ways that we’ve not seen necessarily before. Policy makers, financiers, investors and trainers. It’s a huge opportunity.
And so my question to all of you is, if not us, then who? If not now, then when?
Thank you.
Africa's Green Economy Summit connects industry professionals and organisations to information and each other in a carefully curated live environment. Its purpose is to support in mobilising investments for green projects to scale up and industrialisation, which will have a significant impact on environmental sustainability and economic growth.
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