Onyinye Igbokwe: Bridging Skilled Manpower Gap between African Market and the World

Disturbed by shortage of skilled manpower in Nigeria and Africa as a whole, which in turn has affected the economies of most African countries, UK-based Nigerian and Founder Ujali Limited, Mrs. Onyinye Igbokwe, is building series of platform apps to bridge the gap between African businesses and the rest of the world especially in the area of human capacity development. In this interview with MARY NNAH, she disclosed how UjaliPro, one of such apps, is capable of levelling the playing field between Africa and the globe

What is the impact of having a skill gap in an organisation?

The impact of having a skill gap in an organisation is the death of that organisation. If you are not improving, if you are not evolving, you will die or your competitors will take over. You are going to lose competitive advantage and they are going to run you off the market. So, the impact of not getting quality training is that you have a workforce that is not working at its optimal capacity.

Most times you notice that despite the training given, workers still do not live up to expectations, especially in government offices. What should be done about that?

The funny thing is that the government is arguably the highest procurer of training. They actually spend more budgets on training than the private sector but the thing is that it does not translate to their workforce; you find that in government institutions people are lacklustre. What does that say? Is the quality of training they are procuring okay? We can only fix that problem by allowing the government to procure quality training and ensuring that the training is carried out. The core of our value proposition is quality – we need to ensure that the training is held, that it is quality driven and that value is realised from that training.

At what point did you conceive the idea for Ujali and what was the driving force?

My competence is in engineering and products management but I have been able to run businesses over time apart from working for engineering companies. I started Ujali Limited in the UK as an Ed-Tech company. So, Ujali is basically a registered limited liability company in the UK.

I had lived in Nigeria and had owned businesses for a period of eight years. I had recruited people and had people work for me. I`ve had to go through a lot of training for them and also get them trained. I`ve had to pay for online training and all of that to make sure that they are up to par with what I want to do. And in building a business, I have seen first-hand that recruiting people based on paper qualification in Nigeria is not an ideal thing to do. We know how to put together fantastic CVs, speak beautiful English but when they write you an email, you cannot read it. I have had people come in and that thing they have on papers does not translate in the quality of their work.

Then I went to the UK to get a Masters to do better in my company. The idea came when one day I was sitting and thinking of what I wanted to do after my Masters. I thought about how to improve my company. What is the new picture I wanted for my company after I have spent all this time getting a Masters degree? How do I take this back and transfer it to my workforce? I just felt I needed to build a platform to make accessible the sort of training I got while there.

I did a certificate programme at Sanford University in America, one of the best universities in the world, while I was doing that I saw how we were taught. I saw the quality of teaching, and I felt like the average businessman in Nigeria and Africa as a whole is basically like when somebody is farming with bare hands while the other person has all the tractors and beautiful equipment to farm with. These people running business abroad have all of the knowledge and also have access to all of these facilitators but we are basically here in Nigeria, just trying to make ends meet; we are not building businesses that go beyond our generation. If the owner of a business dies today, the business is dead because we are not building organisations based on structure. We are not trying to follow anything; we are just basically free-balling and learning as we go. We have no idea of what we are doing. It’s only a few of us that know what we are doing in terms of running a business or what is expected of us in an organisation. So, I looked at what is obtainable there, the things that I was taught there and how I can translate this to my African people.

And I have heard researchers say that there is a prevalent skill gap in Africa’s economy, which is affecting our young people, our productivity and our output. And I said, what can we do to make sure that if we improve the quality of the workforce that we have, we can in turn improve our quality of work, which leads to more productivity and in turn improves our economy?

Our greatest population is young people and yet these people are not performing at their absolute best. We can only optimise what they already have by training. When they do better, the organisation does better. If an organisation is doing better they are able to pay taxes and thereby improve the economy of where they are residents.

So, it is a ripple effect for me. This is the thing – just trying to make a difference first of all. And then how do I make the difference? Being a business owner, what are the issues I have been through? How can I improve my business? How can I make the training that I have gotten from abroad accessible to the people that are working for me and other organisations that are around me? I might be a very good organisation in a community where the other organisations are not working. I’m not an island. At some point in time I would have to sub-contract some of those organisations to work for me and their quality of work translated to my quality of work. I can go and have all the training and come back and train my workforce but what happens to these other people. You have to be able to trickle it down. If you are able to train these people in these other organisations, one of them might leave, start their own company and train more people at the grassroots and that person trains more people and before you know it it`s a ripple effect. So, training and having access to quality trainers is very important.

We are an educational tech company that has built a platform to help connect facilitators with companies in Africa that need to have their training needs met. We are basically concentrating on soft skills, which are leadership, business development, financial management and personal development processes.

The people we have in our faculty right now are people that you would not ordinarily have access to, and even companies in Nigeria might not be able to have access to them.

Why did you choose the name Ujali being a UK-based firm?

Ujali is an African name. One thing I have learnt staying abroad is to maintain a certain level of authenticity. It translates to the things that I do. I am an African woman and I am very proud to be that. So, everything that I do, I make sure it comes back to who I am as a person. So, Ujai is actually my grandmother’s nickname. It supposedly means strength or courage. When she comes out at any gathering to do her solo dance or performance, they call her Ujali Nwanyi, basically depicting her elegance, courage and strength as an African woman. So, whilst starting the company, I could have gone for an English name because it will actually open more doors for me – when I go for some of these international conferences, once you hear the name, you know immediately that it is not English. You assume it is coming from an African person.

It is just like when I went to the UK and people were happy using their English names but the challenge is that you send in a CV and you are basically screened out based on the fact that you have a traditional name but I don’t care. I allow people to call me by my traditional name. I am not going to tell you what my English name is. My name is Onyinye, so you try to call it and we have a conversation about it and it’s an icebreaker. And that is what I wanted to do with Ujali as well. Being in the UK comes with its own privileges but the market I am trying to cater for is the Africa market. The skills gaps that I am trying to close are in Africa, so if I am going to be doing that, I feel that it is important I am authentic to that African name.

Let`s talk about the platform, UjaliPro. How does it work?

UjaliPro, our pioneer web application is a virtual market place for connecting subject matter experts from around the world with organisations who require their services in Africa, in order to help African economies close their skill gap and improve the quality of work.

You can access it through our website. It is an app that you access through the internet as a facilitator or a company. As a company, you tell us what you want and we provide for you. For the facilitators, it is a different ball game. We have to do a lot of quality checks to make sure they are who they say they are; the qualifications they say they have and the training they have provided. We do all of this research for these companies so that they don’t have to worry. Anybody you see on the Ujali platform has already gone through a quality assurance process before they can get on.

We are trying to modulate and be like quality assurance, making sure companies are getting value for their money and the facilitators are getting what they want to get and their minds are at rest.

How long has Ujali existed?

We actually got incorporated in January 2020. I have been working on the technology before until 2020 when we got incorporated and we built out the platform, and did a pre-launch of our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in August 2020. It was during the pandemic, the heat of it, so it basically affected us. What we did during that time up until 2021, was as people were at home doing the lockdown, we had some of the facilitators that we had already on-boarded do a lot of free training courses.

As a new company trying to make an incursion into the global market, what is your vision for the next five years in terms of platform training?

At bottom of what we do, we are a tech company that is looking to compete globally. UjaliPro is first of the many platforms and applications we are hoping to build but behind what we are building, everything we are going to build would be centred on improving the African market and bridging the gap between the African and the rest of the world.

Ujali is a tech company that is building a series of applications to bridge the gap between the Africa market and the rest of the world. We started with learning and development just to improve our workforce. We are going to move into other sectors which we have already started work on. In the next five years, we want to also be able to have a presence in Nigeria and other African markets and as an African EdTech company we are able to compete in the global market and say, we are not just making money; we have also made a social impact by building these applications. So it is not just about money or revenue for us, it is about how it translates in terms of value for the African people and how we can move forward as a people and compete with the rest of the world. We are going to be rolling out some applications but at the centre of it is basically to make sure that we continue to close the divide between Africa and the rest of the world in terms of development and other areas of the economy.

Are you restricted to just African countries?

We are present in over 50 countries of the world and what we have is a digital platform.

Ujali empowers African economies to strategically close the soft skill gap affecting their quality of work, by enabling access to a community of quality trainers and training organisations from around the world via the UjaliPro platform.

As long as you can get the internet, you can access the platform from any part of the world. But our recruitment of the trainers currently is basically from Europe. So we have people majorly in the UK and the rest of Europe, then Milan, Indian and so on.

What we are looking to build is a system that allows trainers that pass through our quality assessments process for on-boarding and any country in Africa to go through the platform and get whatever training they want. So we have provided access to our trainers; you can go on this platform, check for the training, and find out who is doing it. So I am giving you access to these people that ordinarily you wouldn’t have had access to. I am bringing them from all over the world and making them available on our platform, so that the people in Africa can actually view them and book them to come here or for them to go over there to them. So the value proposition is basically accessibility of quality trainers for African companies.

The major issue why I set up Ujali was to close the soft skill gap that we have in Africa companies. We go to school and we have a lot of educated people but it doesn’t translate in the workplace in terms of our quality of work. We graduate from school where we are taught all the technical things but who is teaching us how to function effectively as a team?

Who is teaching us all of those things that you need to succeed in a business environment. Who is teaching us how the business environment is being run in other companies globally in other areas of the world. Those things are not taught in school. If we are trying to be as globally as possible, is it not right that we have the people who are already doing it come to your organisation and teach you how it is done, so that we have a first-hand experience of what needs to be done and how it needs to be done?