Pan-African Group Plans Additional Digital Academies In Six African Countries

(AFRICAN EXAMINER) – Smart Africa Digital Academy (SADA) has announced its plan to roll out additional digital academics across six African countries which include, Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Tunisia, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As a pan-African dynamic learning ecosystem, SADA aims to improve digital skills qualifications, employability, and meet the emerging talent needs of African citizens.

The institution provides the courses, webinars and opportunities for exchange to policymakers and regulators to promote the digital transformation in Africa. With its various learning programmes and formats SADA wants to improve participants’ skills for drafting inclusive, gender-sensitive, and climate-smart Information Communication and Technology (ICT) regulations.

It also reaches a wider audience from entrepreneurs to engaged citizens with the aim of improving their digital literacy, so that they can fully benefit from the new potentials offered by digital technologies.

Smart Africa is committed to accelerating sustainable socioeconomic development on the continent through the development and harmonization of a political, legal and regulatory frameworks for the digital ﬁeld, in its member states. To this end, it was set up as a catalyst for building fair, inclusive and sustainable digital societies in Africa.

SADA’s goal is to curb the critical digital skills gap required to enable each citizen to thrive in the digital economy. This is achieved through four essential components namely: Capacity building for decision-makers, programs for digital inclusion, skills marketplace for professionals as well as talent bridge for businesses.

This was disclosed during the launch of its National Digital Academy in Ghana on Thursday last week. The initiative was implemented in partnership with Ghana’s Ministry of Communications and Digitalisation.

The initiative forms part of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), which was signed by the Smart Africa Alliance and the Ministry. The Ghanaian launch follows on from the rollout of SADA national digital academies in the Republic of Congo and Rwanda earlier this year.

The national digital academy will support the uniquely identified digital skills priority needs at the national level. Prior to this official launch, SADA implemented in April a federated cloud proof-of-value workshop in Accra where over 100 people from the public and private sector were trained.

This workshop, according to the organization, is aimed to strengthen the countries’ data centres and cloud services ecosystem with the collaboration of our private sector partners, HPE and Intel.

In addition, SADA also held two other peer learning workshops last week; one on digital payment and the other on artificial intelligence, during which more than 60 experts gathered to gain knowledge and exchange best practices on digital payment ecosystem, and in developing AI frameworks in Ghana.