Although nearly one million students graduate from African universities each year, employment opportunities for new graduates are scarce, and the mismatch between the education offered and the competencies required in the labour market contributes to high unemployment rates among graduates across the sub-continent, including those in la Francophonie Africa. Youth account for 60% of all African unemployed (with even higher rates of unemployment for young women), posing a significant risk to the region’s social cohesion and political stability if sufficient economic opportunities are not made available. Through a better-educated workforce and improved preparation for school-to-career transition, there is an opportunity to increase the capacity of Africa’s youth, particularly women, to become active contributors to the continent’s transformation by focusing on fundamental skills in the mathematical sciences.
The Skills for Employability (SFE) program is a five-year collaborative initiative funded by Global Affairs Canada designed to contribute solutions to major development challenges in the African Francophonie by meeting the demands of the knowledge economy, facilitating targeted training and improving the transition for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) scholars to the workplace. SFE builds upon the AIMS Cooperative Master’s degree currently implemented in Senegal through the support of the MasterCard Foundation and the AIMS Industry Initiative. The ultimate outcome of the SFE program is to strengthen employment pathways for both men and women, build human capital, as well as improve employment opportunities for Francophone AIMS graduates from across 13 partner universities across the African Francophonie.

https://www.nexteinstein.org/

• Burundi
• Benin
• Burkina Faso
• Cameroon
• Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Côte d'Ivoire
• Mauritania
• Mali
• Niger
• Senegal

• Youth
• Women
• The unemployed

The program has been made replicable and scalable by integrating international best practices and lessons learned in cooperative education and WIL over the lifecycle of the SFE program. Furthermore, these catalytic approaches are being adapted, integrated and mainstreamed across the operational framework of the AIMS Cooperative Education program. From this perspective, the SFE program is widely perceived as a means of reinforcing new approaches along the lines of an innovative training model based on academic excellence, adaptive structures and challenging problems. In turn, these approaches will be channeled and replicated across the AIMS network, marking a distinctive shift from traditional co-op programs to the next generation of knowledge mobilization initiatives. In a similar vein, the SFE program is fostering work-integrated learning experiences involving African and Canadian university students via collaborative industry-based problem-solving placements. As a result, the SFE modalities have left a lasting impact on AIMS students and partners by leveraging institutional strengths and constructing a new experiential learning discourse based on mutual exchange and the co-creation of knowledge.

In a similar vein, the AIMS network has ensured that the achievements of the SFE program remain sustainable over the long-term. To this end, AIMS has strategically engaged African industry and government partners, higher educational stakeholders and supra-national steering agencies to leverage resources, maximize impact and minimize transaction costs. To this end, the SFE program is seeking African and international industry sponsorship to support initiatives on new skills development and prepare AIMS graduates for the future of work. AIMS has also embarked on an ambitious but achievable proposal to pilot Africa’s first cooperative education tax credit with the Rwanda Revenue Authority.

The project supports sustainable development in the field of STEM. It promotes early intervention programs in science and technology that target young girls in STEM careers. Beneficiaries acquire highly sought professional skills.