Empowering the next generation: B20 summit highlights need for skills in South Africa’s digital economy

Leading professionals at the Business 20 (B20) summit — the official G20 dialogue forum with the global business community — in Cape Town this week outlined how South Africa can achieve a future-ready economy.

Sanlam CEO Paul Hanratty addressed the issue of technology and how the education and employment task force was addressing the change that technology had brought to the job environment.

“When you talk about a good job, that conjures up in my mind formal employment. On this continent and in the south, the informal economy is massive and we have to pay attention to that. We have to look at the interventions that need to take place,” said Hanratty. One of these interventions, he suggested, was bringing down the cost of data.

Naspers South Africa CEO Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa spoke about digitisation, saying there was still a significant amount of work to be done to upskill young people in this field.

“We need to ensure that young people and professionals have access to all the skills they require. I think when I look at, for instance, our organisation that was formed here in South Africa, but it’s operating in a lot of these countries around the world, that’s where you see the significant gaps that we have, but a lot of them can be overcome through us ensuring that we’re supporting entrepreneurs, supporting professionals with access to tech skills,” she said.

Mahanyele-Dabengwa is quoted on the Naspers website as saying: “It is important that we use technology to transform our economy, to create jobs, to boost growth and transition to a more sustainable and equitable society. We continue to invest in and grow our South Africa-based consumer internet companies and micro-entrepreneurs, advancing the empowerment of historically disadvantaged South Africans and young people to thrive in a digital world.”

Speaking at the B20 conference, she pointed to the example of Naspers, which started in South Africa but is now operational in countries across the world. In August last year, the company said it expected e-commerce and other digital platforms to inject R91.4-billion into the South African economy by 2035.

Read more: Naspers sees $5.2-bn e-commerce boost for South Africa

Hanratty pointed out that while countries such as Japan, China and South Korea faced declining populations, Africa and South Africa were seeing strong population growth.

“People talk a lot about AI, but to me, very basic things, like being able to communicate via WhatsApp, can be very empowering,” he said.

“At the end of the day, it’s about economics, and when the costs reduce far enough. If you think about AI, there is nothing new about AI today that we were not doing 20 or 30 years ago. What has changed is the cost of data storage and the CPU processing. We’ve got to actually make people resilient. And it starts right at the beginning, early childhood, giving people the right foundations, because the world changes so quickly,” noted Hanratty.

Focus points 

Toyota CEO Andrew Kirby reflected that South Africa was “actually getting weak on science and maths. We need a lot more support for robotics and technology education, especially on the continent.”

In December 2024, South Africa once again took the last position out of 58 countries in the major global maths and science comparative tests.

Read more: After the Bell: understanding South Africa’s stagnant performance in global education tests

Key takeaways on how the B20’s industrialisation and innovation task force can help include:

• Creating an environment that stimulates research, development and entrepreneurship, especially around green technology innovation.
• Focusing on developing policies and regulations that enable access to capital and financing for entrepreneurs and innovators.
• Advocating investments in Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) education and skills development to build a pipeline of talent for industrialisation and innovation.
• Promoting programmes and initiatives that support women and underrepresented groups in entrepreneurship and innovation.
• Fostering collaboration between industry, academia and government to drive research, development and commercialisation of new technologies.
• Identifying and addressing barriers that hinder inclusive participation in industrialisation and innovation activities.

Wrapping up the discussion, Hanratty said there was a “huge opportunity” to power up information flows and then let people figure it out for themselves.

“I think the notion that we can plan all of this is a bit far-fetched. We’ll make our contribution as best we can to make sure that people are empowered with the base skills and also information to access opportunities. And then, I have huge faith in human endeavour to solve the problem.”

Speaking on a separate panel on how to mobilise South Africa, Sim Tshabalala, chief executive of Standard Bank, said in order to rebuild the African continent, leaders needed to focus on those sectors that will provide the largest leverage. “The first one actually is energy. 600 million Africans have no access to electricity, a billion people have no access to clean cooking. Our energy (efforts) should be directed at that at the start, and there’s already momentum in that direction,” he said.

Standard Bank’s calculations estimate that the continent will need roughly  $2.4 trillion of funding between now and 2040.

“It’s a vast sum of money needed to fund energy and as (South Africa) can’t raise that amount, we need to mobilise the rest of the world,” he said.

Speaking as the chair of the integrity and compliance task torce, Ruwayda Redfearn, chief executive of Deloitte Africa said the task force would be working with the anti corruption working group of the G20.

“According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners report in 2024 the cost of corruption to the global economy is staggering $5 trillion on an annual basis. Bear in mind that the  African GDP is around $2.8-trillion now. From an African Union perspective, the cost of what we call occupational fraud corruption is about $148-billion annually. Now, I’m aware that the integrity and compliance task force may not be considered the sexiest of task forces, but I would say that it does form the foundation of what every single task force will do. We cannot attract that foreign direct investment. We have a risk premium because of the association of the continent with corruption practices, and therefore, the work that this task force will do, I believe, is absolutely critical,” she told the B20 conference. DM