Here’s how incubation hubs are helping to bridge skills gap

Every year, thousands of students graduate from university, marking the beginning of a long and arduous search for jobs. For a majority, the search is fruitless. Potential employers dismiss them, arguing that they are not adequately skilled to fill available positions.

This long-running complaint has pushed many institutions of higher learning to rethink their training models and also partner with industry to form capacity development centres, better known as incubation hubs. The intention is to equip trainees and graduates with the requisite skills that the job market demands.

Incubation hubs provide students with various kinds of support, such as professional guidance and mentorship, business development know-how, seed capital, space, telephone services, high speed internet, stationery, and administrative support, which empower them to think beyond employment and focus on entrepreneurship. 

At the University of Nairobi for instance, there are centres such as the C4DLab, a technology-oriented incubation hub formed to support innovations across different sectors of the economy.

The C4DLab was formed through a partnership between UoN and private firms such as Barclays, Cisco, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and others. It gives priority to students, faculty and alumni of the university, although parties not affiliated to the university are also considered.

“The centre has a set-criteria whose prospects must be met to qualify for admission. This is to guarantee success stories from the incubation programs. We, for instance, look at the viability of the idea, market potential, level of commitment and the composition of team members,” said Prof Mary Kinoti, the director of the Intellectual Property Management Office at UoN.

She added that the university also plays host to FabLab, a small-scale workshop that offers students space and equipment to assemble various types of hardware.

Centre for budding start-ups

"Members at these hubs access mentors who are entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and industry experts or academics, who provide guidance and advice on startup needs such as how to build scalable products and roll them out to the market successfully, as well as how and why they should patent these products," she explains.

At Kenyatta University, there is the Chandaria Business Innovation and Incubation Centre that was launched in 2010. It was established with aid from the Chandaria Foundation - 70 percent of the centre’s members are Kenyatta University students, while 30 percent are from outside the institution.

The centre has hosted a number of impactful brands such as FlexPay Technologies, a tech company which offers an automated layaway platform that enables customers to purchase essential goods and services from merchants and service providers in flexible installments via mobile phones.

It also hosts Ecodudu, an agriculture-based startup that solves problems associated with waste food and nutrient shortage through upcycling discarded food to create animal fertiliser and animal feeds, and Zalisha, which helps farmers nurture and market their produce, to name a few.

Strathmore University has one too, iBizAfrica, an incubation centre for budding start-ups. Since inception, the centre has so far incubated over 300 start-ups.

The centre also carries out the entrepreneurship theme of iLab Africa, yet another research and innovation hub launched through partnership with private firms such as Safaricom, Google, Deloitte and Samsung. It focuses mainly on ICT.

At the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, the Pan African University Institute for Basic Sciences, technology and innovation (PAUSTI), was launched in 2012 as a post-graduate training centre for students on JKUAT scholarships.

Technology and innovation

The centre was launched through a sponsorship by the African Union and the African Development Bank (AfDB), which actually encouraged its creation, having noted that students who had finished school were not ready for the job market.

The Pan African University Institute for Basic Sciences, technology and innovation has three other branches in Africa, one at the University of Yaounde, Cameroon, serving the Central African region, another at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, serving the West African region, and another in Algeria to serve the North African region.

“We train the students on skills such as personal branding to get the jobs. Every year, we also set competitions to identify 40 novel ideas which we incubate and prototype, then apply in the market,” said Prof Gabriel Magoma, the director of PAUSTI.

He added that some of the innovations have led to the formation of large companies which have gone ahead to open branches outside the country.

“Some of our students are in key areas of our economy, some of them are our leaders. We have a mathematics graduate who heads the equivalent of the Kenya Bureau of Statistics in Zambia. There’s also a PhD student developing an antibiotic using recombinant DNA technology, which we expect is going to have a major impact on the pharmaceutical industry,” said Prof Magoma.

While the importance of a synergy between these hubs and the industry cannot be gainsaid, Prof Magoma notes that getting the right mentors to link up with the students is still a major challenge that has not been addressed.

“The hubs want to host some of these companies to enable students to learn from them, but because of modern developments in data protectionism, many of these companies are not willing to send their staff to the hubs,” he noted.

[email protected]