If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them

I didn’t experience the “before.” Before landlines, before phones, before mobile money—I didn’t exist. But I did read about them. I know we skipped landlines to mobile phones. I know we dived straight into mobile banking after that. I only read about the “skip” but I’m now living in the result. The numbers and statistics don’t lie about how well that worked for us. In late 2025, 66% of Africans were estimated to own mobile phones. Not just for calls. M-Pesa, the continental success story is moving cash for over 60 million Africans . Opay, a fintech mobile money company—barely a few years old is already serving over 50 million Africans. Landlines? Banks? We just skipped them. So when people told us the digital economy would be the next skip, we believed them. Why wouldn’t we? My generation was supposed to witness the next skip—digital jobs. Mobile banking was our last win, but is the next win already being taken off the table by AI? Take programming for instance. It was supposed to be our golden ticket. Learn to code and earn thousands of dollars globally. Junior developers working remotely earn about $500-$1000 per month. Senior developers can reach $7000 per month. It was supposed to be a life-changing opportunity but AI came around.Coding and debugging jobs are already shrinking. AI tools like GitHub Copilot can write code on demand. And let’s face it: can you actually out-program an AI? And it’s not just programming, BPO(Business Process Outsourcing) was supposed to be the next big thing. Here, companies in Europe and the U.S hire Africans to handle customer support, calls and data entry for them because it was cheaper than hiring their own local workers back home. As of late 2025, CCI Global invested $355.3 million to Africa. The industry could create 1.5 million call-center jobs by 2030. The numbers were looking good. But now, most of the current BPO roles are vulnerable to automation by 2030. And let’s face it: can you out-task an AI? Then there’s the space we all thought was untouchable— the creator economy. Yeah, you heard that right. The African creator economy was valued at $5.1 billion in early 2026 with room for massive growth by 2030. Crazy right? It looked like the one place human creativity would always win. But now, AI can generate content, images and even Kim Kardashian’s personality. Content creators are no longer just competing with each other, they’re competing with algorithms that neither sleep nor slumber. Now let me ask you: can you out-create something that can never run out of ideas? But here’s what I’ve come to realize—and I’m saying this from experience, not just research. Are digital jobs shrinking? Yes. Are they all under threat? Yes. But the future does not mean zero jobs. It’s different jobs. I work with Outlier and Luel AI—training AIs on how to think and act better, giving them real human voices and faces to learn from. These jobs exist because of AI. Not what AI took but what they created. And yes, the pay is pretty decent. These aren’t the only ones. AI has created a whole new category of jobs—AI prompt engineering, automation, ethics reviewing and so on. These jobs did not exist ten years ago. And now, people are building careers on them. So, there is definitely hope for African workers in the digital world. Jobs are not vanishing, they’re just changing shape. New jobs do exist and I’m living proof. And real talk? AI isn’t taking jobs. It’s people who use AI that are taking jobs from people who don’t. Let that sit for a minute… I didn’t experience the “before” and I’m glad I didn’t. But I’m going to help shape the next skip because if you can’t beat them, join them. And we’re clearly not beating them.

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