It is generally believed that one of the things that necessarily go into the building of strong and content countries is employment. Experience has shown that when people are gainfully employed and make enough to take care of themselves and their families, they usually make do and there is usually no incentive to resort to those negative actions that come from a place of deprivation and desperation to imperil countries.
Africa has unfortunately known a lot of these negative actions and at the root of some of the problems that are today pulling Africa all over the place is the problem of unemployment.
Being the worlds second largest continent and its second most populous all after Asia, Africa has the worlds youngest population. This means a lot of young people who have a lot of ideas and a lot of energy.
However, the question of whether the ideas and energy which brim in many young Africans are properly harnessed for optimal benefits for themselves and the society remains a burning one and till this day, many African countries simply continue to struggle to answer this question.
A freelancer is an individual who earns money on a per-job or per-task basis usually for short-term work. A freelancer is someone who usually does particular pieces of work for different organizations, rather than working all the time for a single organization. Freelancers are then usually self-employed.
The benefits of freelancing include freedom to work from home or from a non-traditional workspace, a flexible work schedule, and a better work-life balance.
Leonfield, a Nigerian tech firm, recently estimated the value of the freelance workforce on the African continent to be worth $20billion.
Mr. Jonathan Frank Omonigho the CEO of Leonfield recently gave the figure during the launch of what he described as the biggest freelance platform to strengthen commerce and the workforce across Africa, said the platform will help to harness the potential of the vast freelance market.
In these days of unemployment, where once well-paying jobs have been shrunk by different factors across the African continent including the COVID-19 pandemic which is now seeing its fifth wave in some African countries, there is no doubt that the time has come to get creative not just in creating jobs and job opportunities for teeming youth across Africa but also how those jobs are done and from where. This has become imperative in Africa given just how far behind the African continent has been left behind in the jobs market especially with the scramble surrounding the future of jobs.
Opportunities then abound for the African freelancer not just within the African continent but even beyond as versatility and flexibility of jobs make it such that one can work from anywhere.
But freelancing also requires some tools that many African countries continue to struggle to provide. Take for instance power supply and affordable access to the internet which today continue to elude Nigeria, the Giant of Africa.
It is no secret that the cost of access to the internet has put that most vital of services beyond the reach of many Nigerians. This is also true of the cost of adequate power supply which continues to remain forbidding in Nigeria.
With traditional jobs increasingly proving just out of reach of the everyday Nigerian and Africa, perhaps, with the proper tools and resources, the African freelancer might just be given a new lease of life away from the fetters of traditional jobs.
Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com
