Africa-centric employment and business skills ecosystem African Leadership Group (ALG) will leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) technology to expand its global reach. The organisation plans to bolster its core resource, ‘The Room’ in order to match at least two million young Africans to global work opportunities by 2030.

ALG said ‘The Room’ enables global companies to access new technology talent in areas like full stack software engineering, cloud computing, data science, product management, cybersecurity, machine learning, AR/VR, and UX/UI design, and at the same time build more diverse and agile technology teams.

According to the organisation the resource provides customised career advancement through mentorship, high impact relationships with global leaders, challenging opportunities and continued learning.

ALG added that its current approach relies on manual processes that cannot be efficiently scaled.

ALG used AWS to develop The Room Intelligence Platform (TRIP), a secure technical solution built using best of breed AWS technologies.

TRIP will use a Data Lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), containerised microservices using AWS Fargate, and Amazon SageMaker for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

Fred Swaniker, founder of ALG, said: “As the rest of the world ages, Africa remains the youngest continent in the world. We aim to unlock this large pool of untapped talent by identifying and training millions of young Africans in critical areas of technology. We will also invite extraordinary talent from around the globe to join our talent community in The Room. We see a tremendous opportunity to address the global technology skills shortage while enhancing diversity. We are excited to work with AWS to scale The Room to the next level by implementing an advanced digital backbone.”

Sandy Carter, vice president for Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs at AWS, said: “The pandemic has highlighted the gaps and inequitable access to the digital literacy, employment and entrepreneurship skills that are needed to innovate, compete for jobs, or start businesses in a digital economy.We are excited that the realm of what is possible for The Room can be enhanced as they execute their mission to grow diversity within the current workforce through investments in relationships and career opportunities.”