Two continents, two 2030 targets, two shortfalls

In 2025 the European Union set out to have 70% of its adults equipped with basic digital skills. It reached 60%. Over the same period the African Union committed to reaching 300 million Africans a year with e-skills training. That did not happen either.

Two continents, two strategies built around digital skills, two shortfalls now on the public record. The symmetry is worth sitting with, because most conversations about a digital skills gap assume it runs in one direction. The numbers do not support that shape, and the argument that follows from them is set out separately.

Two realities, stated plainly

Start with what each continent has published about itself, because the two shortfalls describe different problems rather than one continent falling behind another.

The EU's Digital Decade programme sets a target of 20 million people employed as ICT specialists by 2030. Eurostat measured 10.4 million in 2025 and publishes the shortfall itself: 9.6 million. The number is growing, but more slowly each year. The ICT specialist workforce expanded by 7.1% in 2020 and by 2.6% between 2024 and 2025, against a target that would require something close to a doubling within five years. This is a continent with more demand for digital skills than it can currently supply.

In the ITU's Africa region the shape of the problem is different. Thirty-eight per cent of the region's population used the internet in 2024, against a global average of 68%, and that regional average hides a sharp internal split: 57% of urban residents online against 23% in rural areas. This is not a story about weak demand for digital skills. It is a story about a young, fast-growing and unevenly connected population, sitting alongside a continent that cannot fill the specialist roles it has already created.

A note on the two bodies, because they do not cover the same ground. The African Union spans the whole continent. The ITU's Africa region is a statistical grouping of 44 economies that excludes North Africa, so its figures describe Sub-Saharan Africa and the island states. Figures from the two are quoted here side by side and never added together.

The network is not the barrier

The strongest single fact in the data is this. In the ITU's Africa region, 86% of the population lives under a mobile broadband signal. Thirty-eight per cent uses the internet. Nearly half the region lives under a signal it does not use, which turns the question from one about network capability into one about cost, skills and relevance.

Cost is the most measurable part of that. Two gigabytes of mobile data a month costs on average 4.2% of income per person in the region, against a United Nations affordability target of 2%. It is the highest cost relative to income of any ITU region in the world.

There is no single continent here

Any sentence beginning with the words in Africa, people runs into trouble immediately. Within the ITU's Africa region alone, national internet penetration ranges from 11% to 87%. That is not statistical noise. It is the entire spread that the word average was hiding.

This is not a pedantic point about vocabulary. A funder, a university partnership office or a company deciding where to direct attention makes a worse decision every time it reads African as a description of shared conditions rather than as shorthand for a continent-sized range of very different ones. Precision here is not politeness. It is the difference between a plan that fits the place it is meant to work in and one that does not.

What is not known, and who says so

It is worth being direct about how little of this is actually measured. Since 2019, eight countries in the ITU's Africa region have submitted any data at all on ICT skills, and one of them, Malawi, has data detailed enough to show how common specific skills are. The ITU states the position in its own report without softening it:

Data on ICT skills is almost non-existent, with only eight countries providing data on the topic since 2019 and only one providing granularity on skill levels.

The same report calls for investment in data collection so that a proper assessment of skill levels in the region becomes possible at all.

That absence cuts in every direction at once. A confident claim that skills in the region are low is exactly as unsupported as a confident claim that they are high, because the data needed to make either claim at a regional level does not exist. The caution applies to this association as much as to anyone else tempted to compress a gap into a single number.

Retention is a real objection

There is an objection to everything above that deserves to be named before anyone else names it, because it is the strongest one available and it comes from an unimpeachable source. The African Union's own Digital Transformation Strategy states that there is locally trained human potential that African countries are struggling to keep and use at national level, and it proposes concrete remedies, including adjusting international tender processes and supporting diaspora reintegration.

A European association proposing to connect African talent with European opportunity has to answer that directly rather than hope it does not come up. The answer is that the model only works if it is built around distributed collaboration rather than relocation. Nobody has to move for their skill, their evidence and their standing to reach an opportunity, and what is earned at European rates is spent where the person lives.

One of the programmes in preparation goes further than that, and it is the reason the objection can be answered rather than deflected. Launch Lab is the one whose result stays in the country. Mixed teams take a product through the full cycle, and because a product proven once can be launched again, a team assembled across several countries can become several independent businesses, each run in its own market by one of the people who built it. One build, several owners, several economies. Training people and connecting them to Europe leaves the return in Europe. This distributes it.

What an intercontinental team looks like

Distributed rather than relocated has a concrete shape. A product lead in Spain, a developer in Nigeria, a developer in Kenya, a designer in Ghana, a technical mentor in Europe and a university partner in the region, all working on a shared technical core that is tested in one country, adapted for another and validated in a third. Each market ends up with something built for its own conditions rather than imported wholesale, and everyone who built it stays where they were when they started.

Shared technology, local knowledge, distributed leadership, in that order. It is a more complicated way to work than moving the person with the skill to wherever the opportunity happens to be. It is also the only version that does not simply move the shortage from one continent's ledger to another's.

Extractive or reciprocal

None of this rules out the possibility of getting it wrong, and it is worth stating plainly what wrong would look like. A model built on reducing labour costs for European companies is extractive. A model that treats European standards as inherently superior to local ones is extractive. A model that trains people and returns nothing to the ecosystem they trained in is extractive, whatever it calls itself.

The test the association holds itself to is reciprocity. The exchange runs in both directions or it is not the exchange it claims to be, and what that obliges the association to do is set out in full.

There is a version of this work that would be easier to run and easier to fund: pick the countries with the most measurable talent, place people into European roles, count the placements and call the gap closed. That version is ruled out on purpose, because it solves the wrong problem. The shortfall this entry opened with is not a shortage of individuals who could fill a role in Europe. It is the absence of a structure that lets ability travel without requiring the person attached to it to leave everything else behind. Universities and companies that want to help build it are the ones being asked first.

In short

• Europe missed its 2025 target of 70% of adults with basic digital skills, reaching 60%, and the African Union missed its commitment to train 300 million people a year over the same period.
• In the ITU's Africa region 86% of the population has mobile broadband coverage and 38% uses the internet. The barrier is cost and relevance rather than network reach.
• A single regional average hides a national range from 11% to 87%, which is why the continent does not hold up as one analytical category.
• Reliable data on skill levels barely exists: eight countries have reported since 2019 and one has prevalence data, so confident claims in either direction are unsupported.
• The African Union names talent retention as its own problem. The answer here is distributed collaboration rather than relocation, and a programme whose result stays in the participant's own country.