Skills investment shapes digital future

AS Tanzania races toward a digital economy, investment in digital skills is emerging as a critical proving ground for the country’s digital architecture, highlighting how control over connectivity, data and innovation could reshape commerce, governance and daily life.

The emphasis on grounding skills in local problem-solving signals a pushback against abstract tech ambitions, suggesting that relevance not novelty will determine the real value of technological training.

Encouraging youth to focus their skills on local problems underscores a broader effort to align technological training with employment realities, ensuring innovation pathways are accessible rather than aspirational.

Against this backdrop, Airtel Tanzania is emphasising the need for sustained investment in digital skills, warning that early exposure to emerging technologies will be crucial for young people to secure a place in the industries driving the future economy.

The company promotes digital inclusion, yet its central role in building the ecosystem gives it significant control over who benefits, highlighting potential tensions between public access and private influence.

Fursa Lab operates at the intersection of public good and corporate interest, navigating a space that is neither fully neutral nor purely self-serving, reflecting the complex balance between social impact and strategic business objectives.

On most days, those abstractions feel far away. Kelvin Mussa Kieta, an 18-year-old from Sinza, first walked into the lab after his secondary school computer club shut down due to a lack of functioning equipment.

At home, he shares a smartphone with siblings. At the lab, he encountered something rarer than technology: permission to fail.

“Here, when it does not work, you do not panic,” he said, gesturing toward the robot arm. “You try again. That is new for us.”

That emphasis on experimentation reflects Dar Teknohama Business Incubator (DTBi’s) influence. As a government-backed innovation incubator, DTBi has spent years supporting startups that often struggle quietly and sometimes disappear altogether.

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Its partnership with Airtel gives Fursa Lab a measure of institutional grounding. Curriculum choices are negotiated.

Instructors come from both industry and education. Disagreements over pace, over priorities, over how advanced the training should be are common. Those tensions become more visible outside Dar es Salaam.

For example, in Mbeya Region where DTBi has conducted outreach workshops connected to Fursa Lab, interest has been intense but uneven.

Connectivity is less of a problem than logistics. Transport costs add up. Time is scarce. Several young people described discovering the programme online, feeling a brief surge of hope, then realising sustained participation would be difficult. Urban bias is an uncomfortable reality.

Fursa Lab depends on stable electricity, reliable internet and proximity to mentors, conditions that are still concentrated in major cities.

Airtel officials acknowledge this limitation and speak cautiously about expansion, noting that replication would require deeper collaboration with schools and local governments. Whether that will happen at scale remains an open question.

Gender adds another layer of complexity. Women remain underrepresented in Tanzania’s technology sector, particularly in programming and hardware roles.

Airtel’s Future Women initiative, linked to Fursa Lab, attempts to address this by pairing young women with female professionals inside the company. The experience is designed less as a pipeline than as exposure.

For Neema Minja, a recent university graduate who participated in the programme described it as clarifying rather than transformative.

“I did not leave with a job,” she said.

“I left understanding how these spaces work and where women are missing.”

That distinction matters. Mentorship can open doors, but it does not dismantle structural barriers such as unpaid care work, safety concerns or hiring bias.

Several participants said the most significant change was internal: greater confidence, improved language and a willingness to imagine themselves in technical roles.

For others, the Fursa brand takes a more tangible form. In Msasani, Elizabeth Mbugi runs a small fruitand-juice business along a busy road side.

Through the broader Airtel Fursa programme, she received equipment valued at 10m/- including a refrigerator and a juicer.

The effect was immediate. She could store produce longer, serve more customers and plan beyond the day’s sales. “Before, everything was rushed,” she said.

“Now I can think ahead.” The contrast between Elizabeth Mbugi’s experience and that of Fursa Lab trainees is striking. Physical capital produces quick, visible returns.

Digital skills unfold more slowly, often uncertainly. Some lab participants find freelance work designing logos or managing social media accounts. Others apply coding skills to unrelated jobs. Many gains literacy without immediate payoff.

Critics argue that programmes like Fursa Lab risk raising expectations faster than the labour market can absorb them. In a low, sunlit room behind Kijitonyama Primary School in Dar es Salaam, a small robot arm sits frozen mid-movement, its plastic joints angled awkwardly over a worktable.

Around it, a group of students argue gently but insistently about what went wrong. Someone suggests rewriting the loop. Someone else says the problem is mechanical, not logical. The discussion stretches on, longer than it needs to.

Their instructor, watching from the side, does not interrupt. This room is part of Airtel Fursa Lab, a digital skills and innovation hub launched by Airtel Tanzania in partnership with the Dar Teknohama Business Incubator, known locally as DTBi.

It is not the kind of place that announces itself. There are no banners promising disruption, no slogans about the future pinned to the walls. Instead, there are cables, borrowed laptops, whiteboards smudged with half-erased equations and young people trying to work something out together.

The lab exists because of a problem Tanzania has been circling for years. Each year, the country produces a growing number of school leavers and graduates, many of them digitally curious and underemployed.

At the same time, employers complain of a shortage of practical skills in areas such as programming, robotics, design and digital marketing. The distance between those two realities has proven stubborn. Airtel’s answer, through Fursa Lab, is to intervene early and practically.

The lab offers short, hands-on training in coding languages such as Python and Java, robotics platforms such as Arduino and Lego Mindstorms, graphic and 3D design, web development and digital marketing. Its doors are open not only to university students, but also to primary and secondary pupils, recent school leavers and young people who never made it to higher education at all.

That openness is intentional and complicated. As a telecommunications company, Airtel has clear incentives. A population fluent in digital tools is more likely to use data-driven services, build apps, start online businesses and remain connected.