Adeyemi: Digital Skills Will Prepare Nigerian Youths for Global Opportunities

Chief Executive Officer of SARMLife, Ruth Adeyemi, who is a Search Engine Optimisation professional, shares her initiative on digital skills training that is empowering and developing youths in Africa to make them self-reliant and major contributors to the economic growth of Nigeria and Africa. Agnes Ekebuike presents the excerpts:

What is your assessment of the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) industry in Africa in 2024, and what are your expectations for 2025?

We have SEO professionals in Africa, but they are more hidden. They don’t have a physical brand that potential clients can trust because they don’t produce content that shows a good understanding of SEO.

In other climes like the United States or the United Kingdom, SEO professionals create their profiles, have a website, and build their brands as professional brands.

My goal and future projection is to mobilise more African SEO professionals who are determined and focused on creating unique and engaging brands for themselves. I also want to see more women in the SEO space.

Today, the digital learning space is awash with digital training products. Tell us about SARMLife Digital Skills Training, or is it just another solution out there?

The SARMLife Digital Skills Training (SDST) is not just another programme. It is an annual digital skills initiative that started four years ago, and its goal is to transform passionate learners into digital economy leaders. The idea to start this training was conceived after my National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) and after I participated in the Google Digital Skills for Africa programme.

The level of digital skills learned in the programme inspired me to reproduce such training for young people in Africa. Through this training, they can be empowered and trained to learn digital skills that boost their employability prospects. They can then contribute to their financial economy, that of their family members and the national financial economy in the long run.

How affordable are the digital training services that you offer?

Excellence has always been at the centre of everything I do. Since the training began about four years ago, the non-profit programme initiative has never been about money.

It is a give-back programme that aims to transform the digital economy in Africa by creating a new generation of tech-savvy professionals with in-demand digital skills. The training is affordable, especially considering the number of expert coaches involved. The idea is to give students the best education in digital skills. I want them to learn from top professionals in different skills without financial constraints.

The SARMLife digital skills training continues this year in March 2025 and participants will pay a registration fee of N15,000. This amount is small compared to the level of training they will receive during the programme.

I know that learning digital skills in this new age costs a lot of money, but with our digital skills training, participants would be learning seven to eight in-demand digital skills for just N15,000.

We could have made the training free. However, one thing I have learned from my years of coaching is that when people get an opportunity for free, they don’t take it seriously. The whole point of asking participants to make a commitment fee is so that we can compensate the coaches for their time and efforts and likewise, compensate our best-graduating students.

How can the Nigerian government and other stakeholders leverage digital skills training innovation to groom the next generation of leaders?

I am aware that some state governments in Nigeria are already investing in skill acquisition for their citizens. However, such skill acquisition programmes usually centre on physical skills like hair, shoe, and bag making. These are physical skills, but you are aware that the world is going digital; we are a more tech-savvy generation. Thus, state and national governments must move from physical to digital skills.

One of our goals at SARMLife is to work with state and federal governments in a capacity where we can share with them the impact and the need to digitally train individuals to contribute to reducing unemployment rates.

Note that a digitally empowered person can in turn, empower many people by expanding job creation in the country.

What have been your greatest challenges doing this type of training business in Africa, and what are the possible solutions?

The greatest challenge we faced when we started this training, was that people thought we were scammers. They wondered how we could teach several data skills for such a small amount of money.

Modern digital training is costly, so many wonder how we train people in seven to eight digital skills for as little as between N10,000 and N15,000. It makes no sense, especially for people who know the value of such training.

But with a detailed explanation of our WHY over the years, we have built trust among the initial doubters and won them over by ensuring we deliver quality digital skills training as promised.

How are you responding to the issue of emerging competition in digital skill innovations on the continent?

Most digital skills institutes charge a lot of money for people to learn digital skills because their goal is to make money from training people. Our training is different because our goal is to give back to our communities in Nigeria, Ghana, and other African countries. I have never really felt the impact of direct competition because we are in our lane making change happen and impacting our continent. Last year, we contacted other digital marketing companies to engage them in a collaborative conversation because I believe in the power of collaboration more than competition.

Where do you see this training in the next five years?

In the next five years, we plan to move the training from virtual to physical or adopt a hybrid model to expand to more African countries, particularly non-English-speaking ones.

We plan to accommodate more languages by including African countries that speak French and other languages because we want to make a bigger impact. We will expand our languages and reach and then see how we can organise the training twice a year.