Idea

Economic Opportunity for Everyone

How do we create sustainable livelihoods for millions of un- and under-employed young people in emerging markets?

I've spent 15 years answering this question—from developing Fortune 500 strategies at BCG to founding African organizations that connected 10,000+ people to digital careers. Now I help governments, UN agencies, and corporations design workforce systems for the AI era.

Impact Stories

Umuzi logo

Founded Tech Bootcamp Achieving 80% Employment

Challenge: 50% of young South Africans are unemployed and excluded from high-quality education and careers.

Solution: I co-founded Umuzi, an organisation that blended government incentives, corporate L&D budgets, and philanthropic funding to create intensive training for unemployed young people to become developers, data scientists, and designers.

Impact: 90% completion rate and 80% job placement rate for 1,000+ graduates from low-income communities.

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ACN logo

Scaled Digital Skills to 10,000 at $50 Per Person

Challenge: Traditional bootcamps cost $6,000+ per person and can't scale across continents.

Solution: I co-founded a network of African training providers and negotiated partnerships with Google and Meta to distribute their certificates through African NGOs, adding locally-delivered career support funded by philanthropy.

Impact: Reached 10,000 learners across Africa in two years at a fraction of the cost.

SAP logo

Opened SAP Careers to Non-Degree Talent

Challenge: High-value consultant roles required degrees, excluding capable candidates.

Solution: I led a multilateral partnership to design an alternative pathway, blending Coursera foundations, peer learning, and hands-on work experience for skills validation.

Impact: 40% of successful participants did not have a degree, 168 out of 300 pilot participants received SAP certification, completing more than 400 hours of learning. The programme is now being scaled world-wide in partnership with SAP and UNICEF.

Rwanda logo

Designing Rwanda's AI-Ready Workforce

Challenge: How can African countries prepare for AI disruption in employment?

Solution: I analyzed global trends, automation risks, and Rwanda's competitive advantages to design targeted pathways.

Impact: Created framework for 20,000 high-value digital jobs by 2030 across 9 priority pathways.

Glasses

Current Work

  • UNICEF Strategy Consultant – Implementing UNICEF's Africa Strategy and fundraising approaches for UNICEF's $3.8B Africa portfolio
  • AI Research, Data & Trust Alliance – Analyzing AI deployment patterns and workforce implications for 26 member organizations across 15 industries

About Me

After several years of strategy consulting with the Boston Consulting Group in London and running my own consulting company in Johannesburg, I realised that the question I really wanted to answer was: Why do smart, motivated young people remain unemployed while companies deperately need talent?

This led me to co-found Umuzi, building it from startup to a thriving organization achieving 80% job placement rates for low-income youth entering tech careers. Seeing the need for continental scale, I co-founded the African Coding Network, orchestrating partnerships between Google, Meta, UNICEF, and grassroots NGOs to reach 10,000 learners at revolutionary cost structures.

Today, I apply these insights globally—helping organizations design workforce systems that blend analytical rigor with on-ground reality. Based in Berkeley, California, I focus on how AI transformation can expand rather than limit economic opportunity in emerging markets.

Gilbert Pooley

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Let's build systems that create opportunity at scale.