The job advertisement that Amara O. answered last spring asked for a data analyst. She had a second-class upper degree in statistics from a respected Nigerian university, four years of coursework in probability and inference, and a transcript any examiner would have approved. She did not get the job. She did not make it past the technical screening, which asked her to clean a messy dataset, build a simple dashboard, and explain her reasoning to a manager who was not a specialist. Her degree had never once required her to do any of those three things.
“I knew the theory better than anyone in that room,” she said. “What I had never been shown was the job.”
Amara’s experience is not an anecdote. It is a pattern, and it is one that two of Africa’s largest economies and others are only now learning to see clearly. The distance between what
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