Kenya’s Skills Gap May Be A Problem Of Fit, Not Talent

When African technology projects fail, the post-mortem usually blames execution. Yet conversations among the continent’s technology leaders keep arriving at a different conclusion: the problem is rarely a lack of skill or budget, but fit. Solutions designed for Western markets, Western infrastructure and Western business logic are imported wholesale and applied to problems they were never built to solve.

A new report from Moringa School reaches a strikingly similar conclusion from a different starting point. The Kenya Corporate Technology Capability Report 2026 looks at skills rather than software, and it finds the same underlying tension. So is Kenya’s much-discussed “skills gap” really a skills gap, or is it a symptom of the same fit problem? I put that question to Nikki Germany, the CEO of Moringa School, in a wide-ranging conversation.

Two passions, one job

Germany has led Moringa for two and a half years. What drew her to the role, she says, was a lifelong passion for upskilling and developing people, paired with a career spent working in or around technology companies. The job allowed her to “marry both of those passions” in one role.

Moringa built its reputation on entry-level talent, helping new graduates land their first jobs in software development, data science and cybersecurity, and that remains a major focus. Increasingly, though, the school is also in the business of workforce development. Professionals can join its open courses, or companies can bring Moringa in to design bespoke training for their teams. The demand, she says, is strongest in data and, more recently, artificial intelligence, and the school has introduced a number of programmes to meet it.

Intent without capability

The report’s headline numbers describe an ambition that is not being converted into results. Some 72 percent of the executives surveyed rate digital transformation as a top strategic priority, yet 73 percent describe their organisations as Developing or Early Stage in maturity. Skills clearly matter to closing that distance, but 84 percent say their current upskilling approaches are not very effective, even though 77 percent rely on online learning platforms, the most widely used method. Only 16 percent are very satisfied with their programmes.

She doesn’t resonate with the obvious reading is that Africa lacks talent. “It’s definitely not lack of talent,” she says. “We have incredible talent here in Kenya and across the continent.”

Germany points instead to what the respondents say they need. The organisations that rate their upskilling as effective describe two things: practical, hands-on learning rather than theory, and training that is tailored to their business. Customisation is the top requirement companies place on training partners, named by 66 percent of executives. She unpacks what it means: understanding the industries people work in, the roles of the people being trained and the markets in which the business operates.

When the platform doesn’t know the market

Germany says that the report examined the return on current skilling methods rather than the tools people use. However, she is clear that the tools matter, and that global online platforms are built for someone else’s market.

“They don’t understand how mobile money works. They don’t understand local languages,” she says, adding that they also miss mobile-first preferences and low-data infrastructure. In her reading, the report’s message is that the way skilling is delivered “doesn’t take into account the local tools that really matter here.”

Such gaps are not limited to training. Germany says every company she has worked with has had to heavily customise global platforms for the local context. For Moringa, that experience shapes how it teaches. It uses instructors who are experts in the relevant industry or technology area, builds or adapts its curriculum locally, and has learners work on real-life projects rooted in local problems. A trainer who understands the context is essential to getting a return on the investment.

More training, or better-fitting technology?

There is a risk in the report’s findings. If the industry’s answer to “ineffective upskilling” is simply more upskilling, organisations could end up spending more to train people on imported tools, many of which they already use at only a fraction of their capability, while the money could instead go toward building technology designed for African problems.

Germany accepts part of the argument but not its framing. Skilling is needed, she says, “regardless of whether you’re using global software or whether you’re developing your own.” She also points to what is already being built locally. Moringa’s students are working on agricultural supply-tracking software and flood-warning models, and she says there is “a lot of innovation and development happening locally.”

Organisations also face practical limits. Past a certain size, a company is often bound by global constraints because it belongs to a multinational, or it ends up customising open-source software rather than building from

scratch. For that reason she frames the issue as a question for CIOs and workforce development leaders rather than a choice between training and innovation: are they getting a return on the way they currently go about skilling? She suggests that some of the budget could be redirected to methods that are more impactful and rooted in the local context.

It is a more cautious position than the “fit, not skills” thesis that prompted the conversation, but the two are closer than they first appear. Both say the failure lies in how capability is applied to the realities of the market, and not in the people.

Where talent is outrunning the tools

From where Moringa sits, having trained thousands of technologists across East Africa and beyond, the most interesting area is data and AI. Organisations are asking for these skills in large numbers, and the report confirms that AI is among the hardest to build, cited by 48 percent of respondents overall and 62 percent of large enterprises. Meanwhile, a wave of young people is upskilling through institutions like Moringa to meet that demand.

The difficulty, Germany says, is that the capability being built is running ahead of the resources needed to use it. The continent lacks computing power and datasets, so organisations cannot yet achieve everything they want to with AI and data even where the talent exists. Moringa is nonetheless building out more programmes in this area, helping organisations and the people who want to work for them to acquire what she calls the “future ready” tech skills of the coming years.

This is where the original question becomes sharper. If the AI skills gap is partly about the absence of local compute and local data, then training more engineers in the abstract will not close it. What is needed is the ability to apply AI to Kenyan and African problems using Kenyan and African data, infrastructure and market conditions, and that depends on the tools being available.

A hard look at the budget

Germany’s advice to the people reading the report is direct. Digital transformation is a top priority, most companies say they are not ready, and a majority say the right skills are critical to getting ready. Yet only 16 percent are very satisfied with what they are paying for.

She urges CIOs, CTOs, business leaders, HR and workforce development teams to “take a hard look” at their skilling programmes, and to look for solutions that are practical and hands-on and customised to their industry, roles and business needs.

The lesson from both the technology failures and the skills report is the same. Kenya does not appear to be short of talent or ambition. The question is whether the training, and the tools it is aimed at, were designed with the people and problems they are meant to serve in mind.