Skills intelligence that works upstream, inside education, so a graduate leaves able to prove what they can do rather than only where they studied.
WHY IT EXISTS
By the time a graduate is applying, the mismatch is already years old. Four structural conditions produce it, and none of them are fixable at the point of application.
A graduate leaves with a document that says which courses they completed. It says nothing about what they can actually do, so an employer has no reliable signal and the graduate has no way to prove one.
The information arrives after graduation, at the point of application, when the only remaining options are remediation or rejection. Inside education it is a conversation with a faculty head.
A committee reviews graduate outcomes from several years earlier and designs for students who will graduate several years later. The institution is structurally behind, and reviewing more often does not fix a lagging mechanism.
Skills formation that should happen inside education gets deferred to the first employer. Large firms carry that cost through graduate programmes. Most employers cannot, so they stay out of the pipeline entirely.
WHERE IT SITS
Skills Grid is not another place to look for work. It is the layer underneath, so that by the time a graduate reaches the networks that already exist, they arrive with a verified profile and those networks work better.
HOW IT WORKS
Every step produces information the next one needs. The sixth returns it to the first, which is what turns a sequence of services into something that improves as it runs.
WHO IT SERVES
Each of them currently holds one piece of the picture and none of them can see the rest. The value of the platform to any one audience comes from the other three being on it.
LEARNERS
Built while they are still studying and matched against real employer demand in their area, so a gap is something they can close rather than discover too late. They leave with a readiness record, not only a transcript.
INSTITUTIONS
A faculty can see, skill by skill, the distance between what it currently teaches and what employers hiring its graduates require now. Specific enough for a curriculum committee to act on with confidence.
EMPLOYERS
Candidates arrive with a documented, tracked skills record rather than a self-reported CV. Employers also become the demand signal: what they need flows straight back into what learners are guided toward.
FUNDERS AND THE SECTOR
Placement and retention data tied back to the programmes that produced it, so investment in skills development can be measured against what it produced rather than what was planned.
The shortage is not job listings. It is that skills built inside institutions do not correspond to what employers need by the time a graduate arrives. No amount of matching closes a gap created years earlier.
Low-data operation, offline capability, and a USSD fallback are in the design from the start. A platform the intended population cannot open has not solved anything, whatever it does on a fast connection.
Every audience draws value from one underlying layer of skills data. Building that layer is the work. The dashboards on top of it are expressions of the work, not the work itself.
The aim is to be something the system works better with, embedded because it is useful in real decisions, not because leaving was made difficult.
SUPPORTED BY
Skills Grid is being built inside an incubation programme, alongside the funding that made it possible.
BACKED BY
MICT SETA
INCUBATED BY
Propella Business Incubator